Kirsty: Hello everyone, and welcome to Enabled, the podcast where we talk about, normalise, and celebrate disability and mental health. And we are jumping on the Barbie bandwagon today. And we're asking the question, is Barbie bad for us? Or is she fundamentally harmless? What do you think? The Barbie movie is out. It's the biggest movie in the world right now. It's massive.
Colin: And I'd play the music, but we're not allowed to.
Kirsty: Can't play the music. Is there music?
Colin: You know, the Barbie music.
Kirsty: Do you mean like the Aqua song?
Colin: Aqua song! You probably can't say that.
Kirsty: I think I can probably say that.
Colin: Maybe if you sang it for us, that's not copyrighted?
Kirsty: (Hums music) No.
Colin: Okay, is there characters in the movie -
well, we don't know because we haven't seen it - that represent diversity and inclusiveness.
Kirsty: Yes, there are. And there's been a lot of buzz about this is so inclusive, there are disabled Barbies in there, there are Barbies of colour, there are ostensibly Barbies of different shapes and sizes. I mean, I've seen the Barbie dolls that are supposed to be curvy.
Those are not curves. But yes, the movie is trying to be a bit more self-aware. It is trying to be more inclusive. And Mattel, the company that owns Barbie or created Barbie, they have just released another inclusive doll. They've released a Barbie with Down Syndrome, which we posted about on our Facebook page, which is so great.
You know, I'm so in favour of inclusive toys and promoting inclusive play. I think it's so valuable and so I'm, you know, I'm excited that they've done that for sure. It's not enough for me though, when it comes to Barbie. I feel like Barbie has too many crosses on my board for it to get me over the line to support Barbie. You have some other thoughts, though, Colin.
Colin: What do you mean crosses?
Kirsty: As in, I just think I'm not a fan just at a core level. I do not enjoy Barbie. I think it's bad for the world, actually.
Colin: Why? I'm going to ask the heavy questions.
Kirsty: Oh, heavy!
Colin: Why is Barbie bad?
Kirsty: I mean, you know, I think it's the obvious reason that, you know, has probably been discussed a lot, but it's the unrealistic beauty standards that it introduces to babies, basically, to young girls.
My kid's Dad and I have both, individually and together, rejected presents from extended family members, from friends, given to our daughters, that are Barbies, because that's one of the decisions we've made as parents is that we don't want our kids playing with Barbies because I think it's bad for them.
Colin: I can understand that, but I just don't know where you draw the line with that thinking. What happens if your kids want to play with Nerf guns? Are you going to stop them from having water pistols?
Kirsty: No.
Colin: Why? Surely a gun is more threatening than a Barbie doll.
Kirsty: And look, some people would say that, and I know people who don't allow their children to play with toy guns, especially, or toy weapons.
It's not high on my list of concerns. You can't protect your kids from everything, absolutely, and you probably can't protect them from most things completely. But I am more concerned - I have two daughters, and I am more concerned about their exposure to the sexualization of women and girls and the mental health impact that unrealistic beauty standards can have on my daughters than the concern that I have for the impact of violence on them. Don't get me wrong, I'm concerned about that too. But I'm more concerned about the mental health impact that, that these things will have.
Colin: I completely get that. But as well, I would say… Isn't it just as important, if not more important, to educate them to be able to not ignore it, but deal with that, because that is something that they are going to get, unfortunately, as they grow older, they're going to come up against that.
Kirsty: Yeah, totally. So, so are you saying that you think that, like, they should be exposed to these things from an educational point of view, like a conversation starter? Is that what you mean?
Colin: I'm saying that probably if they are exposed to them, then you should deal with it and explain to them why, and educate them a little bit more to be able to, deal with that. Because it's going to happen.
Kirsty: Oh, totally.
Colin: Whether you're protective enough to them to never have a Barbie doll, eventually they're going to go to some girl's friend's place and there's going to be a Barbie doll or something else is going to happen as they grow older. And if you have completely shielded them from negative things without knowing how to deal with that, I think that's going to have a worse impact than if you actually were exposed to it and learnt how to deal with it.
Kirsty: Yeah. And I suppose the interesting thing for me, I guess, is that that's an experiment that's impossible to conduct. Because forget eventually there's, I cannot shield my children completely from exposure to the sexualization of women and girls. I cannot protect them from unrealistic beauty standards because all I have to do is leave my house and they see it on billboards and in shops and in magazines.
You can't raise kids in a neutral bubble because they're being raised by a mother who has absorbed these views of, you know, that my core value is in how I look. And as much as I try to process that and work through that for myself, so I'm not passing that onto my kids, I can't shield them from a world that this is the way we see women.
Colin: So where do you go for an answer?
Kirsty: What do you mean?
