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Archive for the ‘Awareness’ Category

What better to write about on WTF Wednesday than the downhill evolution (devolution?) of a creepy doll?

There are a lot of people that are worried about the effect that Barbie dolls might have on the body image issues and self-esteem of little girls. By now, we all know that Barbie would have to be 7′2″ to have the same proportions as a human that she owns as a doll, and there are many who are disturbed by her eternally plastic grin and those feet that are bent into the shape of high heels.

Personally, I think the stick-thin celebrities and glossy magazine covers that scream “YOU NEED TO LOSE WEIGHT NOW, FATTY MCUGLYPANTS!” are far more damaging, but regardless of where you stand on the Barbie issue, there’s a new bad girl in town. Move over, Barbie – Bratz has you beat in triplicate.

The original Bratz doll was worrying enough in its own right. Here’s an image of one of the first Bratz dolls to hit the market:
Remember being worried about Barbie being too thin? This doll’s waist is literally the same size around as her WRIST. Really healthy. Never mind the fact that her legs are twice as long as they should be for her torso size, and her lips are larger than her breasts. She’s also presumably school-age judging by the backpack she carries, and I don’t think any parent really wants their school-age girl going out in five-inch (comparably) platform heels and showing the majority of her midsection.

I’m one of the last people that will ever say we should be censoring the world from children, but I do find these dolls disturbing. Let’s take a look at those shoes. Have you ever seen shoes like that in the real world that weren’t on stage? Don’t get me wrong here, I like Vegas strippers and all the footwear the image entails, but not for little girls, please?

The thing is, it gets worse. This is a sampling of what I saw in the stores at Christmas time:

Let’s not even mention the weird body proportions, since we already covered that with the regular Bratz Dolls. What I think is creepy here is that these are obviously supposed to be babies and toddlers, as evidenced by their accessories. (Unless, of course, they’re trying to tell you that it’s fine for an older girl to ride in a stroller and carry around a baby bottle, which is possibly even weirder than what they ARE propagating.) I don’t know about you, but I am disturbed by the idea of babies wearing eyeshadow and lipstick.

And as for the Bratz Babyz (Ugh, and they blame the internet for the shitty way kids spell these days? At least the internet has spell-checking built into most sites) wedding set… Can’t we just let kids be kids without shoving relationships and marriage down their throats from the second they come out of the womb?

Now, I do give kids credit. I seriously doubt that most kids are going to look at a Bratz doll and say “Oh no, I’m ugly, my eyes aren’t the size of my fists!” but it is one more block in the foundation we’re laying for children. What are they supposed to think, when magazine covers feature Lindsay Lohan photoshopped into having the same garish proportions as their lipstick-wearing dolls?

Thoughts?

(Sorry this is posted a day late. I didn’t have time to go back and final edit/post last night)

When pJammy told me that I should write an AIDS awareness blog for today, I started thinking back to my childhood. When I was young, AIDS was a new discovery. It was first classified by the Center for Disease Control in 1981, and in the early 1990’s when I was in my early years of elementary school it was all the rage in health classes.

What I remember most about health classes, the nurse’s office, and the hallways of my little elementary school are the flyers. I remember flyers handed out to all the students with titles like “It’s still okay to hug your uncle,” and “AIDS doesn’t mean you are a bad person.” Which even my seven-year-old brain could infer meant that, at some point in time, people did believe that AIDS made you a bad person, or that it wasn’t okay to hug your uncle.

For a long time, AIDS was thought to be a “gay-only” disease, and even today, there are some people who still think of it that way. This of course, coupled with the stigma on homosexuality has, at times throughout recent history, left people who suffer from AIDS with little sympathy from others.

Has there ever been another disease carrying such a stigma? No one wrote up flyers about cancer making you a bad person. The fact is, there are many, many ways to come in contact with the HIV virus, and making assumptions about the lifestlye of the  AIDS sufferer is only hindering progress made to fight against the disease.  It doesn’t matter how someone became infected with the HIV virus. It’s none of anyone else’s business, and yet when I was in high school with a girl whose mother had AIDS, that’s all people could ask the girl about.

No one ever asked her how her mother was doing, or even how the girl was holding up. They all wanted to know how she had gotten AIDS, and there were some ugly words tossed out at both the girl and her mother. It’s terrible that at a time when a family needs support and understanding, they are instead saddled with the social stigma unfortunately applied to the illness.

Today, the most highly infected areas in the world are the rural and poor parts of Africa. The spread of the HIV virus in these parts of the world is many times more than the spread of it in more developed parts of the world, largely because of a lack of education and resources to fight it.

AIDS is one of those things that’s easy to forget about, because often, people think it’s not happening right in their own backyards. The truth is, more than 25 million people have died from AIDS since 1981 when it was first recognized as a disease. In the last 25 years, the number of people living with AIDS has increased from 8 million to 33 million, and more than two-thirds of those infected live in the poorer regions of Africa. It looks to me like this is a global epidemic, and it’s something we all — every individual, every nation — need to come togther to combat.