Gone but not forgotten - Ye Olden Barbie

 Bellacozy and Holdfast LOVE toys, and I mean to an unhealthy extent.  Needless to say, dolls rank among the top most enjoyable toy to play with, and the most famous doll around is Mattel's Barbie.  Once a glamorous well-coiffed career girl, in recent years, Barbie has really lost her pizzaz.  By the time the Barbe engineers figured out how to make her legs semi-bendy and fleshy, the Barbie design team must have been under some trying circumstances.  By now, Barbie has deteriorated into formula, and she bears little resemblance to her golden and far bygone self.  Eat shit, Barbie 2000, your predecessors are spinning in their cardboard coffins whilst you Twitter on your wakeboard.

Once Barbies came with a range of vastly varied and beautiful garments and hairstyles, and the companies promotional artwork was marvelously executed.  

The vintage Barbie Dream Houses may have been made of cardboard, but their aesthetic value was rock-hard.  I'd live in a cardboard house if it looked that good.

 If this blog applied to any Barbie, it would be the one above.  Hookah Lounge Barbie, quit parking on the green and pass the humus while you're at it.

This scenario is usually what happened with my Barbies, except most of mine suffered from rapid hair-loss.  Whether or not my peers would like to admit it, I have a feeling theirs ended up in similar scenarios.  Just place one on top of the other and let the sparks fly.  Holdfast says she used to leave the room to give Barbie and Ken or Barbie and Barbie privacy, but I'm not sure how much of that I believe.  Barbie may be offensive to feminists for proportional standards, but she taught me way more about the facts of life than my parents did, however idealized her anatomy was.  Barbie was created not in hopes of making little girls frantic about self appearance, but really, it see,s, in an attempt to show them how much they could acheive - as evidenced with Barbie's many different career exploits.  If anything, what was over-idealized was the notion of being a schoolteacher or a stewardess, only becoming of interest when a pretty face was slapped onto it. 
In terms of her anatomy, however, one friend of mine recounted that she was frustrated that the dolls didn't have nipples, so she would bite the tips of Barbie's smooth breasts until a nipple was created.

On the subject of body image and the effects of idealization, there is a brand of dolls (Sew-Able, they are called) marketed to girls with amputations, cancer, wheelchairs, and who require physical therapy, all with elaborate and realistic props.  At first I thought, fantastic, perhaps this is just what the world needs, but then I spoke to my mother about it.  She was born with one healthy foot and one foot which did not grow, and she had to make the decision to have it amputated below the knee when she was nine years old.  I presented the idea of this doll to her and she was not pleased.  From her point of view, she would have felt awful being given a toy like this as a child, because it was a reminder that she was different, "abnormal." 
As I think about it more I can't believe anyone would think it wise to give a child with such a debilitating and fatal illness as cancer a doll reflecting it.  In over-idealization such as the type found with Barbie, we get issues regarding the societal notion of normality and standards.  But when humans play with human dolls, they can't help but be reminded of themselves, regardless of the specific attributes the toy possesses.  Also, children aren't nearly as stupid as I think a lot of people take them for.  They know the toys are unrealistic, and as a child, to me at least, therein lay the appeal.
There is a lot of power in idealization, both good and bad.  Plus, living in such an over-developed and "civilized" society such as ours, we are bound to be ingrained with crippling self-consciousness in one form or another, and undoubtedly bigger problems to boot.