So over on Roosh Valizadeh’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Return of Kings blog a gentleman named Blair Naso has penned a weird paean to Barbie (the doll, not the Nazi war criminal), suggesting that she is a perfect “inspiration” for girls today.
I suppose it isn’t all that shocking that the kind of men who frequent Return of Kings would be fond of an imaginary woman who doesn’t talk and can’t defend herself.
Naso starts off his post by ridiculing feminists for criticizing Barbie. In his mind, they’re just jealous:
For feminists, what bothers them is that Barbie is beautiful. Feminism is an ugly ideology that overtly seeks to glorify both inner and outer ugliness. …To them, Barbie represents a vile standard of beauty.
In Naso’s mind, Barbie is both a Nietzschean Übermensch (no, really) and the embodiment of a Greek goddess.
Barbie is an over-man to little girls. She transcends reality and inspires admiration. Like Theseus for the ancients and Batman for today’s boys, Barbie goes beyond what a normal person can do. Barbie is not a standard; she is an ideal. She inspires aspiration, not imitation. Barbie is the modern Aphrodite.
Here’s a famous statue of Aphrodite from back in the day. Despite being, you know, a literal goddess, her proportions are a bit more human than Barbie’s.
Naso really seems to have a thing for Barbie:
If characters like Indiana Jones are the apex of masculinity, then Barbie is the same for femininity. She is beautiful, intelligent, domestic, social, gorgeous, hard-working, wealthy, attractive, outgoing, healthy, confident, pretty, talented, lovely, has great tits and hair, accomplished, alluring, charming, elegant, unblemished, graceful, and committed to only one man.
Apparently Naso, like Barbie herself, hasn’t caught on to the blindingly obvious fact that Ken is gay. Also, what about Allan, Brad, Curtis, Todd, Steven, Darren, Derek, Kurt and Ryan? Everyone knows that Barbie is riding the smooth flat crotch area carousel.
As Naso sees it, it’s men, not women, who are the real victims of our “fascist beauty standards.”
Men have to grow muscle, which is a journey that is painful, expensive, and filled with misinformation. And if he’s under six feet tall, his chances with women are drastically cut no matter what his other characteristics.
Women on the other hand have to buy an exercise video and keep their hair long. I suppose make-up can be time-consuming, but fashion is not nearly as expensive as women like to claim.
And if some women develop eating disorders trying to live up to the beauty ideal, well, they have no one but their own inferior female selves to blame.
It would be both mentally and physically unhealthy for a man to obsess about achieving the impossible body of Beowulf. So if Barbie and Aphrodite inspire women to turn to unhealthy practices (like eating disorders or fad diets) in a way that He-man doesn’t to men, then what does that say about women?
Either it is a lie that strict beauty standards cause women to obsess at the risk of their own health, or it is manifest that women are mentally and emotionally inferior to men.
Anyone who really wants to be a hottie needs to work for it.
Both anorexia and fat pride are shortcut cheats to beauty. Mature adults achieve what they want through hard work.
Naso does acknowledge that beauty standards are more “stringent” today. In a spectacularly ludicrous leap of logic — the intellectual equivalent of Evel Knievel’s famously failed jump over the Snake River canyon — he blames this on … ugly women.
My guess why beauty standards are a little more demanding today than they were 100 years ago is because today women are ugly. They are overweight, they have bad hair, they lack social grace, and they think hideous products are fashionable by sole virtue of their popularity. Women and little girls know this instinctually and over-correct through their fantasies.
Perhaps little girls love Barbie and Ariel so much because they see how frumpy mommy and their teachers at school are.
And it is the evil feminists who are keeping these little girls from living out their over-corrected fantasies dreams.
Women just want to be beautiful and have a beautiful life. Barbie gives them the inspiration to achieve their dreams. Then feminism sweeps along and tells them to remain stagnant.
In case anyone here needs inspiration, this song should help.
Believe it or not, the tapeworm “diet” is making a comeback, right in the good ol’ US of A.
I know. I’m as disgusted as you are.
Which MRA site suits this best:
[blockquote]It is a sad truth that pampered women are almost worthless for all the great ends in human life. they have but little force of character; they have still less power of moral will, and quite as little physical energy. They live for no great purpose in life, they accomplish no worthy ends; they are only doll forms … to be dressed and fed to order. They dress nobody; they feed nobody, and save nobody. They write no books; they set no rich examples of virtue and womanly life. … Whoever heard of a fashionable woman’s exhibiting any power of mind for which it became eminent? [/blockquote]
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article128761086
bugger blockquotes
I want Japanese Ken. That is awesome.
I’ll give him ‘filled with misinformation’, but painful and expensive? Doesn’t have to be either of those. Not sure why it would be. I strength train regularly and don’t find it painful or expensive; delayed onset muscle soreness can be, well, sore but it’s not a big deal. If you don’t practice good form you can injure yourself, but that holds true for most physical activities, so. Expensive? You can build good strength and muscle with bodyweight training, as long as you keep adding resistance (so to speak) – muscle-ups and pistol squats are HARD.
I had tons of Barbies. Also had a Sindy doll, and a Farrah Fawcett doll (who was always the villain in my Barbie escapades)
http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/default/files/styles/image_content_width/hash/18/94/1894aea5b3b1f5c75ad0bc18566dd1de.JPG?itok=IByjvixm
Also had a Barbie camper, which they used for horrible things like kidnapping Ken:
Farrah refused to embed. See… villain.
http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/default/files/styles/image_content_width_large/hash/e1/d9/e1d94e7ba6d205afab19bcbd8b42bafd.JPG?itok=91zRlKBX
Rats. Foiled again! FARAAAAAAAAAH
As a Japanese American, I say that Ken ain’t Japanese. It’s more like a Cosplay Ken dressed up as a hybrid of Sephiroth and Fire Lord Ozai.
