In today’s fast paced world everyone is always looking for ways to improve their image. This is due to the media’s emphasis on looks. Every station you watch portrays women as skinny but busty bombshells. Girls grow up thinking the norm is upper skinny size zero or double zero with large breasts, perfect skin, and great hair. The media also portrays men as these muscular and lean modern day gods. What most people don’t stop to think about is being an actress or model’s size is nearly impossible to obtain. After all, most regular people aren’t making enough money to afford personal trainers, a nutritionist, health food (which gets expensive), personal tanning beds, and plastic surgery. Marge Piercy’s poem is an example of the extreme emotions girls go through because of our superficial society. American society pressures people to conform to a certain “ideal” physical appearance.
In “Barbie Doll” a young girl is raised in a stereotypical American home. As a young child, she is
and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy. (2-5)
because her parents wanted her to be normal. These toys represent the old fashioned view of a woman’s role in
Basically she is taught to act shy but flirty. At the same time she has to be overly friendly when she does speak to people. She has to diet and exercise so she shows other people that she cares about her looks. Piercy’s character is taught to overcompensate for her looks with her personality. It’s relates back to the stereotype of ugly girls having great personalities and pretty girls not having personalities at all. Piercy’s character becomes wrapped up in the bias views of her peers and society.
The undertaker was finally able to transform this girl into a Barbie-doll like figure. She had a new putty nose and wore pink, the color often associated with girls and Barbies. He also hid the pain and suffering she went through as a child with makeup. “Doesn’t she look pretty? Everyone said.” (22) The girl finally achieved what she wanted. She was pretty. Her whole life she had been alienated for her looks. She was taught to be coy since she wasn’t pretty; she had to diet and workout so she wouldn’t be fat. She received “consummation at last/to every woman a happy ending.” (23-24) The character’s suicide transformed her into one of the “beautiful people” like she had always been pressured to be. Having others see her as pretty was the character’s ultimate goal and now it was finally complete. Is it really consummation if the girl isn’t alive to see her new beauty though? Her happy ending is being a statistic as another teenage suicide. The superficial reality of society was detrimental to this girl’s life.
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