Certain she could help, I gave her a call between classes one morning. The more I internally picked apart and criticized my body, the more I thought about Sophie and the line of beauty products she was pushing on social media. I had an unhealthy habit of comparing myself to other girls at that age, and the beauty standards I grew up with did nothing to help. I spent this time casually hooking up with guys, but found myself not always attracting the men I wish I could. To cover these, I did ridesharing during my time away from classes and made enough to cover both necessities and luxuries. Luckily for me, I was accepted to where I applied and was financially helped out enough by my parents to not have to worry about much more than books, food, and transportation. ![]() I was happy that she found direction so soon after graduation, and was still unsure of my fate regarding my application to my dream college. She excitedly informed me that the firm was called “SculptMe,” a beauty manufacturer that sold “rejuvenative care products.” The specific nature of their products varied by application, from anti-aging creams to what they referred to as “corporeal rearrangement regiments.” Sophie gushed about the last type of product most often, claiming it would take the health and beauty world by storm and change the image of the American woman as we understood it. We’ll call her Sophie, but no one else involved in the events that would follow deserves to have their names mentioned or changed. My life continued as routine until I was graduated from high school, at which point one of the friends from the group I grew up with secured what she claimed was a lucrative job at a trendy, youthful marketing firm. We grew out of playing with dolls and moved onto boys not long afterwards, but our minds were absolutely melded by years of careful corporate marketing and messaging. ![]() Nothing else, not until she began to resemble what a healthy, trim woman is supposed to look like.Įven so, this didn’t stop my friends and I from shaping our desired self-image around the idea of what Mattel sold us as how a girl should look we spent countless sleepovers painting each other’s toes and fingernails just like hers, and carefully did our makeup once our parents let us buy it. If a Barbie doll set were realistic, it would feature her in a wheelchair or a hospital bed. There’s not enough room in her stomach to fit her organs while allowing her to comfortably digest food, and her limbs don’t appear strong enough to allow her to engage in many of the activities her playsets allow her to do. If you’ve ever taken a careful look at one, it quickly becomes clear that a woman with her exact proportions would be grotesquely unhealthy not any of her video game, movie, or storybook portrayals, but the shape of the dolls themselves. From a tender age, every girl I knew growing up had an aesthetic vision of who they wanted to become for some of them, it was their favorite singer or actress, but for me - and most of my friends - the vision was directly taken from my Barbie dolls.
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