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I've been reading this book called "The Lolita Effect: The media sexuaization of Young Girls and what we can do about. It's by M. Gigi Durham. I want to post a part of it and hear your views on it.
I'm in an elementary school classroom in Iowa, standing in front of a roomful of lively and diverse sixth-graders. I ask them what a "perfect girl" looks like. The answers tumble out: "Young! "Thin!" "Blonde! "Long Hair" "Long Legs" Finally, twelve year-old Katie ernestly sums it up "She would look like Barbie. I get the same answer every time I ask this question: in my college-level classes on gender and sexuality, in casual conversations with colleagues, when I talk to my friends' pre-school children. Over and over again, "Barbie" is what they come up with, despite the incursion of the newer, more popular dolls; despite Fat pride and the butch mystique. "Perfect girls" in the new millennium, apparently still look like Barbie.
Whoa. That's so weird that it's so consistent with everyone. If I were to think of what the "perfect girl" looks like, Barbie does not come to mind at all, but that could be because I was never allowed to have Barbies as a kid...maybe it all depends on their upbringing.
