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Bodies, Representation, and Lammily

“When I grow up, I want to be just like my Barbie,” a young Cara had once told her

mother. At the time I thought there was nothing wrong with striving to be as beautiful as my

favorite doll, but the instillation of these desires from a young age has led me, and many girls, to

unhealthy body images, as well as dangerous methods of attaining them. I used to think Barbie

was what all women should strive for, but when blown up to life-size measurements, Barbie has

wildly unrealistic proportions. A life-sized Barbie would have a head two inches larger than an

average woman, and a neck that is six inches thinner and twice as long; she would have a sixteen

inch waist, three and a half inch wrists, six inch ankles, and a child’s size three feet (Golgowski,

2013). These proportions would leave a Barbie-like woman walking on all fours because her

ankles cannot support her top-heavy body, unable to lift her head because her neck is too thin,

and her waist would only have room for “half a liver and a few inches of intestine” (Golgowski,

2013). If this is the standard of beauty we teach to our young girls, how can we expect them to

grow up ever feeling that they are beautiful? For this reason, artist Nickolay Lamm created

Lammily, the crowd-funded average doll. Lammily was created using average proportions of a

19-year-old female as they are reported from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

(Postrel, 2014). Lamm states that “average is beautiful,” and the doll is meant to show young

girls that they can be beautiful without having to strive for the standards of Barbie (Postrel,

2014). However, the concept of an average body type is equally problematic, bodies are each

unique and claiming that one is standard or average in turn creates additional standards of beauty

and normalcy. Unrealistic media images cause young women to adopt unhealthy strategies in

order to obtain the desirable level of beauty; Lamm attempted to combat this ideology by

creating Lammily, but in actuality, he created yet another unattainable standard.

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The media that surround our lives portray women as hyper-sexualized objects for the

pleasure of men, creating an unhealthy environment of women striving to attain this rare beauty.

These images are seen in magazines, reality television, and movies all around us but begin at a

very young age with the cartoons that children watch and the toys they play with. Ronald

Barthes (53) states that, “all the toys one commonly sees are essentially a microcosm of the adult

world.” Toys exist to create a safe, non-consequential world for children to exist in, where they

can learn adult habits and internalize them as normal. Through our toys we are treating children

as smaller versions of adult men and women who “must be supplied objects of his own size”

(Barthes, 2012, p. 53). Through these dolls, young children are taught what an average woman

should look like to be considered beautiful. Lammily is meant to offer a doll that looks like the

other women, like mothers and sisters, that these young girls see in their lives in order to create a

more feasible meaning of beautiful. The theory stands that if you teach a practical standard of

beauty at a young age, these girls will grow up with a realistic ideal to strive for. The American

ideology of beauty is being defined and enforced from a young age and never fully ends, creating

a constant pressure for women and men to look a certain way in order to be accepted in this

society. Grossberg et al (193) defines ideology as, “a particular way of thinking and seeing the

world that makes the existing organization of social relations appear natural and inevitable.” The

media has been an integral part of the construction of this ideology as images of models,

celebrities, and the body shaming of those who are overweight constantly surround us. These

images are in magazines, movies, billboards, cars, and everywhere we turn, as well as being

enforced through our parents and peers (McCabe & Ricciardelli, 2001, p. 225). “The media have

generated a very clear image of the societal ideal for females, and this is consistent among the

various forms of media outlets” (McCabe &Ricciardelli, 2001, p. 237). The fact that this

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ideology is presented on so many different platforms ensures that it reaches the vast majority of

people living in this society. It engrains the idea in women that looking like this ideal is the only

way in which they will receive love and acceptance, and it teaches men that the only women who

deserve their attention are those who meet these standards. Our ideology of beauty is one of the

most dangerous in our society based on the common practices women use to reach it.

