Morning shows are the masters of two things: Jumping to conclusions, and whipping up a moral frenzy over absolutely nothing. Their big mum audience is perfect for generating coffee cup outrage all day long.
This morning Sunrise ‘family expert’ Dr Michael Carr-Gregg got stuck into a new fishnet flaunting Barbie doll. They labeled it Adult Barbie. ‘Totally amoral,’ ‘You can buy it in stores,’ ‘Outrageous,’ ‘B.M.I of 10 and unable to menstruate’ (yeah, I dunno either) — It’s ‘going too far’ Carr-Gregg screamed. What would the Pope think of it he asked!
Adult it was, but not for the reasons Sunrise or Carr-Gregg attacked it. The doll in question is a limited edition collectors item based on the superhero Black Canary. It’s part of a Barbie Famous Friends DC Comics series not sold in stores like Kmart or Toys’R'Us, but in specialty collector stores. Certainly not an item your kid is going to pickup on a shopping trip to Westfield.
Here’s what one online store selling it says:
‘Barbie Famous Friends Dc Black Canary Doll is an Urban-Collector pre-order. When Barbie visits Star City, she needn’t worry about crime when Dinah Lance, the Black Canary, is on the case! Mattel recreates the DC Comics’ heroine as a Barbie Famous Friends: Black Canary doll, which stands nearly 12′ tall. With her comics-authentic costume of black leather jacket, black fishnet stockings, and black thigh boots, Barbie’s friend Black Canary will keep the criminal element at bay!’
But Carr-Gregg says his barometer for these kinds of things is would you wear what the doll is wearing to work. Well that depends if I’m a superhero, Doc. They sometimes wear these things called costumes.
I don’t recall playing with many Batman figurines when I was kid where the caped crusader was dressed in a business shirt and tie.
Thankfully, one viewer emailed the show and pointed out that it was a collectors item intended for adults, not children. A couple of people also pointed it out on the Sunrise comments page.
Michael Carr-Gregg seems to have a grudge against the doll in general, but is that an excuse for sprouting off on Live tele without knowing or revealing all the facts?
1 comment
Rachel says:
Jul 21, 2008
I think what Carr-Greg fails to realise is that he himself is working for a magazine that constantly porjects a hard-to-obtain image.
Advertisements are splashed all over Girlfriend displaying skinny, attractive girls. What would an overweight girl think of that? She’d want to cry that she didn’t look like them, and she would torture herself to attain the goal. I’m not saying that about every girl, but I know women that when they were young girls they have done so.
Barbie has, in my opinion, not done even a hundredth of the damage that the media have done in the past 40 years with promoting skinny, “sexy” women, and splashing huge full colour images of some celebrities’ cellulite in magazines for the world to see.
People need to start being less concerned about what a toy, aimed at MATURE collectors -myself being one -
are supposedly doing to their children, and instead should be more concerned about what these “Bratz” dolls are doing to their children’s opinions on what is important in life.
In a particular advertisement for these Bratz dolls, the slogan “Don’t theorize, accesorize” reaches the ears of young girls. These same young girls then get that message, that it’s not important to be intelligent, as long as you are beautiful, and have all the right clothes, accesories, and other things that the media perpetuates about societal worth and admiration.
I would get more behind a petition to ban the bastardised versions of Barbie, such as the Bratz dolls, rather than Barbie herself. What about fashion shows that feature women with near-impossible figures? What about some big tabloid magazine gushing about how amazingly thin and “healthy looking” some celebrity looks after giving birth just 3 weeks previously?