We live in a social world, a world that is growing to be more and more dependent upon technology to keep us connected and to keep us informed. Growing hand in hand with our dependence on technology is the amount of time we spend viewing advertisements. Whether it is an ad for clothes or one for your local supermarket all ads are attempting to sell the same thing, the perfect life. They do this by showing what the media has decided is the perfect person using their product. “From childhood to adulthood, television, billboards, movies, music videos, video games, computer games, toys, the internet, and magazines convey images of ideal attractiveness, beauty, shape, size, strength, and weight” (Croll, 537). Without being aware of it we are being told hundreds of times a day that we are not good enough, that we need to be something different in order to be liked, loved and successful. From our height to our weight to our facial features we are being told on a daily basis that we are wrong and that we are worthless.
“At 8 years old, girls believe that weight control is strongly associated with self-worth and view dieting as a means of improving self-worth” (Croll, 540), in the second grade our children are worried about how they look and how much they weigh. How do we expect these children to survive through puberty, the time when everything grows, without lasting negative effects? The cruel truth is that we can’t. “58% of girls want to lose weight” (Croll, 563) while “over one-third of boys think their current size is too small” (Croll, 537). The worries may be on the opposite sides of the spectrum, but the results are often the same. “Approximately 30% of boys and over 55% of girls report using unhealthy weight control methods” (Croll, 540). The goal for the boys is to drop fat and put on muscle while all the girls want is a slimmer waist and a bigger chest, both will do anything to get it. “Vomiting, laxatives, diet pills, cigarette smoking, and diuretics” (Croll, 540) are all used and abused in an effort to be counted as a member of the “Cult of Slimness” (Fiedler, 564).
But where did this all start? Where did our society’s obsession with slimming down or bulking up begin? Horrifyingly the answer is children’s toys. “Over 800 million Barbie dolls have been sold and annual sales amount to more than 1 billion dollars” (Croll, 538), that’s more than 1 billion dollars spent every year to show our children something they should never aspire to be. “If Barbie were real, her neck would be too long and thin to support the weight of her head, and her upper body proportions would make it difficult for her to walk upright. If Ken were real, his huge barrel chest and enormously thick neck would nearly preclude him from wearing a shirt” (Croll, 538). This is what we give our children to play with; this is what our children want to be when they grow up. A woman whose chest is so large that she cannot remain upright for long periods of time and a man who is unable to wear shirts, both unable to hold jobs or support a family. The only silver lining that I can find is that Barbie’s hips are likely too narrow for her to give birth so they would have no children to starve to death. This obsession with looking perfect and therefore being happy, what I call the ‘Barbie Syndrome’ , begins early in life and remains with us for a long time to come.
Models, women well past the childhood age of playing with dolls, are striving every day to live up to the ideas about a beautiful body given to them in their youth. Already the average model is “at least 30 pound lighter and 6 inches taller than the average female” (Croll, 538), but as of late pressures within the modeling industry are pushing these women to be thinner and look taller. At the 2006 New York fashion week models “appeared so gaunt and thin that their knees and elbows were larger than their concave thighs and pipe cleaner arms, and their bobbling heads looked as if a light breeze could detach them from their frail bodies” (Wilson, 542). This description paints a humorous picture of a very dangerous reality, that those who achieved everything that ‘Barbie Syndrome’ promised may now be expected to continue to push this ideal even further. Models are not alone in this; beauty queens have been swept up in the mad dash to make beauty an extreme instead of every day. This new found application for “less is more” can be seen in one of the most famous beauty pageants, Miss America. “Since 1970, nearly all of the winners have had BMIs below the healthy range, with some as low as 16.9, a BMI that would meet part of the diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa” (Croll, 539). With women so frail and thin that you can count their ribs as they walk by being placed on pedestals and worshiped by men and women everywhere, how can we expect society as a whole to keep health first when beauty is so widely revered?
It is no longer enough to reduce the size of the bad; we now must increase the size of the good. For women this generally means a reshaping of the nose and an enhancement of the breasts, two fairly simple and, now, common procedures. For men the goal is something that in the past was impossible, is now painful but possible. This painful goal is height, a whole three inches. To gain these much sought after inches these men pay to have both legs broken in two spots and then having “eleven arrow-sharp carbide pins [pushed in] until they bottom out against bone” (Kita, 548). For the next six months these pins are rotated to force the bone farther and farther apart, “work is out of the question. This is true not only during the distraction phase but also for three months or more after the frames come off and the new bone is hardening” (Kita, 548). Nine or more months out of work for three inches more of height and these men pay money for it. Why? Simply because we, as a society, have told them that they are too short to matter. The men who willingly take part in this painful and expensive process will cite a whole list of reasons why being three inches taller will make their lives better, but the short of it is that they are tired of being over looked and turned down for things they are qualified and prepared to do because they are not the right size.
There are those who would say that the focus on thinner men and women is a way of pushing youth to living healthier lifestyles. What these people seem to be missing is that the youth is never told how they got so thin or even what type of thin is healthy. All they are told is that thin will get you jobs, thin will make you happy, thin will fix your life. We never advise these impressionable young people on the difference between just being thin and being healthy. So the only goal they have is to be thin and being the head strong youth that we all once were they rush off with reckless abandon to find the thing that will make them thin and keep them that way.
Our society focus is on thin and not healthy. Until this has been changed so that healthy is the new focus, ‘Barbie Syndrome’ will continue to spread across the country and across generations like a twenty-first century plague. There is hope for the future, in 2006 “the organizers of Madrid fashion week...said they were banning models with a height-to-weight ratio below what the World Health Organization considered normal” (Wilson, 543). However a problem that began in the home must surely be fixed in the home. The greatest sign that we have not doomed our nation will be when Barbie and Ken could, if they were real, remain upright and wear a shirt.
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