A clever marketing ploy, or a sexist campaign stereotyping women?

That is the fierce debate on social media about Mattel’s introduction of its latest limited-edition Barbie doll and an accompanying promotional cover wrap of this year's Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

Mattel, long criticized for Barbie's humanly impossible figure, is using the #unapologetic hashtag on Twitter and other channels to promote the effort.

The annual swimsuit issue is a blockbuster publishing event featuring supermodels in skimpy bathing suits selling sun, surf and sex. Yet the toy company has couched its campaign in the rhetoric of women’s empowerment.

Women’s rights advocates are incensed by the use of a doll for girls on the swimsuit issue, which they see as objectifying women.



Pia Guerrero, co-founder of Adios Barbie, an advocacy organization for women's representation in the media, points out that advertisers have appropriated feminism to sell products since the 1960s, the inception of the second-wave feminist movement. Guerrero calls it "commodity feminism," a term Rashmee Kumar, writing in Rutgers University's Daily Targum newspaper, defined as "a strategy that takes feminist ideologies, depoliticizes them and rebrands them as capitalist ware.”

The Sports Illustrated limited-edition Barbie doll will be sold at Target.com. It will be featured on a Times Square billboard in New York, in a four-page advertorial in the magazine's 50th anniversary edition, which goes on sale Tuesday, and at the New York Toy Fair, starting Sunday. Barbie is the world’s No. 1 toy brand, worth an estimated $1.3 billion in sales revenues.

The Representation Project, an advocacy movement against gender stereotyping, denounced the campaign but also said it offered an opportunity to educate people about the dangerous implications of representing models with Photoshopped bodies as real.

“The fact that our most well-known mainstream moment for objectifying women (the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue) has actually taken an object as a representation of women, and put that on the magazine cover, is an acknowledgment that they turn women into toys, or things, to look at,” Imran Siddiquee, the group’s director of communications, told Al Jazeera.

“It actually makes our job easier,” he said.

One part of that job is fighting negative body images among girls and women. Nearly half of all adolescent girls have reported a desire to lose weight because of how magazine pictures generally portray women, and more than two-thirds of girls the same age said those images influence their idea of a perfect body shape, according to statistics from the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness in the U.S.

But these statistics don’t faze Mattel.

"As a legend herself, and under constant criticism about her body and how she looks, posing” on the cover “gives Barbie and her fellow legends an opportunity to own who they are, celebrate what they have done, and be #unapologetic," Mattel said Tuesday in a release.

For Sports Illustrated, a magazine owned by Time Inc., which routinely hands out a print issue of the swimsuit edition to all its employees — the cover apologetically placed face down on their desks — the #unapologetic ad campaign represents a departure from the implicit acknowledgment that the issue offends some of its readers. The publication did not respond to questions emailed by Al Jazeera.

Mattel’s corporate culture offers a different take. "Unapologetic" is a word that Mattel executives use internally, said Lisa McKnight, the company’s senior vice president. However, this is the first time the company is "engaging in a conversation publicly," she added.