Barbie "Can" Be.

Warning: This blog contains a very annoyed 16 year old girl going on about one of her childhood idols. You've been warned.

This journal is the rest of what I couldn't get out yesterday. This was going to be the second part of the journal yesterday, but I was so upset that I couldn't bring myself to rant about Barbie right after talking about my grandmother. I saved this for you all today though because I'm now in my regular "let's fuss about something" mood. Today, I glare at Mattel's one and only, Barbie.

When I was younger, I was a Barbie girl. I remember I had the Malibu Beach collection when I was four, a Barbie dream house (or what I thought was a dream house), and of course, Barbie and Ken. I had a chest full of clothes and I basically dreamed to be like Barbie one day. She was the perfect blue eyed, blond haired girl that every girl my age loved. Who didn't want to be her? To this day, I still even have some of my dolls and a custom one that I redid. I ended up chopping my doll's hair off, dying it black/blue with a marker and water, and staining Barbie's wedding dress purple after cutting off the pretty pink bow.

Barbie has been the idea of many controversies though. For one, her waist is totally unhealthy for a woman's standards, she done many things that make woman look weak, and she's caused a lot of attention from other races. My rant today though is about how Barbie has done stupid shit to make girls look weak/dumb.

Long after I had outgrown my Barbies, but my sister was in love with them, Mattel released a series of the dolls called "Barbie, I Can Be..." These dolls were to show young girls that they could be anything they wanted to be in the future from a racecar driver to a veterinarian (I'm only naming off a few that my sister actually had). I thought that they were very interested because I didn't have that when I was younger. There were also some books that were released along with the dolls... One of them being "Barbie, I can be a computer engineer". Now, some of you may have already heard about this, but for those who haven't, I'm going to talk about it a little bit here.

In the story, Barbie is developing a game, but the story states that she is only "designing it". The game won't really be a game until she gets two guys to program the damn thing. Being a female who has taken a computer programming and game design class in high school, this is quite offensive. Not only did I design my game, I also coded it to the point that people could actually play it. It was an actual game.

Somewhere along the lines of all of this, Barbie pulls out a flashdrive that is in her (literally) heart shaped necklace. She plugs it up to her computer and the screen begins to flash before crashing. Somehow, Barbie's sister gets a hold on said flash drive, plugs it up to her computer and loses part of a huge school project and music files. While reading this I'm literally sitting there saying to myself, "What the hell?" Flash drives are used for files that you trust. Do not put anything on a flash drive that you have no idea what it is. DON'T PUT VIRUSES ON A FLASH DRIVE, GODDAMMIT. I actually almost gave up reading the article that I found this on at one point. Besides, shouldn't Barbie know how to fix it? She is the computer engineer after all.

After the viruses are on the computers, Barbie takes them to her two male friends to fix them. They also program Barbie's game. At the very end of the book, Barbie become a credit stealing whore, presenting her game to her class and proclaiming that she is a computer engineer. One, at my school, that's called cheating. Two, sitting on your ass doesn't make you a computer engineer.

Mattel responded to the backlash of people with this book by pulling it off of Amazon. People are so mad about it, but I wouldn't blame them. I spend about a fourth of my time coding, writing, and working on being successful. I don't take other people's credit, but I also don't let people take mine. I work for what I earn and I know that you've all seen it if you've known me since I sat at my mom's house writing Andley fanfiction. This makes me blow a fuse though.

In other news, there's a new "Barbie" created by an artist named, Nikolay Lamm, called a Lammily. She's a realistically proportioned doll that has recently been made to have stickers that resemble scars, bruises, freckles, birthmarks, acne, etc. I swear to goodness, if they become a real thing by the time I have kids of my own, I'm going to buy my babies as many as they want. I don't hate Barbies, I just wish that sometimes they wouldn't make women seem like dolls though (no pun intended).

Until next rant.
-Kayla VI