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with her friends and collected a number of things that would make Barbie's life more interesting.
Even when she had long outgrown "playing Barbie" my daughter enjoyed the occasional collector Barbie doll. When she graduated high school her graduation gifts would not have been complete without the "Graduation Barbie", who held an ornament that showed the year of graduation.

When Mattel introduced the "fat" Barbie doll a few years ago, in an attempt to create a more realistic doll in response to years of criticism of Barbie's unrealistic dimensions, my daughter and I discussed the criticisms of the Barbie doll and the way so many people blamed the doll for everything from girl's self-esteem problems to unrealistic expectations for themselves. (The new Barbie dolls were not "fat". They just had slightly waists and more realistic proportions than their predecessors had. The new dolls, however, were often called, "fat" in jest.) My daughter rolled her eyes and said, "I always just saw it as a doll. I never thought I'd grow up to be like Barbie." Like my daughter, when I was a child and playing with Barbie dolls, I saw my dolls as nothing more than dolls. Even as a little girl, when I heard that Barbie song in the television commercial, "Barbie you're beautiful. You make me feel as if my Barbie doll is real...", I would think, "I don't really think she's beautiful, but she does make me feel as if she's real." By the end of my "Barbie-playing" days, however, I was actually quite aware that I was the one who made my Barbie doll seem real, because once I stopped "playing Barbie" the whole crowd of dolls just sat in my bedroom, doing nothing but being dolls.

Not long ago, I did some research for an article on the Barbie doll and the fact that she has become so maligned by so many. Studies of college students revealed that a lot of girls admitted to hating the Barbie doll because she was "so perfect" (and in some cases, because of all her frilly pink belongings). An unsettling percentage of participants of the study admitted to having "tortured" their Barbie dolls. One young woman said she and her sister had taken off all Barbie's clothes and buried her in the snow, so she'd "freeze" all Winter. When the snow and ice melted they brought the doll in and burned her. Other girls joined with their brothers to "torture" the dolls. I found it disturbing that Barbie's prettiness and her image as a model of femininity would bring about such hatred and cruelty in children. Such

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