Colin: Like, okay, you- your children experience that, how do you sit them down and talk to them about that?
Kirsty: Yeah, look, I don't think it's a sit down and talk about it process. I think it's just an ongoing conversation. Yeah, I think you just have to keep the door open. It's almost like talking to your kids about sex.
Like it's not a one time sit down, birds and the bees, everything's uncomfortable. Let's never talk about this again. It's a continual, you know, pointing out, you know, the way that you talk about things. So even I try, for example, not to comment on how my girls look. I try to comment on their character or their ability rather than, Oh, that dress is so pretty.
You look so cute today. Look at your hair. Look at your face. Look at, you know. Because these are, this is the way that we talk to girls and we don't really talk to boys that way.
Colin: Hmm. Again, I completely agree, but I just think again that, yeah, if we can educate better so that they can deal with that.
Kirsty: Yeah.
Colin: I sound like a broken record.
Kirsty: No, but I suppose, so people try to sell the origin story of Barbie as being like-
Colin: There's, there's an origin story of Barbie?
Kirsty: Yeah. No, as in, as in how Barbie was created. So the idea is that, you know, back in the day, children only played with dolls that looked like babies.
And so these little girls were being encouraged... They were given dolls that they were encouraged to mother effectively. So we were raising little girls to just think of themselves as future mothers. And this was one of the first adult looking dolls that children were given.
Colin: I'd never thought about that before, but you're right.
Kirsty: Yeah. And so the idea was let's give these girls a doll with an adult body so that they can sort of project their future selves onto it. And first of all, Barbie is not a doll with an adult woman's body. No adult woman has that body. It's physically impossible.
So that's, you know, problem number one. But problem number two as well, like, yes, Barbie might have had like jobs, like maybe she was a president, maybe she was a doctor, maybe she was an astronaut. But ultimately, the way that she looked was so core and imperative to her appeal. And the actual origin of Barbie is the woman who, I suppose, Barbie is the brainchild of, she modeled Barbie on a, I want to say German - I'm pretty sure a German doll that was being marketed at the time that was based on a comic strip of a playboy-esque kind of character. And this doll was marketed to men. An overtly sexual doll marketed originally to men, and that is what Barbie was modeled against.
Colin: What? What years are we talking?
Kirsty: I don't know. I don't do the statistics. I just do the general vibe behind what I read.
Colin: It's just, do you think then, okay, we're talking about Barbie. What about Ken? What about GI Joe? What about all the wrestling dolls that one of my friends collected? I mean, are we marketing then action figures, male action figures to young boys? And encouraging, that's what a real man is, an action figure.
Kirsty: I mean, you tell me, cause honestly I've never really thought about that and because I'm-
Colin: Neither had I, until just then.
Kirsty: So I mean you, but you are somebody who grew up with those things being marketed towards you, those sorts of action figures all of those sorts of things, did that impact the way that you viewed yourself and where your value came from?
Did you think that you weren't valuable if you weren't muscle bound?
Colin: No.
Kirsty: The noise of that for men is not as loud as it is for women. I feel like men do still see their value in what I do. And even if you look at it, we were talking about this before, if you look at it in terms of. when women age out of being important and interesting and visible. You hear women who age talk about the time that they stopped feeling like they were visible in public.
People stopped looking at them when they walked past because as you get older, your I suppose, that sort of conventional standard of beauty starts to leave you. You stop being noticed and you start to feel like you're not as important anymore. That doesn't really happen to men. Like George Clooney, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, all of these people, they're still considered...
super attractive. Chris Evans, as we said before, he's 41. He's dating a 25 year old, you know. And I, I don't think that things like that can be reduced down to, oh, well, women are more mature than men. And so, you know, a 25 year old woman is probably the maturity equivalent of a 41 year old man. I don't think that's the answer.
I think it inherently says something about the different value that we see in men and in women and a woman's chief value that we see in society is how pretty she is. And like, that's not nice to say, but I, it just is. I think it's just the reality.
Colin: And that obviously is going to have an impact on your mental health.
Kirsty: Absolutely it does. Yeah. Women's mental health is dramatically affected by this I think, and it colours every part of your life, I suppose.
You know, if that's where you see your value, I mean, aging becomes incredibly hard. And especially for children, you can see the way that that the repercussions that might have for little girls would be really problematic.
Colin: Well, they're not given, particularly young girls, but young boys, I think as well, they're not given time to grow up.
Kirsty: Yeah.
Colin: They're asked to mature a lot quicker than what they should.. And that takes away from their ability to learn and know how to navigate different situations that they come across because they've already learnt from social media or wherever, or this is how I should be acting, or this is how a teenager, young adult acts, I want to be like them.
