Mothers Launch Bald Barbie Campaign For Cancer Awareness

Mattel’s Barbie franchise — those glamorous toy dolls with notoriously unrealistic physical dimensions — may soon be making an unprecedented foray into the real world. If a growing community of Facebookers has its way, the next version of the iconic American plaything might ditch her golden locks for a chic smooth scalp.

Just days before Christmas, friends Rebecca Sypin and Jane Bingham launched a Facebook page called “Beautiful and Bald Barbie! Let’s see if we can get it made.” Within a week, the page had over 16,000 fans and has continued to grow by leaps and bounds. As of Friday, the page had been ‘liked’ by almost 100,000 users.

The two women say their aim is to persuade toy-maker Mattel to introduce a line of bald Barbies in an effort to show solidarity and support for children suffering from cancer.

The opening lines of their Facebook page reads: “We would like to see a Beautiful and Bald Barbie made to help young girls who suffer from hair loss due to cancer treatments, Alopecia or Trichotillomania.”

Both Sypin and Bingham have had personal experience with disease: Bingham is currently fighting lymphoma and has lost her hair due to chemotherapy, and Sypin’s 12-year-old daughter has lost her’s as well in her treatments for leukemia.

While Mattel initially declined to make a formal comment, the company acknowledged that it had received letters from the two women and noted that they do not generally accept design ideas from outside sources.

Yet with pressure mounting, streams of letters coming in, and a growing number supporters for the website, Mattel finally issued a formal statement on Thursday.

“We are honored that Jane Bingham and Beckie Sypin believe that Barbie could be the face of such an important cause. Mattel appreciates and respects the passion that has been built up for the request for a bald Barbie doll.”

“As you might imagine, we receive hundreds of passionate requests for various dolls to be added to our collection. We take all of them seriously and are constantly exploring new and different dolls to be added to our line,” the statement added.

Mattel also highlighted that the company and its charity arm the Mattel Children’s Foundation have donated nearly $30 million to children’s causes in recent years as well as over a half a million toys.

Neither Sypin or Bingham are experienced activists, and they have insisted that they’re not trying to force Mattel to do anything they don’t want to. They believe, however, that the popularity and iconic status of Barbie dolls would offer an ideal platform to call attention to and support the thousands of young people currently suffering from cancer in the U.S.

“We’re not demanding that the company do anything,” Sypin said Wednesday. “We’re just hoping somebody sees this and can help us make it happen.”

Since the creation of the first doll in 1959, Barbie’s descendents have had an ambiguous and evolving relationship with American culture. On the one hand, versions of the doll in which Barbie is dressed as an astronaut, flaunting tattoos or even black have been hailed by some women’s rights activists as bold and groundbreaking attempts to smash gender and race stereotypes. Yet in more recent years, Barbie has frequently drawn heat from a number of women’s groups on account of the patently unnatural proportions of her body and the unattainable physical ideal that it supposedly presents to young girls.

Whatever the outcome of their grassroots campaign may be, Sypin and Bingham say that they’ve been moved and encouraged by the unexpected wildfire-like success of their Facebook page.

For a small handful of critics who’ve insisted that a more traditional fund-raising event for cancer research would be a better investment of their energies than getting Mattel to make a bald Barbie, Sypin and Bingham point out that successful fund-raising efforts first require awareness—and raising awareness is exactly what their project has done.

“A lot of these people wouldn’t have even thought about doing that without this movement,” said Bingham.

If study after study shows a connection between leisure and productivity, why are we being worked to exhaustian in the name of production? In the United Kingdom, the New Economics Forum has released a report called 21 hours calling for a new work-week norm. "Each person in Britain already works an average of 20 hours a week if you spread working hours evenly across the population," reports Zoe Cormier in the New Internationalist:

It all comes down to what we consider 'work': what labour we think is worth paying for. If all the time spent in the UK on unpaid labour--raising children, cooking, household chores and so on--were paid at the minimum wage, it would account for 21 percent of the country's GDP.

...Rather than allowing the labour to remain unaccounted (and underappreciated), we could "redistribute paid labour, reduce the differential between paid and unpaid work, and make better use of assets," says [Commissioner for Health with the UK Sustainable Development Commission Anne] Coote.

"Having the normal working week could solve a litany of social problems," writes Cormier, and it could have an effect on climate change as well:

The Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research estimates that is Americans were to work the same number of hours as Europeans (who work up to 300hours less per year) they would reduce their carbon footprint by up to 30 percent. Less time spent at a factory or office translates into less time spent driving to work, less energy consumed in the building or on the road, and fewer materials used in production.

"While we can always make more stuff," says Cormier, "we can't make more time--each of us only has so many grains of sand in our hourglass. As difficult as our mortality may be to contemplate, we each need to learn that our lives are not going to get longer--and in fact, the stress of punishing schedules and sedentary jobs can shorten them."

Read more: http://www.utne.com/Politics/Leisure-Pr ... z1jVji8JQa