Bitch Media - dolls en Why Black Dolls Matter <p style="padding-left: 60px;"><img src="" alt="" width="500" height="323" /></p> <p>As a little girl, Samantha Knowles didn't stop to consider why most of her dolls—her American Girl dolls, her Cabbage Patch Kids, her Barbie dolls—were black like her. But black dolls were not common in her upstate New York hometown, whose population remains overwhelmingly white. So when Knowles was 8 years old, one of her friends innocently asked "Why do you have black dolls?" And she didn't know quite what to say.</p> <p>But that question stuck with her, and in college, she started to consider how she would answer as an adult. Finally, as an undergraduate film student at Dartmouth, she connected with a small but passionate group of black doll enthusiasts who gather at black doll shows around the country, and for her senior honors thesis, Knowles, now 22, completed a documentary called "<a href="">Why Do You Have Black Dolls</a>?" to articulate the answer.</p> <p>What the Brooklyn filmmaker didn't know was that her mother felt so strongly that her daughters, Samantha and Jillian, have dolls of their own race, that she would stand in line at stores or make special orders&nbsp;to make sure they got one of the few black versions. "My parents made sure to get us a lot of black dolls in a wide variety of hues and shapes," Samantha Knowles says. "We didn't have exclusively black dolls, but we had mostly black dolls. After I started working on the film, I had a lot of conversations with my mom, and she would say, 'Oh, you don't know what I had to go through to get some of those dolls!'"</p> <p>Many black doll enthusiasts, like&nbsp;<a href="">Debbie Behan Garrett</a>, the author of "Black Dolls: A Comprehensive Guide to Celebrating, Collecting, and Experiencing the Passion," feels the same way as Knowles' mother.</p> <p>"I'm emphatic about a black child having a doll that reflects who she is," Garrett says. "When a young child is playing with a doll, she is mimicking being a mother, and in her young, impressionable years, I want that child to understand that there's nothing wrong with being black. If black children are force-fed that white is better, or if that's all that they are exposed to, then they might start to think, 'What is wrong with me?'"</p> <p>"Why Do You Have Black Dolls?" debuted in October at the&nbsp;<a href="">Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival</a>&nbsp;in New York City, where it won the Reel Sisters Spirit Award. In the film, doll maker Debra Wright says when little girls see her dolls, they'll exclaim happily, "Look at her hair! It's just like mine."</p> <p>Research shows this bias about dolls is real. In 1939 and 1940, black psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted a study wherein they presented black children with two dolls—almost identical, except one was white with blond hair and one was brown with black hair. The researchers asked the kids which doll was nice, which doll was pretty, which doll was smart, which doll would they rather play with, etc., and the kids overwhelmingly chose the white doll as the one with positive attributes. When student filmmaker&nbsp;<a href=";task=view&amp;id=10&amp;Itemid=88888904">Kiri Davis</a>&nbsp;conducted a similar doll study in 2005 and when&nbsp;<a href="">CNN</a>&nbsp;asked black children about cartoons with varying skin colors in 2010, they both got almost identical results. But a 2009 replica of the original doll survey by ABC's "<a href="">Good Morning America</a>" came up with more black children favoring black dolls.&nbsp;</p> <p>The film interviews one woman named Debra Britt, who was the only black girl at her school in 1950s Dorchester, Massachusetts, and grew up carrying the vinyl white Baby Bye-Lo doll. Then, Britt's grandmother stepped in and started dip-dying store-bought dolls brown for her granddaughter, and she also taught Britt how to make African wrap dolls from a gourd, an apple, and vines. &nbsp;"My grandmother kept saying, 'You don't know where you're coming from and you need to.'" Britt says. "And so she made this African wrap doll and gave me the history." Today, Britt runs the National Black Doll Museum.