Kirsty: Yeah, I think it increases people's isolation as well. Because if you think of the amount that people are using technology these days and things like, you know, Instagram and Tik Tok and all of those sorts of things, people are living more and more digital and virtual lives and phenomenon like instagram filters… I mean, I feel like Barbie is the original filter because it's not just that it's her body. It's the real issue for me is her face. It's a heavily made up face and we give this to tiny little girls who will look at it and think that's how I want to look. Nobody can look like that. And so now we have this phenomenon where people are living their lives online and it's not even a genuine representation of who they are, they've got filters that make them look completely different.
Colin: Or they're spending lots of money on, on cosmetic surgery to look like Barbie.
Kirsty: Yes, huge amounts on-
Colin: And Ken.
Kirsty: And you're not allowed to these days you're not allowed to like, say that that's not okay because you don't want to shame people for wanting to use fillers or Botox or things like that. And I don't want to shame people and I think there could be, you know, a myriad of reasons why people get cosmetic treatments. But I guess I'm concerned about the idea that people maybe are getting these treatments and these treatments are becoming normalised and almost expected of women because we're attempting to stay conventionally attractive and, and youthful. And because that’s where we see our value.
Because I think that, you know, I have a responsibility to my daughters to age without despairing, and to age without fearing that I'm losing my value because my face or my body is changing.
You know, I want to enjoy getting old and wrinkly and, you know, let's normalise aging. It's a great thing to do. And I desperately want for my daughters that they don't think that the most valuable thing about them is how they look because gosh, what a horrible, horrible existence. But that's, that's the reality for so many women and girls is, that is their existence. That's, that's where they place their value.
Colin: I haven't thought about that before.
Kirsty: You are unburdened. And look, not to say, I don't want to suggest that like men aren't impacted by this at all because I'm sure with all the social media and these sorts of things…
Colin: Oh, I think, yeah, I definitely think that they would be. You have to look at the aisles in the supermarket with all the men's products now. I mean, they're everywhere. I just want something to shave with and some deodorant and maybe some moisturizer cream or something or other-
Kirsty: Old school basics.
Colin: Because I have like dry skin. I don't like dry skin. So.
Kirsty: Yeah do you, I mean, do you feel impacted by the aging process at all? Not to suggest that you're old. I'm just saying, you know, as somebody slightly further down the line.
Colin: Nicely put. I don't, I don't think I am.
Kirsty: No?
Colin: I don't, yeah. I'm getting older. That's what happens. Yeah, sure, I'd like to be fitter or lose some weight or have more hair, I don't know, on top of my head.
Kirsty: Right. You, you, cause you've started sort of equalling out that situation.
Colin: And I'd say, yes, probably I would like, but it doesn't really worry me. No.
Kirsty: So, you know, there's, there's a degree to which I suppose it's a universal phenomenon. But it is something that hits different with women. I, and I think is, is exaggerated in the way that, that, that women are portrayed.
And I think it's because of things like Barbie. And so I think we have to push back against that to a degree because how do you create change in a capitalistic society? Well you vote with your wallet, you vote with your time, you know, you unsubscribe to those, you unfollow those things. Maybe we shouldn't go and see the Barbie movie, Colin, maybe we need to veto this?
Colin: I'm- completely up to you. If we go and watch Barbie though, like I said, you have to watch at least, the original trilogy of Star Wars movies.
Kirsty: I mean, I've decided. We're not watching Barbie.
Colin: Episode four, five and six.
Kirsty: I can't do it. I can't.
Colin: You can.
Kirsty: I only have so much life left in me. I don't want to waste it on Star Wars.
I'm sorry. Maybe if there's a new one that comes out that is you know, interesting, we could go and see that.
Colin: They're all interesting!
Kirsty: Sure, yeah. Anyway, food for thought. Just something for everyone to be thinking about. Do you let your kids play with Barbie? Let us know if you do or if you don't and why.
If you do want to know more about the sexualization of women and girls and the really terrible impact that this has on young girls especially, but on everyone actually, really follow Collective Shout on Facebook. They're a really great organization that campaign against the objectification of women and sexualization of girls in media and popular culture.
And also check out Taryn Brumfitt, she's the Australian of the Year, this year and she has a documentary called Embrace that is great and really sort of affirming this idea that our bodies are not ornamental. They're not decorative. They're functional. And we need to stop being at war with our bodies. So hit us up on our Facebook page.
Let us know what you think. Yeah. While you're on our Facebook page, actually, if you could like and follow and even write a review, that would be amazing.
Colin: That would be fantastic.
Kirsty: And share our podcasts with other people, that'd be wonderful.
Colin: Yeah, cool.
Kirsty: All right. Well, that's it from us. Thanks for listening, guys. And we'll see you next time on Enabled.