Long Hair Is Feminine. (I will not give the TV Tropes link. You’re welcome.)
@ Tracy: It’s for the better that Farrah won’t embed. It’s kind of nightmare fuel.
Of course the link hasn’t been made to Barbie’s progenitor the Build Lilli doll.
https://ameripics.wordpress.com/2014/12/12/the-dark-side-of-barbie-2/
Yes, a West German fetish doll whith a collection of lingerie based on a rather risque comic in Bild-Zeitung.
To quote the wikipedia article “She was originally marketed to adults in bars and tobacco shops as a joke or gag gift. Many parents considered her not appropriate for children…A German brochure from the 1950s states that Lilli was ‘always discreet,’ and that her wardrobe made her ‘the star of every bar.’ ”
Lilli sounds somewhat like a MRAs worst nightmare:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild_Lilli_doll#The_cartoon
Personally my role model is #Feministhackerbarbie
Long hair is feminine:
http://i.imgur.com/chQ3FMb.jpg
Well naturally they like dollies better than actual women. Dolls do what they want; they can do anything to dolls without anyone at all complaining.
Now you’ve made me remember David K. Meller. *Shudder* Nazi doll fetishist who was pissed that human women had more personality and willpower than his dolls AND WOULD TELL YOU SO AT LENGTH.
Oh, I read those comments. Good old Meller. Yikes.
Point is, it should surprise no one these guys like objects better than women. They view women as objects anyway.
BritterSweet | February 19, 2015 at 10:09 pm
I thought that too. It felt way too…exaggerated.
All of the Barbies in that collection look awfully pale. Especially the Arabic Barbies.
Katz:
Yeah, that entire thing felt really nitpicky overall.
I agree that Lamilly can be a little thicker, and the stickers are an excellent idea, but I agree that it is weird that you can just peel the stickers off. On the other hand, it’d be impossible to make one doll with every imperfection on it. The stickers are a way for a girl (or grown woman like myself who still enjoys toys) to customize her doll so it looks more like her. I have stretchmarks and splotchy skin, and a scar here and there, but they’re not guaranteed to be in the same spots as other people’s, so the stickers are nice to help me customize Lamilly for me.
I’m glad the article did bring up that Lamilly will be expanding and adding more diversity later.
Meanwhile, I still have Deadpool to help me through my self-loathing about my body.
I’m beginning to think they just write this stuff to piss of feminists. I wonder if they really do believe this stuff or if it has become a game to see who can come up with the most ridiculous theory to piss feminists off with.
It’s true that removing the stickers isn’t true to life…but on the other hand, there’s no feasible way to customize the doll except with stickers, and permanent stickers wouldn’t be good toy design (because she’d end up with every single sticker stuck to her).
Katz
Yeah, that’s true. I also did mention it’s not feasible to have the scars where the end user of the doll can connect with it most. :3
I bless my mother’s practicality so much sometimes. I mostly had Sasha Dolls (http://www.sashadoll.com/) growing up and my niece is enjoying them now because they’re beautifully sturdy in addition to being realistically people-like. I mean, they’re low on boobage, so I was able to sew my own clothes for them, and they have nice styleable hair. I had a few Barbies, which were all gifts, but I gave up on them pretty quickly because they’re enormously hard to dress and they’re not a good size for anything: they can’t sit down well, they can’t stand up on their own – they did not fit well into any of my childhood games.
Ah yes… the idea that ED patients are shallow and just thinking about their looks.
No. Just… no.
I have an ED and I know A LOT of other ED sufferers. You know what they have in common? Mental health issues — most of them are either dual diagnosis or have trauma backgrounds.
In three months at a rehab facility, what you hear from ED patients is self loathing — not for their bodies, but for themselves — and anxiety. They talk about not eating because they don’t deserve it, not because they’re fat. They talk about feeling guilty because eating can feel good. They talk about being out of control around food.
What you hear very little of is talk of supermodels or Barbies.
There’s nothing wrong with liking Barbie, but this guy doesn’t even seem to realize how unrealistic her proportions are or the medical cost to a real woman who had those proportions.
…Indeed you did. Sorry.
“What the hell is it with these guys and women with long hair, anyway?”
Well, I guess Rapunzel is kind of their dream woman. She’s beautiful, has no knowledge of men, and all she does is sing and grow her hair long. And she’s trapped by an evil witch, thus potentially justifying violence against a woman in order to “rescue” her.
However, I think these guys would probably be too lazy to travel out to her tower repeatedly till they found a way to get her down. They’d want her to escape on her own and bring them a sammich, and to stop singing. And if she didn’t manage to escape by herself they’d call her a frigid bitch/slut, and use her as an example of why women are inferior. And if she did escape on her own, they’d just lock her up again. She’d be worse off than with the witch.
Speaking of long hair, that reminds me of a video I was watching earlier.
Don’t try this at home!
I don’t know if looking at art depicting Aphrodite is the best way to see what people thought she looked like… maybe my memory is being selective here, but I recall a lot of greek and roman sculptors really went to town when representing men and didn’t leave a whole lot of doubt as to how they thought the ideal male body should look, but women? Not nearly so much. There’s quite a lot of the ‘male body with boobs, minus a few other bits’ thing going on there, an art style that apparently remained popular for quite some time…