</p> <p>Dolls—handmade to look like the children who love them or the deities their parents worshipped—have been found all over the world, in all cultures, all races, since ancient times. In early America, everyone, including slaves, made their own dolls. On plantations in the South, slaves would have their children put a pebble in their dolls to represent each fear or worry and relieve them of the burdens.&nbsp;</p> <p>The first manufactured dolls in the mid-1800s were produced in&nbsp;<a href="">Germany</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="">France</a>, countries that dominated the&nbsp;<a href="">porcelain</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="">bisque</a>&nbsp;doll industry in the Western world for decades. Even early American dolls would have heads and hands produced in Germany. Unsurprisingly, the aristocratic white European ideal of beauty monopolized the doll world, while the occasional black dolls portrayed the "exotic beauty" of dancers or opera characters. Even after slaves were freed in the United States the 1860s, most black families could not afford European porcelain dolls, which were luxury items only available to the very wealthy.</p> <p>The objects featuring racist caricatures that we now call "blackamore" or &nbsp;"black Americana" grew out of post-Civil War black-face minstrel shows where African Americans were depicted as watermelon-chomping simpletons with exaggerated features like googly eyes and big red-lipped grins. These caricatures carried over to&nbsp;children's books like the British "Golliwogg" series featuring black-face humanoids, which were also made into rag dolls. &nbsp;The Nancy Ann Storybook Doll Company made characters from "Uncle Tom's Cabin," while Reliable Doll Company was one of many that produced a Topsy, characterized by three knots of hair.</p> <p>But even in the 1910s, early civil rights activists like Marcus Garvey and R.H. Boyd were pushing back against these stereotypes. Boyd started his National Negro Doll Company in 1911, importing elegant black porcelain dolls from European dollmakers and selling them in the United States before his firm went out of business in 1915.</p> <p>The end of World War II in 1945 brought about a boom in U.S. manufacturing featuring new plastics developed during the war. Suddenly,&nbsp;<a href="">vinyl</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="">hard plastic</a>&nbsp;dolls were cheap and easy to churn out of the factory. But the mass-production of plastic dolls was so streamlined that, for manufacturers, making special molds of dolls with African American features seemed like an unnecessary cost. That's why most of the vinyl and hard plastic dolls were white. The black dolls that were sold by companies like Horsman or&nbsp;<a href="">Terri Lee</a>&nbsp;were most often white dolls painted brown or dipped in brown dye. "You couldn't look at the doll and classify it as a true representation of a black person," says Garrett. "Because it was just a brown counterpart of the white doll."</p> <p>The one exception to the white-dolls-painted-brown rule in the 1950s was the Sara Lee doll, which was created by a white woman named Sara Lee Creech, who took 500 photographs of black children to get her doll's face just right.&nbsp;<a href="">Ideal Toy Company</a>&nbsp;sold her vinyl doll between 1951 and 1953, but these are next to impossible to find now.</p> <p>The most famous vinyl doll,&nbsp;<a href="">Barbie</a>, who sashayed onto the world stage in 1959, got a cousin named Francie in 1966, Britt explains. In 1967, Mattel issued a Francie doll as a black woman, but she didn't sell well. In 1968, Mattel produced another black fashion doll, Christie, probably made from an altered mold of Barbie's less-glamorous white friend, Midge, who was accepted as Barbie's pal. In 1969, Mattel introduced Julia, inspired by the TV show, "Julia," in which Diahann Carroll played a widowed black nurse. It wasn't until 1979 that Mattel felt assured enough to issue an official Barbie with black skin.