You Could Be Curvy, or You Could Be a Pilot!

By Elizabeth Marmer

For the past two months, all I’ve heard is “Barbie” “Barbie” “Barbie.” The Barbie movie has made quite the impact on everyone around me. My big confession is: I haven’t seen it. But I am aware of how successfully it has rebranded the Barbie franchise in everyone’s eyes, and there are a couple of facts everyone seems to have forgotten. 

I grew up, like many of my peers, playing with Barbies. My Barbie was a blonde, skinny, white doctor – and though a couple of my friends had Barbies of different races, their dolls were generally all the same. In 2016, Barbie begins to lose their corner of the doll market to competitors, and they decide it is time to move with the trends and create 3 new body types: petite, tall, and curvy. The original doll poses an unrealistic standard attained only by Victoria’s Secret angels, and the curvy doll does not do much to change that. Her hips are slightly wider, with marginally larger arms and calves and the smallest bit of abdomen fat. In other words, she is still very skinny, now with wider hips that tailor to the male gaze more than anything else. Is Barbie really sympathizing with women, or is the brand’s main intention simply to maximize profit? Their lazy rendition of a body-positive doll speaks to their central motive: profit. 

Not only is the curvy doll only vaguely curvy, she also has less clothing options than the regular Barbie. She is, above all else, just a category, an accessory even. Pick your choice: pilot Barbie, doctor Barbie, mother Barbie, or curvy Barbie! It is curvy Barbie’s job to be curvy, just like it is pilot Barbie’s job to be a pilot. On the websites of Target and Toys R US, two of the most popular Barbie retailers, there are many original Barbies with a million different outfit options. However, there are only 5 curvy dolls. Out of 200! The curvy dolls are just a different “career”, a different “type”. You could be curvy, or you could be a pilot, but you can’t be both. This perpetuates the idea that larger women cannot accomplish the same tasks that skinnier women can, and that they are somehow not equal to skinnier women. Unfortunately,  this is not the only group Barbie categorizes –  a couple of other unconventional Barbies that come to mind are Down syndrome Barbie, prosthetic limb Barbie, and wheelchair Barbie. The stark and unequal differentiation between “normal Barbie ” and every other Barbie proves that Barbie as a brand is simply selling “woke” dolls in order to maintain consumer demand. It is all about staying up to date on trends, and right now the trend is to be inclusive. This follows the modern obsession with using human differences as fads and monetizing those differences, rather than appreciating differences for what they are. Barbie is doing just that, using this curvy doll as nothing more than a trend, a marketing tool to maximize profit. 

Barbie was mainstream when I was growing up, and it remains mainstream today, especially with its glamorization post-movie.  The problem is, Barbie understands how instrumental they are to the lives of children––how much they, as a brand, have a hold on an entire generation. The Barbie board of executives sees the body-image issues of our world like never before with the rise of social media. They have done the bare minimum to stay relevant, their version of the curvy doll clearly displaying how they do not care to genuinely change the beauty standards that they, to a degree, created. Negative, body-oriented beauty standards affect us starting from our earliest days, and if Barbie’s inclusivity ends with their poor attempt at designing a curvy doll, children will inevitably grow up internalizing that as the largest possible body that is still acceptable. 

In collegiate level economics classes there are two driving factors for businesses: utility (overall happiness of a business) and profit, utility in most cases stemming almost entirely from maximizing profit. By this logic, Barbie, as a corporation, focuses exclusively on maximizing profit, so there is no way their main intention is to empathize with women. Take Aerie, a brand at the forefront of the body positivity movement. Starting as early as 2014, they committed to stop retouching model images. Yet, Aerie is owned by American Eagle, a company that has done far less than Aerie to move towards body positivity. Inclusivity is just a weapon to increase Aerie’s profit. It is clear that their mother corporation, American Eagle, is not committed to body positivity in the same way, and they use Aerie as their personal “woke” branch. Hence, the company as a whole is not using body positivity to make women feel better about themselves, but rather as an effective marketing strategy. 

Barbie is not trying to be inclusive, instead trying to stay relevant and reach the greatest possible consumer base. Barbie is not the only brand that operates like this. There are a few possible steps Barbie could take to ameliorate their brand values. First is to widen the variety of sizes that the Barbies come in. The curvy doll cannot be the most plus-sized… Next, Barbie could create all the same outfits and career paths for all the different sizes, instead of only providing a few select ones for their curvier dolls. In a perfect world, Barbie could also eliminate the way they categorize groups of people by simply selling dolls by careers and randomizing the size, race, and other factors of the doll. This may never happen, but it would help eliminate biases in customers, perhaps even changing the mindsets of the individuals behind this corporation and in turn perpetuating healthy stereotypes.

Brands, as a whole, cannot really care about the wellbeing of the individual. Firms want more money and that’s about it, and for some reason, their bare minimum contribution of doing just enough to stay “body-positive” is enough for us to look past their shortcomings and support them. If we continue to allow brands to get away with this, they will continue doing it. And yet, we are all products of the very marketing that we try to debate, with commercial jingles and clever advertisements shoved into our brains from birth. It is an endless cycle: we egg them on and they egg us on. There is no clear solution to this issue, but I don’t think glamorizing Barbie is the way to go.