Every young girl is supposed to have a Barbie doll. My seven-year-old daughter has one somewhere in her midden of a room, but it was foisted on her rather than requested and if it's used for anything it's probably as a weapon in her regular battles with her brother.
Wind Barbie round with gaffer tape and she makes a perfectly acceptable cosh, I imagine. She may already have been used for that purpose for all I know. When the foam cutlasses and sawn-off lightsabers come out, I just look the other way and – in case there's a blood injury – plot the best way to A&E through the tea-time traffic.
Other parents of girls are less sanguine about Barbie, and makers Mattel have long been sniped at for the gender stereotypes the dolls reinforce as well as the very specific body image they project. Your typical Barbie is thin, white, blonde and tall – around 11 inches, or five foot nine in the real world. That is fairly lofty for a woman.
Of course Mattel aren't stupid. There have been African-American Barbies since the late 1960s and more recently the company introduced micro-lines such as Barbie Careers (all the obvious ones are included like rock star, film director and ice skater) and Barbie Collector (you can get Tris from the Divergent film series or a University of Kentucky cheerleader, depending on your preference).
Now they've also launched Barbie Fashionista and for the first time (apparently) Barbie gets to wear shoes other than towering high heels. "Gone are the pink stilettos and firmly in their place are hi-tops that wouldn't look out of place in a pop-up cat cafe in east London," cooed Marie Claire last week.
This is all well and good, of course, but when is the last time Barbie's boyfriend Ken was given a similar makeover? As far as I know he's still wandering around in safari suits and cerise slacks with hair like Fred from Scooby Doo. Does he know about smartphones and Twitter or does he still think Lol is something his tongue does when he's asked a difficult question. Like "What's a pop-up cat cafe" or "Can you tie your own shoelaces yet, Ken?"
And talking of shoes, what does he get to wear on his feet? A pair of wolf grey Nike Air Huaraches, perhaps, or those Grenson Archie platform brogues with the cool white sole? I mean it was 30 years before he was allowed to even wear an ear ring, so I don't suppose he has "sleeves" of tattoos or (perish the thought) pierced bits.
Well, it turns out the Barbie Fashionista range does have a Ken and no, there are no Nike Huaraches. Instead he has wine-coloured skinnies, a blue t-shirt with a worryingly deep V-neck, and shiny brown boots. He looks like a member of a boy band, though not one that anybody would remember if it came up in a pub quiz. On the plus side, he still looks pretty buff for 54 – buff enough to make an equally good cosh for a martially-minded seven-year-old. Still, in this age of equality I think Ken could do with a little tlc too.
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