Last week, Mattel unveiled curvy, petite, and tall versions of its classic Barbie doll with different skin colors and eye shapes. The new dolls were released in hopes of revitalizing traditional Barbie’s uniform look (white, blonde and thin) and anemic sales, and, despite not doing anything particularly new, they got a lot of press.

Over the last two decades a kind of limited enlightenment has crept into marketing efforts aimed at women and girls. The Body Shop launched the zaftig Ruby doll in 1997 as part of its “Love your body” campaign, which was prompted by that company’s plummeting US sales. Dove, a Unilever brand, launched its Campaign for Real Beauty in 2004. According to Dove, that campaign “started a global conversation about the need for a wider definition of beauty.” (Starting in the late 1990s, Dove’s beauty bar was described in ads as being “for the beauty that’s already there.”) In December 2015, the editor-in-chief of Women’s Health banished the phrase “bikini body” from the magazine’s cover.



Reading about the new curvy Barbie, I couldn’t help wondering why she is still thought of as the toy for girls. Why not encourage girls to play with a wider range of toys—including dolls, if they want to, but also chemistry sets and tools and building blocks? Even Legos—perfectly gender-neutral, in theory— have in recent years courted controversy due to silly, sexist marketing campaigns (in the early 90s, around age 9, I wrote a letter to the Lego company protesting their rollout of pink Legos for girls).

Marketing executives claim that women have more and better choices today than ever before, and that’s probably true. Many brands in the United States have caught up with social and cultural trends in the last twenty years. They have realized that “diversity and inclusion” and “women's empowerment” are not just corporate buzzwords; they are real concepts that can be mined to move product. Just listen to these companies’ language.

From Dove: “[Our] brand is rooted in listening to women.” (Swoon! Tell us more!) From Mattel: “Girls everywhere now have infinitely more ways to play out their stories and spark their imaginations through Barbie.”

Few would object to the stated messages of these campaigns and marketing strategies: bodies come in different sizes; real beauty is within; a woman’s body is “bikini-ready” when she puts a bikini on it. And they certainly expand consumer choices. But are they actually transforming the world for women and girls?

I spoke to one mother of a teenage girl who described Mattel’s new campaign as “a baby step in the right direction” but “not nearly enough.” She said she knows from her own experience and from her daughter that “girls will find ANY reason to be down on their faces and bodies, so the more variety we can put into dolls, the better!” It’s a fair point. As a recovering teenage girl myself, I remember how harsh I was about what I perceived as my many physical flaws, and how easily I transmitted that anxiety to my younger female cousins.