Why Barbie dumped Ken

Posted by Kathleen Fasanella on Mar 27, 2006 at 2:24 pm / Fit and Sizing / Trackback

In my quest to explain allometry for my upcoming series on grading, I came across something you may find interesting -the real reason Barbie dumped Ken.

Since like attracts like and in the context of the continual debate over the ideal female body as represented by the Barbie doll being incongruous with real women’s bodies, it seems there’s a similar debate regarding boys toys (action figures). From Evolving ideals of men’s body image, consider this photo of Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo in 1978 (on the left) with Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo in 1998 (on the right).

According to this article that describes muscle dysmorphia

This difference between men and women is very important, because it shows that men as well as women are susceptible to feeling badly about their bodies after viewing certain media, but these feelings are triggered by a different type of media image. In fact, Leit, Gray, and Pope (2001) have shown that the idealized male body type is toward the more muscular; society’s view of muscles is: “Bigger is better.” Women are conditioned to think that: “Thinner is better.” Research has shown, in general, that men strive to be heavier in muscle, whereas women strive to be thinner (Furnham, Badmin, & Sneade, 2002).

If you wade through these two articles you’ll find the clue to the real reason that Barbie dumped Ken.

…the examples analyzed here are representative of the overall trend of body image in male action toys over the last several decades. The other leading contemporary toys, support the impression that this trend toward a bodybuilder physique is consistent. The only notable exception to this trend is the Mattel Company’s Ken, the boyfriend of Barbie. However, although the Barbie toy line overall has frequently ranked among the top 10 toy lines, Ken is but a small part of this market. Among boys in particular, Ken almost certainly ranks well below the popularity of the other male action figure discussed above.

So it would seem that Ken wasn’t just unpopular with Barbie. Physiologically speaking, Barbie’s unique physical attributes put her at 1/100,000 women but Ken is only 1/50 men. I’d always suspected the break up was due to Ken’s permanently affixed plastic underwear but apparently, Barbie is anorexic but Ken doesn’t have muscular dysmorphia which eliminates the possibility of their becoming the perfect dysfunctional couple! No wonder she dumped him.

Allometry -by the way- could be defined (for our purposes) as the parameters for defining the characteristics and measures of grade rules. Why then, do none of my grading books even bring it up? And people wonder why I dislike most text books…

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