On November 18th I attended a floor program held by my floor’s RA, Julie Eller. The program did not have a name, but it required each resident, as well as a few non-residents, to draw herself as a true-to-scale Barbie doll using regular printer paper and some colored pencils. The rest of the residents and I sat together in the common room as we drew ourselves and colored in what would be ourselves as Barbies, and then each of us had a picture taken with our respective doll, which will later be hung up on a wall in our common room.
The mission of this program was to bring to people’s attention the inaccuracy of Mattel Barbie’s body shape and size, and the detrimental effect this morphed body image has on the minds of small children who grow up playing with Barbie. Young children who play with a doll of seemingly ‘perfect’ proportions have their expectations of themselves set unrealistically high, which will affect them later in life and result in a morphed body image and low self-esteem, among other negative mental effects. Our floor’s RA, Julie, plans on taking a picture of each resident with her realistically-drawn doll and sending these pictures to the Mattel company in order to get the company to begin manufacturing dolls that are more realistic and of humanly normal features and proportions.