</p> <p>Since the 1990s, options for parents who want to buy their children black dolls have been woefully slim. There have been some noble efforts, including the Big Beautiful Dolls, the first full-figured fashion dolls, created by Georgette Taylor and Audrey Bell in 1999; black designer Byron Lars' African American Barbies for the Barbie Collector Series from 1997-2010; and&nbsp;<a href="">Stacey McBride-Irby</a>'s "So In Style (S.I.S.)" line for Mattel, launched in 2009. McBride-Irby went on to launch&nbsp;<a href="">The One World Doll Project</a>, multicultural fashion and play dolls. As far back as 2003, Salome Yilma led the founding of&nbsp;<a href="">EthiDolls,</a>&nbsp;which are made in the images of historical African women leaders and come with a true-to-life storybook.&nbsp;</p> <p>The Black Doll Museum employs dolls to educate visitors about both the painful and inspirational moments in black American history, which hold lessons for Americans of any race. The message is similar to that of "Why Do You Have Black Dolls?": Dolls tell us who we are.&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><em>Photo: Three Baby Nancys, the first doll produced by Shindana Toy Company, dedicated to making ethnically correct black dolls, in 1968. Photo by Debbie Behan Garrett.</em></p> <p><em>A <a href="" target="_self">longer version of this article originally appeared on </a></em><a href="" target="_self">Collector's Weekly</a><em>. Read the full version there! </em>&nbsp;</p> African-American dolls history Race toys Social Commentary Tue, 05 Mar 2013 21:08:59 +0000 Lisa Hix 21714 at Douchebag Decree: Monster High <p><img src="" alt="douchedecree" width="494" height="199" /></p> <p>Sometimes, products are all the more disappointing when they sounded pretty cool at first.</p> <p>Case in point: Mattel's blockbuster franchise, Monster High. This series of dolls is centered around the children (mostly daughters) of werewolves, mummies and other classic beasties of horror tales. When <a title="The New York Times: As Girls Flock to Comic-Con, Marketers Woo Them" href="">speaking about</a> the franchise to the <em>New York Times</em>, Tim Kilpin of Mattel said, "Who doesn't feel like a freak in high school? It started with that universal truth." Of course, high schoolers aren't Mattel's target market; in fact, most Monster High products are officially listed as <a title="Mattel: Buy Monster High Dolls, Filter Age 6-8" href=";f=PAD%2FAge%2F6-8">"Age 6-8."</a> Still, dolls that promote not buying into superficial mainstream standards would be neat, right?</p> <p>Yeah, they would. Too bad that's not what's happening here.</p> <p><img src="" alt="monster high dolls, via api.ning" width="500" height="273" /></p> <p><em>Look again: They're not Bratz. </em>(<a href="*2kmZqMlOqvktxZI7KnX-k0tuEW4bJe-P6lpixbbw0N2WsMqT1ZDITd/035.JPG">picture source</a>)</p> <p>Well, what do you know? Hypersexualized, heavily made-up dolls with über-Barbie proportions. Not only are their waists much narrower than their heads; they're close to the size of one of their calves. The ladies are homogeneous in height, shorter than their few male counterparts so as not to be intimidating. The designated nerd, zombie Ghoulia (third from the right), is the only female to come with a pair of pants; mummy Cleo de Nile (second from right) appears to at first glance but is actually clad in strips of fabric prone to gaps and <a title="Monster High profile: Cleo de Nile" href="">wink-wink</a> wardrobe malfunctions. (She also supplies those of us who remember <em><a title="Clone High: Characters (Their Cleopatra is third from the bottom.)" href="">Clone High</a> </em>with a serious case of déjà vu.)</p> <p>These are the quintessential high school outcasts? Most of the characters, from the personae established by the ridiculous <a title="Monster High home" href="">website</a>, TV special, <a title="YouTube profile: MonsterHigh" href="">webisodes</a> and tie-in books by <em>The Clique </em>author Lisi Harrison, are popular cheerleaders. Monster High's tagline is "Freaky just got fabulous," which manages to be at once uncomfortably suggestive, insulting, and materialistic. "Fabulous" denotes fashion, and even if "freaky" is only supposed to signify that some of the characters are pseudo-weirdos, this sends the message that unusual girls are only interesting if they are fashionable. While some would be quick to say that clothing is the point of dolls in the first place, I'd argue that the best use of such figurines is as a springboard for imagination. What were Barbies, Polly Pockets, or even G.I. Joes ever for if not do-it-yourself storytelling?