Barbie is one of the enduring figures of American pop
culture, and earlier this month, design VP Kim Culmone defended the
doll against a common criticism: that her impossible figure created
a standard that girls tried and failed to measure up to. "Barbie's body
was never designed to be realistic," said Culmone. Now, this stylized form
will be showing up in one of our other great fixtures: the Sports Illustrated
Swimsuit Issue. As The New York
Times reports, the 50th anniversary issue will feature Barbie in a
redesigned version of her original 1959 swimsuit. As a media tie-in effort, the
crossover goes deep. The doll will get a four-page advertorial spread shot by
longtime Sports Illustrated photographer Walter Iooss, Jr., and a
limited-edition "Sports Illustrated Barbie" will be sold separately.
The pairing is perfect almost to the point of parody:
if you wanted to find the two long-standing cultural touchstones most likely to
push buttons about body image and the presentation of women, you'd be
hard-pressed to do better. Mattel, at least, certainly knows it. Barbie's
latest ad campaign is summed up as "#unapologetic," a hashtag Mattel
probably chose because "#sorrynotsorry" was already taken. It's
usually paired with pictures of sparkly shoes and references to "legendary
women," and Mattel frames the Sports Illustrated spread as an explicit
rebuttal to criticism of both the doll and the magazine.
"As with Barbie, every year the Swimsuit edition
sparks conversations about women and body image, and Sports Illustrated stands
unapologetically behind this issue that women, in reality, love," a
spokesperson tells Ad Age.
"As a legend herself, and under criticism about her body and how she
looks, posing in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit gives Barbie and her fellow
legends an opportunity to own who they are, celebrate what they have done, and
be unapologetic," reads a statement to
Adweek. It's a judo attack on feminist critique: complaining that
Barbie or Sports Illustrated promotes unrealistic expectations of women becomes
body-policing a 55-year-old plastic doll.
But as Nicole Rodgers of Role/Reboot, which covers culture and gender
roles, points out, there's a particularly awkward subtext to this team-up.
Unrealistically photoshopped magazine covers have been alternately criticized
and mocked over the past few years, and Barbie ups the ante: she's an object
specifically built from the ground up to be impossibly beautiful, and now she's
sharing space with real-life women. "In this context, the choice of this
doll/human pairing seems to be moving in entirely the wrong direction,"
she tells The Verge. "It is quite literally a new level of female
objectification to pair real women with inanimate objects, as equivalents, at
least in terms of how readers are expected to appreciate and value their
beauty."
People have been debating whether Barbie is a good
role model for years, and this spread won't change minds on either side of the
issue. "My first thought is that this is pure outrage bait," says
Lisa Wade, Occidental College professor and founder of the blog Sociological.
And while Mattel is asking the question of whether pinups and fashion spreads
are empowering, it's eliding the question of why they're such a ubiquitous way
to celebrate female success. The problem isn't necessarily that Barbie (who has
roots in fashion dolls sold to adults) is posing in the Swimsuit Issue, or even
that the Swimsuit Issue exists. It's that things like the Swimsuit Issue are
where "legendary women" tend to end up. During the rest of the year,
women are noticeably
absent from Sports Illustrated covers, and while male athletes are
usually shot in ways that demonstrate athletic prowess, women who do appear
tend to have more passive poses and are less likely to be athletes.
In an interview (yes, an in-character interview) with People magazine,
Barbie praised other Swimsuit Issue models, women who "exemplify that you
can be both capable and captivating." Being captivating in a photo shoot —
which involves extensive bodily maintenance and a great deal of patience and
charisma — is its own kind of capability. Plenty of men possess it as well. But
the overwhelming majority of men aren't urged to do pinup shoots, and
successful male tech CEOs aren't generally asked to strike
come-hither poses in executive profiles. Barbie has had hundreds of
careers. Not all of them require looking good in a swimsuit.
