The Plastic Insecurity In Marge Piercy's Barbie Doll

Barbie: The Plastic Insecurity

In Marge Piercy’s Barbie Doll, the author tries to bring awareness to an issue because of the overwhelming social pressures and insecurities, one girl has that causes her to commit suicide. The classic Barbie doll came out in 1959 and this poem was published in 1971 giving only 12 years for the Barbie doll to be out on the market and have an impact on little girls. In Piercy’s poem, as the girlchild is growing up, she is given all the toys girls today get, toy dolls, GE stoves, irons, and lipsticks (Piercy). All the things she will need to be “successful” as a woman. The girl is smart, intelligent and beautiful but one day, when the girl is a teenager, “a classmate said: you have a great big nose and fat legs”

Today the Barbie doll is still a popular toy but the Ken doll is just as popular. Thus, resulting in societies idea of the perfect bodies for males and females. Plastic. People are supposed to be plastic and only look a certain way no matter how they feel or how they choose to look. If a transgendered male (female to male) has a female body and is happy with his body but society tells him he is female based on the genitalia he has have, he will spend thousands of dollars to get gender reassignment surgery just so society will view him as a male. Any type of surgery is expensive and transgendered people aren’t the only people who get it. In the article “Teenage girls and plastic surgery” it states the pros and cons of teenage girls getting plastic surgery but the truest statement in the article “Many teenage girls want plastic surgery for all the wrong reasons” (Teenage) The teenagers “…may feel pressure to live up to the unrealistic standard of female beauty promoted by U.S. popular culture. But they “… also do not carefully consider the health risks that plastic surgery poses.” (Teenage) This may seem like girls are the only ones who feel the pressure of societies opinion and “Observers say that teenage girls are far more likely than boys to feel physically inadequate” (Teenage) But the truth is that “Young men with body image issues are

The United States in the most obese country and the Barbie doll was manufactured in the United States. The negative part of this is that “In 2013, 42 million children under the age of 5 worldwide were overweight or obese” (Kiener). Children are playing with a doll that is tone and has the perfect body when they don’t have the same body type. They are being taught how they should look when they don’t look that way they hate themselves. So many people think Barbie isn’t to blame when in fact I wouldn’t be writing this essay if I didn’t think Barbie was causing a problem with self-esteem issues nor would “a 2006 study published in the journal Developmental Psychology, [have] found that girls exposed to Barbie at a young age expressed greater concern with being thin, compared with those exposed to other dolls” (Dockterman) have their