The creation of an ideology depends on the normalizing of these ideals, and in terms of

our standard of beauty, body shaming is “concretized, massively repeated and normalized in

contemporary televisual and tabloid press imagery, such as reality television series” (Kyrölä,

2014, p. 61). Putting women down for their appearance has become increasingly common

through media and results in many women developing low self-esteem and depression, which

then leads to taking drastic measures to change the way they look. These measures include

harmful diseases such as anorexia and bulimia, as well as the rise of grooming industries such as

“extolling cosmetics, diets, exercise grammes, the latest ‘to-die-for’ fashion and, more recently,

cosmetic surgery, have proliferated en masse to drive home a relentless message that there are

consumable strategies for those who do not” conform to the socially defined body type

(Northrop, 2013, p. 31). The constant pressure of our thin and beautiful ideologies have lead

women to believing that they need these grooming products in order to reach these standards.

This body image ideology is driven by fear through body shaming and it is this fear of not being

beautiful in the eyes of society that drives so many women to these diseases and these products

(Kyrölä, 2014, p. 198). This fear has been so engrained in the minds of this society that there is a

commonly held belief that, no matter one’s weight, they could always lose more or generally

improve their image in some way (McCabe & Ricciardelli, 2001, p. 235). What makes this

ideology so dangerous is that is can never fully be obtained. Young women are taught that they

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can always be prettier; there is always something about themselves that women dislike, even if

an outsider would consider her to be perfect. It is for this reason that women turn to these

grooming products and disordered eating in pursuit of a better version of themselves. One of the

reasons for these drastically altering measures is due to the idea that weight and beauty are

“much more easily changeable and mostly one’s own fault” (Kyrölä, 2014, p. 2). The idea that a

woman failing to meet these standards could still be beautiful if she would just try harder,

controlled her appetite, or went to the gym more, makes her appearance her responsibility and

her fault without taking factors, such as genetics or environment, into consideration. While it is

easy to see where these pressure are coming from in our adult lives, it is important to look back

to where it all began. From the time we are born we are receiving signs of this body image

ideology that we will be expected to fit into as we grow older. When these poor body image

constructions emerge during childhood, there is little chance of ever escaping it (Northrop, 2013,

p. 134).

All of these extremely negative images have been surrounding us since we were born,

leading to very damaging effects later on in life, and that is where Lammily comes in to attempt

to stop this cycle at the beginning. Toys create standards that children grow up believing to be

normal, including the beauty of a Barbie doll (Barthes, 2012, p. 53). Lammily attempts to point

out the absurdity of Barbie by offering an alternative version to compare it to. This doll was

based on the measurements of an average 19-year-old female which stands five feet four inches

tall with a “33.6-inch waist and a 14.1-inch upper arm. She weighs 150 pounds, giving her a

body mass index of 25.5” (Postrel, 2014). Lammily also has more realistic features including

being flat-footed, wearing less make-up, and all of her joints bend (“Lammily dolls offer,” 2014).

Through these changes this new doll is more accessible to young girls and gives them a toy that

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reflects the women they see around them. Females are therefore striving to meet more realistic

standards, and are less likely to engage in body-altering behaviors to maintain an ideal body

type. Lamm has also introduced stickers for his doll that allow users to personalize their doll to

match either themselves or the women in their lives. There are stickers of “tattoos, stretch

marks, acne, cellulite, scars, bruises, scrapes, freckles, glasses, grass and dirt stains, moles, and

bandages” (“Lammily dolls offer,” 2014). These stickers make children understand that these

features are not obscure, and they do not constitute ugliness. Having the option to add such

features means that there are others like them and that they are not weird or different because of

them. The stickers, the flat feet, the joints that bend, and the decreased make up send a message

to users that it is okay to not look perfect all of the time (“Lammily dolls offer,” 2014). The doll

now has the physical capability to be casual and relaxed and that sends a very strong and realistic

message to its young users.

