The Dangers of Wanting to be Barbie

I really liked Douglas’ chapter, “Lean and Mean,” where delves into an anger-induced, and personal attack on the media for its fantasy-like conception of beauty standards. As is reiterated in her “Sex ‘R’ Us” chapter, perhaps one of the most unfortunate consequences of the achieved strides of sex-positive feminists is the over-exposure and over-emphasis on female body parts that has become the norm in society today. Women are constantly reminded of the need to be “perfect,” physically, given that the consequences of not following this expectation are seemingly unsuccessful lives devoid of love and happiness. Thus, women flock to dieting companies and plastic surgeons to look like Barbie (even though it is a known fact that Barbie could not exist in real life because her boob-body ratio would cause her to literally collapse).

Douglas states that enlightened sexism tells us that these beauty standards are “empowering” against women and against men. As is demonstrated in films and TV shows such as “Mean Girls” and “Gossip Girl,” the characters who look a certain way areallowed to behave negatively toward others, mainly because they are “hot” enough to do so. Douglas emphasizes that this connection between looks and unruly behavior can be very dangerous for young girls. In fact, one of the most disturbing points from this chapter was her allusion to a suicide of a high school teen due to a girl-on-girl manipulative prank.

Further dangers of the connection between leanness and meanness are present in psychopathologies within young women. It is known that women tend to fall to depression more so than men do. However, perhaps a more pertinent problem (especially in our college-aged generation) is the pathological body obsessive-ness seen within women today. Last semester I took an abnormal psychology class in which the topic of eating disorders was a major source of discussion. In this class I learned that while anorexia nervosa is related to biological causes, social, personal, and cultural factors ultimately can have a greater influence in triggering the disease. In fact, it was found that even certain personality traits, such as perfectionism, can raise one’s inclination for the disease. Another personality trait that is associated with anorexia is high self-objectification. The term “self-objectification” refers to an individual’s relationship to his/her body in which he/ she views his/her own body as an object. Sound familiar,Douglas- scholars? With the increasing objectification of female bodies, women have no choice but to encapsulate this feeling of subordination, thus allowing for increased pathology.

While in this class we also brought up many statistics from the Colgate Campus Life Survey in which feelings of body hatred/ shame in female students were overwhelming. Thus, even at Colgate, a predominantly athletic and healthy campus, females feel the need to constantly cut back on eating, further reduce their waist sizes, and generally “look a certain way” for acceptance. Overall, I think that all of these (perhaps mainly media-induced) ideals point to the fact that something needs to change regarding the relationship between women and their bodies, not only for the health of women on campus, but for that of all women. Sadly, if this does not occur soon, we will be heading toward a Barbie-fantasy land, where women will not be able to stand because of their socially-mutilated proportions.