mszombi:

dollsahoy:

dollsahoy:

Once again I’ve seen on my dash that…art project?  making claims about how horribly unrealistic Barbie is, with the smiling young lady standing next to a bizarrely-proportioned homunculus that claims to be how Barbie would look if life-size, and there’s text claiming unbelievable things about Barbie’s “real” proportions.

Y’know, these:

Oh, where to start…well, let’s start with the weight issue.  The 110lb number comes, as the text admits, from 1965.  In 1965, Barbie was still  very much being marketed as a 16 year old ‘girl next door.‘  Illustrations from the time portray the character as younger and less curvy than the actual doll, because, honestly, the doll’s shape was ‘borrowed’ from a German sexy novelty toy, and not custom-designed to represent a 16 year old girl.  So, tell me this–do you think it’s unreasonable for a 16 year old to weigh 110 lbs?  I sure hope not, because that’s what I weighed at that age.

Let’s look closer at those measurements.  We’ll start with the fact that Barbie is 1:6 scale–that means that for every inch Barbie has, it would be 6" in ‘real life.‘  Using that information, I took this doll, which used the body that’s been standard for Barbie since 1999, so is most familiar with modern youth, and made some measurements:

I won’t argue that, wow, those are some slender measurements, but…I don’t see anything like a 39" bust.  Even the older Barbie bodies, with their slightly larger breasts, measure in at a mere 5.5", which that chart up there tells you is 33" (and she did have an 18" waist, but her hips are just under 5", so, again, I have no idea what the ‘facts’ up there are based upon.)  And here’s the thing about those slim measurements–they’re not attempting to project an ideal of womaniness as much as to take into account the fact that, although the doll is 1:6, the cloth used for her clothes is still 1:1, which means they’ll add a lot of bulk to the clothed doll, making her look, oh, I dunno, maybe more like a ‘real’ person?

But I’m not done.

Let’s talk about that…thing…purporting to be a life-size representation of Barbie.

Oh, yeah.  Nailed it.  Looks spot on.  I’m totally swayed by this.

And then I decided to do this

I honestly thought about using a random stock photo of a woman, or maybe a picture of my short self, but this seemed more…poetic.

I’m not saying there aren’t problems with Barbie (I don’t have the knowledge to argue with the shoe size claim, but, like the slender build, the reasons for the design of Barbie’s feet has to do with physical limitations of dressing something so small, especially when that something was designed with the technology of the 1950s.)  But, the problems that Barbie does have?  Aren’t any of those addressed by that project.

I first posted this in 2013, seemed like it might be time to bring it back.

I never understood how anyone cold take that life size “Barbie” thing seriously. Like, a life sized Barbie would just look like a regular Barbie but bigger? Why would it suddenly look all wonky and deformed because its big?