Barbie Research Paper

Improved Essays
Jillian Wain
Mrs. Adams
Composition 101
9 November 2015

Critical Conversation
Think back to when you were a child, whether you are a boy or girl you more than likely owned a Barbie doll or a G.I Joe action figure. They were what society considered the perfect male and female physic with their unrealistic bodies. Now imagine you are walking down the street and see someone who looks like a walking, talking, life sized doll. It sounds crazy but not impossible because there is in fact a real life Barbie and Ken doll. Meet Valeria Lukyanova, Russia’s very own Barbie. The 28 year old claims that she has only had a breast augmentation t\and relies on the gym and makeup to help her achieve her Barbie look. Now this seems completely false because if you look at before and after shots of Lukyanova, there are very obvious differences that makeup alone cannot be solely responsible. Now onto the Ken
…show more content…
This refers to women who have enhanced their natural features to unnatural levels. Women like Lacey Wildd who has a $30,000 butt and her breasts weigh in at 42 lbs each. Lacey is one of millions of girls who take plastic surgery a few steps too far, many women have had their chests collapse due to their large breasts and there are some cases in which their spine can be broken or damaged due to the excessive weight on their chests. Women are pushing themselves past the breaking point just to have bigger, better implants. If plastic bodies and over-sized implants weren’t enough, there was a show in 2010 called Bridalplasty where blushing brides-to-be competed for chances to receive free plastic surgery and even a dream wedding. It sounds ostentatious but it was crazy what these women went through just to achieve their “perfect body” and it made some viewers have a disdain for anyone who chooses to get plastic

Related Documents

  • Decent Essays

    My Cuban Body Summary

    • 451 Words
    • 2 Pages

    In the article “My Cuban Body” by Carolina Hospital deals with the issue that young women have about their body. The main character in the story struggles with her own body image issue. When she was just 15 years old she was already developed into a women with curves and protrusions. Carolina was really self conscious about her body, instead of showing off and flaunting her body it made her feel shame and embarrassment.…

    • 451 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The ways that women will alter their body to be considered beautiful is heartbreaking. For example, eating disorders are very dangerous, but also a very common way to achieve the impossible body women are told is desireable. In The Body Politic, by Abra Chernik, she describes her struggles with an eating disorder. She describes how once she decided to lose weight, she would purge anytime that she felt she had eaten too much. She had dedicated her life to suppress her feminine curves and gaining any weight.…

    • 166 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The argument is Barbie either provokes a negative image to women or the image of a strong woman proving “girls can do anything” boys can do. How an individual perceives the Barbie determines the effect the doll has. This carries on to younger girls and their mindset on body image. The narrator in “Barbie-Q” follows under the empowering opinion. Proof of this is stated in the quote: “So what if we didn’t get our new Bendable Legs Barbie and Midge and Ken….and had to buy them on Maxwell Street, all water soaked and sooty.…

    • 2052 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Decent Essays

    When I was a kid I use to play with all kinds of toys, I played with legos,action figures,RCe cars,trucks,hot wheels,nerf guns,playdough,video games,water guns,Pokemon cards. I played with a lot of toys when I was little and they were boy toys none of them was girly at all. Even If I did choose a girly toy(which I didn’t)my dad would be like “that’s a girl toy” and point me in the direction where the boy toys are. I was a very outdoors person when I was little, spent a lot of time playing sports or just playing around with my friends. I didn’t have any girlfriends growing up, all I had was guy friends, so I was always around boys just doing boy things.…

    • 251 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Superior Essays

    All I saw were the toys, bright colors, and smiles. It was a wonderful place filled with everything I ever wanted, Barbie dolls, toy trucks, Legos and so on. As I continued to walk through, I was so excited that I was playing over in my head what toys I would play with first. The Barbie dolls first, then the playhouse, and build a house with Legos. And there were so many other kids to play along with too.…

    • 2204 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In Piercy’s poem Barbie Doll she first depicts the birth of a “girlchild” this child was presented with the usual girl like toys. Makeup and dolls. Piercy uses repetition and death like diction to display that women are set against standards that sometime have drastic effects. Piercy first uses the repeated phrase of “nose and legs” after the girl has grown up and was starting to go through puberty when a classmate commented on her “great big nose and fat legs”.…