While the Lammily doll has created an alternative standard of beauty as compared to

Barbie, it is by no means a solution to the problem of young girls idolizing a standard and

working to achieve it. Lammily technically meets the average measurements of a teenage girl,

but being made of hard plastic presents some issues. The average teenage girl’s body is about 32

percent fat, which is overweight and just under the classification of obese (Postrel, 2014). In

reality, this girl would have rolls of fat, but a plastic doll cannot convey that. Modern society

would not look at a girl of this size and consider her beautiful, so Lamm altered the doll to be an

extremely fit athlete; she does still meet the average measurements given, but she meets them in

an un-average way. Lammily’s body is still unattainable for many women, as it would require

exceptionally good genes as well as hours in the gym. Aside from this factor, there is still the

concept of declaring one body type as “average.” Every single body is unique from height,

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weight, shape, skin tone, eye color, hair texture, and so on, so there is really no way to claim that

any single one is normal. “Celebrating one version of average as ‘normal’ and ‘realistic’

implicitly stigmatizes everyone who doesn’t meet that standard” (Postrel, 2014). Lammily does

create a physically plausible doll that some users could identify with, but at the same time it

holds the same basic issue of creating a standard. There are many girls who are physically

incapable of looking like Lammily, whether that is because their skin is the wrong color, they are

too skinny, they are too fat, or any other number of factors. This ideology of an average beauty

that Lamm is trying to impose is still a beauty ideology at its core and operates in the same

fashion. We are each uniquely beautiful in our own way, and no one can ever fit into these

prescribed molds of beauty.

Images from the media, our toys, and those surrounding us, push females and males alike

to strive for a standard of beauty that can never fully be reached. We live in a world in which we

are always going to be striving for something, we will be reaching and pushing our limitations to

achieve these ideological standards. Lammily tries to create more attainable levels of beauty and

to show users that average is “realistic” and “normal” (Postrel 2014). In reality, there is no one

version of normal; each individual body is unique and beautiful, and the focus should be shifted

to celebrating that. We should be teaching our youth how to live healthy lives and how to be

confident with what they look like instead of defining a normal that can only be meet through

unhealthy measures. The underlying problem is not that there is an unattainable standard, but

rather, that there is a standard at all.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. (2012). “Toys” in Mythologies. New York: Noon Day Press. P. 53-55.

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Golgowski, N. (2013, April 13). Bones so frail it would be impossible to walk and room for only

half a liver: Shocking research reveals what life would be like if a REAL woman had

Barbie's body. Retrieved April 15, 2015, from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-

2308658/How-Barbies-body-size-look-real-life-Walking-fours-missing-half-liver-inches-

intestine.html

Grossberg et. al, “Ideology” in MediaMaking: Mass Media in a Popular Culture (Sage, 2006), p.

193-216.

Kyrölä, Katariina, Dr (2014). The Weight of Images : Affect, Body Image and Fat in the Media.

Retrieved from http://www.eblib.com

Lammily dolls offer better conventions of beauty. (2014, Dec 04). University Wire Retrieved

from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1630145790?accountid=14244

McCabe, M., & Ricciardelli, L. (2001). Parent, Peer, and Media Influences on body image and

strategies to both increase and decrease body size among adolescent boys and girls.

Adolescence, 36(142), 225-240.

Northrop, Jane Megan (2013). Reflecting on Cosmetic Surgery : Body image, Shame and

Narcissism. Retrieved from http://www.eblib.com

Postrel, V. (2014, Mar 13). Barbie, lammily and body images. Chicago Tribune Retrieved from

http://search.proquest.com/docview/1506723997?accountid=14244

UNC Honor Pledge: I certify that no unauthorized assistance has been received or given in the

completion of this work.

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Signature Caroline Nagy .

COMM 140 Paper #2

Research:

Bones so frail it would be impossible to walk and room for only half a liver: Shocking research reveals what life would be like if a REAL woman had Barbie’s body

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Nina Golgowski

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2308658/How-Barbies-body-size-look-real-life-Walking-fours-missing-half-liver-inches-intestine.html

Barbie, Lammily and body imagesVirginia Postrel

http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/docview/1506723997?pq-origsite=summon

“wildly inhuman proportions” “To me, they were magical and special and didn’t look the least bit strange.” “Toys exist in an imaginative world. Nobody expects them to be scale models of

reality.” – Barbie is the exception “Barbie instills in her preschool fans a false and remarkably detailed standard of beauty.” “crowd-funded project from artist Nickolay Lamm” “based on the average proportions for a 19-year-old, as reported by the Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention” “Average is beautiful” proclaims her maker “Average is also ‘realistic’ and ‘normal’” according to Lamm “Based on a representative sample of 118 people, the agency reports that the average 19-

year-old female American stands 5 feet 4 inches. She has a 33.6-inch waist and a 14.1-unch upper arm. She weighs 150 pounds, giving her a body mass index of 25.5. That indicates that she is overweight.”

“The average 19-year-old’s body is about 32 percent fat, just at the threshold for obesity” “If Lammily were true to life, in other words, she’d have rolls of fat, not a firm plastic

tummy. Her figure would turn off beauty-minded girls and health-conscious parents.” Made her an athlete, fit and strong to make up for her excess weight- strong, thick thighs

and a bubble butt that require good genes and hours at the gym (still idealistic way of looking at average- may not be normal but it is better to have girls

striving to be fit than to be thin) “The average body doesn’t actually exist. Nobody is normal. Everyone is weird.” “Celebrating one version of average as “normal” and “realistic” implicitly stigmatizes

everyone who doesn’t meet that standard.” “treat a doll as an object of escapist fantasy” dolls with other weird characteristics, big heads/blue skin/etc. are gaining popularity and

are considered beautiful but are not anyone’s idea of average.

Lammily dolls offer better conventions of beautyUniversity Wire [Carlsbad]http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/docview/1630145790?pq-origsite=summon

“changing the way children view themselves and their toys”

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“She is flat-footed, so her feet are not always stuck in high heels, with a more realistic hip size and smaller bust, less make-up and all her joints bend”

“to make her more look more like the girls who will play with her” “stickers are of tattoos, stretch marks, acne, cellulite, scars, bruises, scrapes, freckles,

glasses, grass and dirt stains, moles and bandages.” Flaw stickers to customize the doll to look like themselves or women they know “a doll that could wear sneakers when she wanted to be casual—that she even had the

option to be casual and not always looking perfect.” “He wanted his doll to go through the same experiences and changes that women go

through and show that those changes are normal. That getting stretch marks or acne during puberty is what most women go through and there is nothing to be ashamed of. That having freckles or moles or scars don’t make women any less beautiful in her eyes or in someone else’s.”

“its intent is to show healthy, active and strong women to children and adolescents.” Barbie as over-sexualized and perfect “What really helps these abstract ideas stick to young children is seeing them in action

and holding them close to their own lives” – about body images

Parent, Peer, and Media Influences on Body Image and Strategies to Both Increase and Decrease Body Size Among Adolescent Boys and GirlsMarita P. McCabe and Lina A. Ricciardelli

http://dro.deakin.edu.au/eserv/DU:30001199/mccabe-parentpeer-2001.pdf

“females were less satisfied with their bodies and were more likely to adopt strategies to lose weight, whereas males were more likely to adopt strategies to increase weight and muscle tone.” 225

“Media influences to alter weight, as well as feedback from mother, father, and both male and female peers, were greater for females.” 225

The problem exists for males too (Hulk, GI Joe?), and can lead to “binge eating, excessive exercise, and steroid use.” 226

“Parents appear to play an important role in transmitting sociocultural messages regarding the ideal body to adolescents” 226

“parents were perceived to be more likely to provide feedback to daughters than to sons regarding their appearance.” 227

“fathers are perceived to have a greater influence on their daughter’s attitudes, and mothers are perceived to have a greater influence on their sons’ attitudes.” 227

Validation from the opposite sex important during adolescence 227 “the media, particularly magazines, play an important role in body image and disturbed

eating among adolescent girls” 227 “looking at thin models resulted in feelings of anxiety and body dissatisfaction among

females” 228

“adolescent females reported less body satisfaction as compared with males, and the appearance of their bodies was more important than it was for males.” 235