</p> <p><img src="" alt="cottonmonster, via TreeHugger" width="432" height="350" /></p> <p><em>My dolls could've had plenty of adventures with <a title="TreeHugger: Cotton Monsters" href="">THIS monster</a>.</em></p> <p>While the copious unnecessary branches of Monster High differ, all seem to feature <a title="Monster High profile: Frankie Stein" href="">Frankie Stein</a> as the new girl at school. Perhaps this is where the dubious outcast claim is based, because, y'know: she's nervous, insecure and just starting to make friends. She's also fifteen <em>days</em> old.</p> <p>In fact, there's a lot of weirdness happening when it comes to age. While I get what Mattel was going for (vampires are immortal, blah blah blah) I can't help but cringe when, say, a sixteen-year-old <a title="Monster High profile: Deuce Gorgon" href="">son of Medusa</a> is dating a six-thousand-year-old. Likewise, while I personally like a good faux-goth plaid skirt, sexifying a creature who is basically an infant is <a title="Bitch: Douchebag Decree: geoGirl's Anti-Aging Makeup for Preteens" href="/post/douchebag-decree-geogirl">well-documented</a> to be a <a title="Bitch: Heels for babes!" href="/post/heels-for-babes">bad idea</a>. Reducing both old and young females to a shallow realm of teenagedom is, um, not ideal.</p> <p>And <em>what </em>a shallow realm it is. In between proclaiming their passions for "checking out the bro's [sic]," "flirting with the boys!" and "the most creeporific guy" (that last courtesy of young Frankie Stein), the characters' <a title="Monster High: Students" href="">Facebook-esque online profiles</a> further work the emphasis on appearance. Check out these gems, from vampire Draculaura and werewolf Clawdeen respectively:</p> <blockquote><p>Freaky Flaw: Since I can't see my reflection in a mirror, I have to leave the house not knowing if my clothes and makeup are just right. Of course after 1,599 years of practice I've gotten pretty good at it.</p></blockquote> <blockquote><p>Freaky Flaw: My hair is worthy of a shampoo commercial and that's just what grows on my legs. Plucking and shaving is definitely a full time job but that's a small price to pay for being scarily fabulous.</p></blockquote> <p>Oh, dear. What better way to spend days or years than laboring to cram oneself into the narrow body standard du jour? Lisa Lusero's piece in <a title="Revolutionary Readings home" href=""><em>Revolutionary Voices</em></a>, in which a little boy asks why she has hair on her legs and she retorts that it grows there, comes to mind. Not that folks of any age <em>should </em>be worrying about their body hair, but pushing big beauty companies' agenda onto (pre-)pre-pubescents is rather awful. There is nothing "freaky" about hairy legs, nor do they nix fabulousness, if that matters to you. So, 6-8 year olds: Have you learned to hate your bodies yet?</p> <p>No? Don't worry, the <em>Monster High</em> web series has you covered with this charmer:</p> <p><object width="640" height="390"> <param name="movie" value=";hl=en_US&amp;rel=0" /> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src=";hl=en_US&amp;rel=0" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="390"> </embed></object></p> <p><em>Warning: Contains body shame and terrible music.</em></p> <p>On the less-sucky side, said profiles include a space for "Favorite School Subject," so these high school students actually do occasionally mention, y'know, school. While most of their answers are based in the monster gimmick (eg. Cleo likes geometry because shapes=pyramids=Egypt, geddit?) they are legitimate subjects, so that's something. Then there's the fact that the main players aren't all coded as white, as I feared when I first saw the sherbet-y skin of Draculaura and Lagoona Blue. Both Cleo de Nile and Clawdeen Wolf appear to be women of color.</p> <p>Unfortunately, the two of them are written as the most vicious in the group. They also <a title="YouTube video: Monster High(TM) - Clawditions" href=";feature=channel_video_title">hate each other</a>.</p> <p>So, what's more disheartening: the failure of a pretty good premise or the fact that it's hardly even surprising anymore? After <a title="Bitch: Under the knife: A thinner, sexier Strawberry Shortcake and Care Bears" href="/post/under-the-knife-a-thinner-sexier-strawberry-shortcake-and-care-bears">the epic slimming down</a> of Strawberry Shortcake, Angelina Ballerina and, yes, even the Care Bears (don't get me started), absurdly bodied, appearance-obsessed monster offspring are disappointing but almost par for the <a title="Bitch: Mad World: Toy Ads and Learning Gender" href="/post/mad-world-toy-ads-and-learning-gender">Toys R Us course</a>. And I don't know about you, but I find that pretty scary.</p> dolls Douchebag Decree mattel sexualization teenage girlhood toys Social Commentary Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:28:43 +0000 Deb Jannerson 9841 at Girls Just Wanna Play With Dolls <p>Mattel has recently released Barbie versions of Joan Jett, Cyndi Lauper and Debbie Harry as part of its "Ladies of the 80s" series. Stare into the empty plasticized eyes of your youth!!</p> <p><center><img src="" /><br /> <img src="" /></center></p> <p>I'd rather see a child playing with a Joan Jett doll than Malibu Beach Barbie or a Bratz, but the dolls still look pretty much like your everyday Barbie (with a few alterations for individual features) gussied up in rock star costumes. They're marketed as collector's items, but they're only $35 – more expensive than a regular Barbie, but still affordable enough to be actual playthings for actual children. Rock stars being marketed as superhuman idols is standard, but it is strange that such openly sexual and endlessly sexualized music icons are being immortalized in plastic, anatomically incorrect form. But if a Joan Jett doll can lead a little girl to Joan Jett's music, attitudes and activism, then maybe it's not such a bad idea. </p> <p><center><img src="" /></center><br /> <center><i>Barbie was never this badass.</i></center></p> <p>What do you think? Does the "Ladies of the 80s" series elevate Mattel, or does it degrade the women it portrays? And is it wrong that I kind of want one?</p> barbies cyndi lauper debbie harry dolls joan jett mattel DigiBitch Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:12:14 +0000 Sara Reihani 2550 at American Girl debuts new marketing strategy....err, doll. <p>When I saw the Jezebel headline <a href="">"The Newest American Girl Doll Has A Secret"</a> I couldn't help but click through. </p> <p><center><img src="/sites/default/files/Chrissapanionsbanner.jpg" width="477" height="184" alt="Chrissapanionsbanner.jpg" /></center></p> <p>It turns out the Gwen Thompson, a "companion" doll to Girl-of-the-Year doll <a href="">Chrissa,</a> is the first American Girl Doll to be living in a homeless shelter. From her <a href="">American Girl</a> Wiki page: </p> <blockquote><p>Gwen and her mother Janine fell on hard times when her father lost his job; they later lost the house as they were unable to keep up payments. Soon after, Gwen's father left them and they became homeless...</p></blockquote> <p>Job loss? Homeownership kaput? Sounds like what a sizeable chunk of America experienced this past year! Looks like American Girl is very up to date with contemporary issues that girls (and their parents) can relate to, or at least recognize (see also: <a href="">Chrissa vs. the cyber-bullies!</a>). Color me cynical, but I can't help but feel this is just a marketing strategy by the Mattel-owned company. </p> <p>In their unending march towards every American girl owning an American Girl Doll that has hobbies, clothes, friends, not to mention <a href="">precise physical features</a> like their owner, I think they're hopping on the economic downturn bandwagon. Irony aside (<a href="">$95 for the low-income Gwen and her book</a>--Add Doll Hairbrush for $7) Gwen's story is timely enough that I can't help but think it's supposed to appeal to girls who might be feeling the recession at home. </p> <p><center><img src="" /></center></p> <p>I don't think I'm completely alone in my suspicions, both Anne Elizabeth Moore (who devoted a chapter to the AG Franchise in her excellent marketing and consumerism critique <a href=""><i>Unmarketable</i></a>) and <i>New York Times </i>TV critic <a href="">Anita Gates</a> saw connections between the marketing of <a href="">Molly McIntire,</a> whose father is away at the WWII front, and a target audience of young girls whose own fathers may be serving in Iraq. <a href="">One <i>Wall Street Journal</i></a> reader responded to a 2006 article about the AG Franchise <a href="">"The Selling of Nicki: Overscheduled Skier With a Cute Dog" by Christina Binkley</a> wrote</p> <blockquote><p>I pondered the article "The Selling of Nicki" (page one, Dec. 30), which highlighted the brainstorming and focus groups employed by the American Girl company to design and create the Girl of the Year series of dolls, and was left feeling initially uneasy. As the mother of two young girls, my husband and I have purchased many American Girl character dolls and Bitty Babies because they are high quality, have a historical component and support creative and imaginative play. Frankly, I never considered the calculated marketing tactics behind the expanding line of dolls.</p> <p>Later, as I drove my daughter and her friend, both happily clutching their new matching Kaya dolls, I stopped to pick up the mail, handed the new American Girls catalog back to the girls and was stunned to hear them both parrot, almost verbatim, the comments of the focus groups regarding Nicki, the Girl of the Year. Juxtaposed against the article I'd read just hours earlier, I'm not certain whether to be impressed or terrified. Perhaps both would be wise.</p></blockquote> <p>And even though the <i>New York Post's</i><a href=""> Andrea Preyser</a> is a bit vitriolic on the new Gwen doll ("What message is being sent with Gwen? For starters, men are bad. Fathers abandon women without cause. She's also telling me that women are helpless."), she does tap into some of the very suspicious "cult-like" environment surrounding the AG franchise. ("I asked to see Gwen, and the saleswoman persisted in referring to the inanimate object as 'she'.") The American Girl Doll Stores littered over America feature restaurants, hair salons, and movie theaters for girls to visit with their dolls, all in addition to abundance of accessories you can buy for your doll. (Personal to Preyser: your hollow threat to support Barbie over the pinko Gwen Thompson--"I'll stick with the thin girl. She never attempted to politically indoctrinate me"--rings hollow since both are owned by Mattel). </p> <p>I don't want to paint American Girls completely as an evil corporation (though they did pull in $463 million last year). I read and owned the books (which Moore calls "gateway purchases to the engaging, miniature world inhabited by the dolls"), and felt kindred spirits with the blond-haired Scandinavian prairie-settler Kirsten (Hey, that's like my name! Hey, that's like my hair color! Hey, that's a very general and idealized American past I can get behind as a kindergartner!). Pricetag aside, they're a much more wholesome (and educational you could argue) alternative to Barbie and Bratz. <a href-"">Rebecca Rubin, </a>the newest historical American Girl Doll and its <a href="">second</a> Jewish character seems to be well-received for the most part. </p> <p>But Gwen's introduction brings up other points. <a href="">Chrissa</a> is the first "Girl of the Year" to have companion friends (AG nomenclature lesson: "They are also not referred to as best friends but simply Chrissa's friends. This could be due to the fact that Chrissa has two companions and both feature with equal prominence in her books.") Does the fact that homeless-shelter Gwen and <a href="">"at least part South Asian"</a> Sonali are sidekicks rather than Girl-of-the-Year themselves contribute to the other-ing and tokenizing of disenfranchised or non-white young girls? Or is it good that they're getting the American Girl Doll treatment at all? </p> <p><center><img src="" /><br /> <i>Can't we just be friends? Chrissa can only come with one friend at a time!</i></center></p> <p>Maybe after reading through the books, <a href="">watching the movie,</a> and anticipating 2010's Girl of the Year, I'll have some answers. </p> American Girl Anne Elizabeth Moore doll dolls homeless marketing recession Social Commentary Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:41:52 +0000 Kjerstin Johnson 2258 at