    • 243 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Bridezillas Gender Roles

    • 1594 Words
    • 6 Pages

    New and Old Female Gender Roles and Their Impact in Bridezillas “This wedding is fucking over. I don’t got time for this shit. These people are just fucking crazy. We’re not having a fucking wedding.…

    • 1594 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Media Influence On Beauty

    • 779 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Everybody feels different about their bodies. Some may feel that there needs to be a change and others have learned to love their body. In the end what is the cause of body dissatisfaction? Is the image many see in the media something we want to see? Or is the media corrupt?…

    • 779 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The problem with girls comparing themselves to magazine models is that the bodies of the magazine models are edited using Photoshop, and are not naturally achievable, which means woman are trying to make their bodies look like something that doesn’t exist. To help them try to replicate the bodies of the models in advertisements, women turn to plastic surgery. In 2013, there were 15.1 million cosmetic procedures, with breast augmentations up 37% since 2000. Not only is the plastic industry rising, but the diet industry is now making four billion dollars annually. These statistics show that women are trying to change…

    • 1410 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    1950s Body Image History

    • 1400 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The 1950s was the Golden Age of Hollywood. The epitome of perfection in body figure in that era was Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Body image was more influenced by Hollywood and its celebrities than ever. Women were expected to have curves, slim waists, large breasts and an hourglass body shape. There was hip and rear padding to ‘round out’ figures and skinny women often took weight supplements to gain weight.…

    • 1400 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    (Prager 1). Instead of gathering the facts and showing whether or not Barbie’s appearance had any influence on the rising popularity of breast implants, Prager moved on. Her claim could be seen as credible if she had gathered statistics that showed that women who have had breast implant surgery owned Barbie dolls growing up or that they find Barbie’s out of proportion body type to be the epitome of womanly perfection. Seeing, however, that Prager disregarded the importance of the facts and did not…

    • 1331 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    She appeals to the emotions of her audience by displaying the drastic measures the contestants in the video took to look “perfect”. She states, “Blonder hair, flat chest, TV says bigger is better” and “South beach, sugar free, Vogue says thinner is better”, she shows that media is contradicting itself. Clips of girls dieting, throwing up their meals, taking diet pills, not eating, dyeing their hair to make it lighter in color, and having plastic surgery were flashed throughout the video. Adding this in her video proves that the effect of media is unpredictable, and that media is unsuitable to define the beauty of females. Instead of making society beautiful, media is making society ugly.…

    • 726 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Barbie Doll In the poem “Barbie Doll” written by Marge Piercy, the author addresses the stereotypical ideas of what society believes a woman should look like and how a woman should act. The title lends itself to help reinforce these themes of appearance and femininity by implying that women are to fashion themselves around the famous 1959 Mattel doll, Barbie, whose appearance some argue provides an unrealistic expectation for women to strive to achieve. Piercy goes on to show what happens to the unnamed main character of the poem, when faced with the challenge of conforming to these social norms of beauty and femininity.…

    • 877 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    • Is There Too Much Pressure on Girls to Have ‘Perfect’ Bodies? • Teenagers should not thrive to have a perfect body. The pressure on girls to have the “perfect body” is on the rise because of what society perceives and defines as “perfect”. For decades women have been put under the pressure of looking a certain way. This pressure primarily begins in the adolescence- teenage years of a girl’s life.…

    • 962 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is the product of a chain reaction that started with a global study that came out in September about women and beauty. The Real Truth About Beauty: A Global Report came to the conclusion “that the definition of beauty had become limiting and unattainable” and that “only 2% of women around the world would describe themselves as beautiful,” (yellow). In response to this global study Dove launched their Campaign for Real Beauty in September 2004 with what is known today as the “tick box” billboards, “which debuted in Canada and spread across the United States and United Kingdom,” (green). The billboards presented real women with appearances outside of the stereotypical norm with “two tick-box options next to them…

    • 1529 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays