What scares me is that somewhere there is a group of CEOs who thought it was a good idea…
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Has anyone read other Barbie books? On another forum they were saying that pretty much all of them are similarly awful.
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I wouldn’t be surprised at all if your average Barbie designer is some 60 year old womangirl who loved Barbies when she was a kid and want to keep them just the way they were.
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I have a tête-bêche edition of Stephen King’s Riding The Bullet. It’s a pretty cool idea: Side One contains King’s original novella (originally published as “the world’s first mass-market electronic book” back in 2000), and Side Two is Mick Garris’ screenplay based on the novella (which is a very different treatment of the story, moving the action from more-or-less present day back to 1969, among other things), and it also includes some great art by Bernie Wrightson and Alan M. Clark.
I thought this was a pretty cool use of the format.
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Maybe she’s done that and gotten grief for it, so she’s speaking from experience?
Honestly, should people have to do that? I can understand wanting to, from a privacy perspective, but should people have to in order to avoid harassment?
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They’ve done this over and over throughout Barbie’s history. They try to make her fit with the times, and fuck it up royally. Like in the '60s when they gave her a black friend, but just used the same doll mold with darker plastic and called her “Colored Francie.” And in the '90s when they let kids put tattoos on her and included a tramp stamp.
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You know how 4chan has a reputation for being full of sexist assholes? As soon as a woman goes on there they’re harassed to show their breasts and maybe debase themselves in other ways. That’s true, but there is a reason behind the madness.
On the internet you get to choose how you are represented. There is no need to announce that you are a woman unless you’re talking about women’s issues or, as is more often the case on a site like 4chan, you want attention simply for being a woman. The demands to see boobs aren’t because they want to see boobs (it’s the internet, there’s no trouble finding boobs), but they are to discourage people from demanding attention simply due to their gender. If you want attention post something interesting or clever.
I was a bit surprised how truly awful this is.
But come on, it’s fucking Barbie. That’s no amount of surprise next to how I’d feel if it didn’t suck horribly.
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The reasoning behind this is so flawed. There is a huge difference between needing the world to know that you are a woman - and needing to hide that you are a woman. Whatever thing you can think of, if people tell you that it’s “ok”, provided that nobody knows about it, there is most likely a problem.
What makes this treatment especially sexist and awful is that they don’t call out guys. If a guy is called Mark Stark nobody assumes that they are “making a point” of being male, and demanding to see pix of his balls. Why don’t they do this? Because “there are no women on the internet”, which makes no fucking sense. Beyond that, gender does frequently become topical in 4chan discussions, mostly from a junior-high mythical perspective. If a crowd of oiks make generalizations such “women always do this” or “women can’t do that”, the person who can set them straight is obviously a woman. What happens is that these guys become disillusioned by having any dissenting opinions to whatever foolish rant they are sharing with those who are likeminded. It’s a great way to remain an ignoramus and not learn anything. I’ve argued with crowds of people on 4chan before, and it was painfully stupid. If I don’t agree with their rants about women, then I must be a secret feminist infiltrator. If I don’t agree about their racist remarks, I must be a black interloper. They don’t use anonymity because it’s fair, it’s quite the opposite. They use anonymity to stack bogus one-sided arguments, and then tar and feather people with pejorative labels. Yet when I explain who I really am, I am supposedly soapboxing. It’s an easy tactic to witness and argue against, but they eventually drown out meaningful input with a building wall of noise.
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So… you’re saying that being myself (who happens to be a woman) is offensive and I shouldn’t try to “get attention” by being my gender… Got it. Being a woman means I inherently “want attention”… so, I should just, not leave the house, because that might make people think I want attention, which of course, is a whorish thing to do. I mean, I should be at home popping out babies and make food for my husband, right? How dare I possibly try to be a human being… that’s for men.
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Oh, no no no… @jandrese is totally right. How dare “people” like me try to get attention by being myself. Clearly I’m in the wrong and I deserve whatever I happen to get by NOT being gender neutral or pretending to be a dude. I and other women get what we deserve by not being subservient little wives… I should know my place in the pecking order of life, after all. How dare I attempt to go out and make a career for myself. That’s way out of my league, being I only have a lady brain.
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From what I’ve heard Hasbro (or whoever owns it) has been freaking out because Barbie sales have slumped due to competition from basically everything else. Granted there is some stuff that is much worse (Bratz dolls for instance) but I’m sure if you expose your kid to many other things she’ll latch on to something not-horrible.
Also I recently read this and this line blew my mind:
Sure, maybe Hello Kitty doesn’t have a mouth with which she can roar, but she’s not likely to encourage an eating disorder or fantasies of being blond-haired and blue-eyed, either. She’s one of few characters my six-year-old is interested in (perhaps the only one) that promotes being a child and maintaining childhood friendships, and doesn’t encourage my daughter to obsess over makeup or pretend to do adult things or grow up too fast.
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My mistake - I was assuming that the attitude was indicative of immature males who wished they could marry their mom, since she was the only one who had any obligation to put up with their crude manners and slovenly lifestyles. It must be soul-crushing for them to suspect that women aren’t fighting for the privilege of doting upon them.
Tie a steak around your neck, boy! The dog will play with your nasty ass if it gets hungry enough!
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Simply don’t announce your gender unless it is relevant. Everybody is a person, and you don’t know or care if they are black, brown, male, female, a dog, etc… I’m not saying you have to go out of your way to hide here, just use the basic anonymity built into the system.
The number of places online where your gender really matters is not very big.
This isn’t binding the boobs and putting on a suit so you can pass as man. It is “don’t bring up irrelevant information because it’s a distraction”.
I mean this was in response to someone who felt that she couldn’t submit code solutions to forums for fear of being called out by some jackhole. That’s an area where your gender absolutely doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t even come up. Besides, if the solution is correct it shouldn’t need defending unless there are some style nazis on there or something (Oh no! K&R Braces!). The only time you should have a problem is if your code solution is wrong, and that’s unrelated to your gender.
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Fixed, to the extent it can be:
https://cfiesler.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/barbieremixed.pdf
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You’ve missed the point of this line. There are no women on the internet because gender doesn’t matter. There are no men either! The point is that everybody should be treated equally, or at least given the same chance. If they can’t contribute then they can’t contribute, but it’s not because they’re a girl or black or a cat or whatever.
Your comment that people never demand to see balls is mostly accurate, but that’s because nobody ever posts a solution on Stackexhange and goes “You know this is correct because I’m a man!” They never mentioned it. It never came up. It could have been a woman for all we know, it doesn’t matter.
That’s actually pretty fucking awesome. 
And it’s good to see that Mattel have pulled the book from Amazon and have apologized and promised a re-write. Although I reckon they should just publish the remixed version.
What I’m hearing here is “Here, put this electronic burqa to hide the fact that you are a woman!”
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I don’t miss the point. “No gender on the internet” is how I personally go about things. But again, there is a difference between “no gender” and “no women”. Coding sites should be better than most, I hope, but I used 4chan as an example of where this apparent neutrality has been subverted. If it doesn’t matter, then people can accept different genders without making a big deal about it, rather than use that opacity to exclude and marginalize.
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