It's Barbie...but different
1) Everyone knows who Barbie is. She's a tall, beautiful, skinny blonde who get's whatever she wants and holds the heart of just about every six year old girl in the country. Barbie has always been an iconic symbol for girls around the world even though her looks aren't very realistic. Lately there has been a lot of problems concerning the appearance of Barbie and how it effects the perception of little girl's dreams for their own appearance. So what's the solution? Well Mattel (the creator of Barbie) has just released that Barbie will now be diverse. She is going to be coming out in all new sizes and skin colors to help her represent the diverse girls who play with her. People are still wondering why it even took Mattel so long to redesign Barbie to be more realistic. Are they just copying American Girl because their stocks have been falling?
2) In this article, I would have to say the most sympathetic person in the story are the girls who are buying Barbie. It's taken so long for a new more realistic Barbie to come out, that it almost feels like they were created because they had to make something different to keep their buyers, not because they realized that Barbie wasn't an achievable role model. When I was younger, I always wanted to be like Barbie, I wanted the nice clothes, the amazing 4 story house (with elevator), the hottest guy in town, and a rockin' bod. But because I have brown hair and I developed hips as a young kid, I never thought that image was achievable. So not only the dreams of the body and looks went away, the hopes of a wealthy future went right down the drain. I have honestly always been a little jealous of blonde hair, blue-eyed girls because they were what I idolized as a kid. They were the definition of beauty.
3) I'm not sure if I actually buy the fact that Mattel created the new curvy and diverse Barbie because they wanted to give little girls more accurate representations of their future. If they really wanted to do that and help girls be more comfortable with themselves, this would have happened a long time ago. Because let's face it, diversity isn't new. I think that Mattel created diverse Barbie to try and save their stocks and become more politically correct. I guess I just can't believe that they did this because they knew it was the right thing to do. I think they saw their money dwindling and they thought this would save their asses.
Madelineyoki "Collete-Barbie-and-Ken" 9/8/2009 via flickr
Public Domain Dedication License
He? She? Not Anymore
1) What is going wrong with this country? Trick question... a lot of things are going wrong in this country, but a big thing is it is just getting too politically correct. The Fed has decided that business's must now take the words 'he' and 'she' out of their notices so they can avoid the 'gender binary'. So basically, I guess it's now offensive to call a person 'he' or 'she' even though it describes their gender...but wait...you can't describe someone by their gender anymore. Why? Because who the hell knows. IT COULD OBVIOUSLY OFFEND SOMEONE!!!!!!!!!!!! The Washington Free Beacon states that changing gender identifiers to something like 'individual' or 'person' is going to cost job centers to spend at millions of dollars to update their posters and notices. This rule was released on Tuesday January 26th and it will be open for public comment until March 28th.
2) After reading this story, I feel sympathy for myself, other americans, and business owners. This is going to cost millions and even billions of dollars for businesses and tax payers to change posters and notices and applications. And for what? So a couple of people don't get offended by a text saying 'individual' instead of saying 'he or she'? That's absurd. If you're born a girl and you want to be identified as a boy, then fine, call yourself a boy, have others call you a boy, but don't be offended when you see gender identifying words such as 'man' or 'women' written down on a piece of paper. Find a bigger battle to fight. People are becoming too sensitive over the stupidest things and it is running our country.
3) I don't sympathize here with the government or the people who are getting offended enough to complain and make this a real thing. I just can't bring myself to understand how people have so much time on their hands that they have to find the most ridiculous thing to be offended about and complain to the government so they can write up some legislation to control us more. I just really don't understand how the words 'he' or 'she' can offend someone.
Has our political correctness gone too far?
No comments:
Post a Comment