Barbies gone bad
The jailbait Bratz line are no baby dolls
BY Dorothy Woodend
There’s a war going on, a hair-pulling, eye-gouging war of the dolls—Barbie versus the Bratz.
Mattel, the maker of Barbie, launched a lawsuit on November 20 against MGA Entertainment, the creator of the Bratz, claiming that MGA stole its concept. What concept might that be exactly? That sex sells? If so, Barbie may be in for the fight of her life.
Barbie certainly wasn’t the first to sell blond hair and boobery, but the Bratz have escalated the battle to new heights. Or depths, as the case may be. I never thought I’d have much sympathy for Barbie, but at least she appears fully grown, whereas the Bratz are not even barely legal. The original dolls were teenagers, but they’ve since regressed to Bratz Kidz and now Bratz Babyz, whose abuse of the English language is not the most heinous of their crimes.
Each infant comes complete with tiny hooker outfits, bee-stung pouts—thickly lacquered with gloss—and big eyes rimmed with kohl. They virtually climb on your shoulder and scream sex in your ear. The siren call of these toys that blur the line between adults and children is disconcerting at best, deeply disturbing at worst. But if you want to train little girls to believe that females should always be sexually available, it is best to begin early.
Since selling sex is also a marketer’s wet dream, the collision of sex, marketing and kids was probably inevitable. The need to create new consumers has resulted in an explosion of advertising aimed specifi cally at children (more than $22 billion was spent on toys last year alone in the U.S.). The Bratz have been enormously successful, hence the threat they pose to the competition. It is a correct, albeit reductionist, impulse to blame the blunt forces of capitalism. But the repercussions of sexualizing children, even in doll form, could have perilous consequences. In the November 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine, writer Mark Greif summed up this state of affairs in “Children of the Revolution,” theorizing, “It seems likely that an incessant overvaluing of the sex of the young will train some people towards wrong objects, thus swelling the numbers of incipient wrongdoers who no longer see a bright line between right and wrong—because social discourse has made that beam wobble, then scintillate, attract and confuse.”
The push to sell everything, by whatever means necessary, as illustrated by the battle between Barbie and the Bratz, has reached its lowest point in the sexualization of infants. Where else is there to go from here? Maybe superhot, well-accessorized zygotes.
Or should that be Zygotz?
