Apparently, kids love to torture Barbie dolls. Why?
One interpretation of this phenomenon is that the children are reacting to the proliferation of different types of the doll, which range from Fashion Barbie to Queen Elizabeth I Barbie and even a Geisha Barbie.
“The children never talked of one single, special Barbie. The girls almost always talked about having a box full of Barbies. So to them Barbie has come to symbolise excess. Barbies are not special; they are disposable, and are thrown away and rejected,” Dr Nairn said.
She added: “On a deeper level Barbie has become inanimate. She has lost any individual warmth that she might have possessed if she were perceived as a singular person. This may go some way towards explaining the violence and torture.”
That’s right, the availability of different types of Barbie dolls in the marketplace inspires “violence and torture”. This must be true, since when I was a kid, the proliferation of comic titles featuring Wolverine prompted me to buy as many as I could, suddenly develop the political consciousness of someone far older and realize that all these comic titles represented excess, get really angry, flay their covers off, and put cigarrettes out on them to express my hate and contempt. Excess, eet iz zo… how you zay… ? Boor-zhwah?
Previous research from the US into Barbie abuse suggested that prepubescent girls destroyed the doll because she reminded them of adulthood at a time when they were still clinging to their childhood, but Dr Nairn found no evidence of this.
No mention of any evidence that would support the notion that too many Barbie choices lead to “torture” anywhere in the article, of course. Nor does the article report on whether the paper is titled “Children’s Doll-play Shows How Capitalism Corrupts Society’s Most Vulnerable” and recommends the nationalization of the doll industry, so that The Single State-Approved Barbie can be produced*.
She also dismissed the idea that overweight little girls might be jealous of Barbie for being the girl who had everything, including a tiny waist. It was more likely to be a simple reaction against a toy that the children had grown out of, she said.
“The children we were talking to were aged 7 to 11, whereas the right age for having a Barbie seems now to be 4, even though Barbie doesn’t exactly look like it is aimed at four-year-olds,” Dr Nairn added. She and her colleagues Christine Griffin and Patricia Gaya Wicks concluded that, while adults may find a child’s delight in breaking, mutilating and torturing their dolls to be disturbing, from the child’s point of view they were simply being imaginative in disposing of an excessive commodity, in the same way as one might crush cans for recycling.
So wait - which is it? Is it too many choices, or that at twice the age kids are supposed to be playing with dolls, they perhaps just look back at how simple and stupid they were to ever enjoy something so execrable as a Barbie doll, and, embarressed, express their new opinion of the product? The anti-market explanation is at the halfway mark, and the more likely alternative in the last ‘graf. Wonder why that is?
Oh, right.
*Not a bad idea… not only will kids cherish it forever, but we’ll have taken an important step towards the creation of the New Socialist Tot and the eventual salvation of the world through progressivism!
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