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“these behaviors are being adopted by adolescents as young as 12 years of age.” 235 “focus among adolescent females, regardless of their weight, to lose weight, this is not

surprising.” 235 “for both boys and girls, body dissatisfaction, the use of food supplements, and strategies

to increase both weight and muscle tone tended to increase with age.” 236 “body dissatisfaction increases as adolescents develop fat deposits that are associated

with puberty.” 236 The shape of the body is just as important as its weight “increasing focus in the media on muscular ideal” 236 mothers providing the majority of feedback about body images- usually negative 236 “adolescent girls, more so than boys, perceive that their mothers are encouraging them to

adopt strategies that would move their bodies closer to the societal ideal.” 236 “fathers were more likely to encourage them to lose weight and increase muscle tone”

237 “the media have generated a very clear image of the societal ideal for females, and this is

consistent among the various forms of media outlets.” 237 males have multiple ideals presented in the media, which relieves pressure 237 “peers were perceived to pressure girls to move closer to the societal ideal” 237 females had “a high level of encouragement to lose weight and increase muscle tone for

all respondents” regardless of BMI or age 238 “respondents in highest BMI category perceived more sociocultural pressure to alter their

weight. This perceived pressure was associated with increased dieting and extreme weight loss strategies among this group of respondents.” 238

“association between weight loss strategies and the development of disordered eating” 238

The Weight of Imageshttp://reader.eblib.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/(S(fubndb2qvxgl3xbhlpvasjqe))/Reader.aspx?p=1645679&o=44&u=CijCcEDrnsg%3d&t=1429122120&h=E5E9E59B9D3A2CDCAD7AF3DC6AFCE71EB9155584&s=34727491&ut=94&pg=1&r=img&c=-1&pat=n&cms=-1&sd=2#

“media images can show us bodies we would never see in everyday life, thus expanding our perception of what is possible” 1

“in contemporary media, fatness is claimed as the most serious threat for the health and economy of various western nations, the necessary starting point for heroic transformations into proud and happy slimness” 2

“bodies are related to, valued, judged, desired, accepted, rejected, and imagined fundamentally in terms of their weight, size and shape.” 2

“weight and body size are deemed much more easily changeable and mostly one’s own fault.” 2

“some similar structures or relating fatness in particular, and gendered corporeality more generally, appear across various mainstream media, genres, and modes of address, but the

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affective connections which organize and locate imaged bodies in relation to each other and in relation to viewing bodies take different shapes in different media and genetic contexts.” 61

“disgust, shame, and pride are deeply implicated in each other as ways of seeing and relating to other bodies as well as one’s own body” 61

body shaming is “concretized, massively repeated, and normalized in contemporary televisual and tabloid press imagery, such as reality television series” 61

“she sees the gendered culture of dieting as deeply oppressive” 62 “dieting and body-sculpting directions and weight-loss and weight-gain narratives have

long been basic stuff of tabloids and women’s magazines, but during the 2000s, this tendency has further escalated through the arrival of reality television shows on dieting.” 64

“various ongoing attempts in the media to regulate and organize that fragility into cultural hierarchies and fixed affective routings.”197

“a body image ideal that is internally organized by fear, based on a view of bodies as measurable objects instead of multidimensional living beings, which poses potentially drastic limitations to viewing bodies’ mobility and openness—relating to but not determined by weight.” 198

Reflecting on Cosmetic SurgeryMegan Northrop

http://reader.eblib.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/(S(cydohlwvi45xui1olwvibpo3))/Reader.aspx?p=958454&o=44&u=CijCcEDrnsg%3d&t=1429129875&h=118926141BBF26BDE39D0FB51C412C0DA1254E83&s=34727491&ut=94&pg=1&r=img&c=-1&pat=n&cms=-1&sd=2#

“consumer culture of late modernity has appropriated the body with a gaze of steadfastly focused upon its appearance, preservation and health.” 31

“grooming industries extolling cosmetics, diets, exercise grammes, the latest ‘to die for’ fashion and, more recently, cosmetic surgery, have proliferated en masse to drive home a relentless message that there are consumable strategies for those who do not.” 31

“engaging women to survey and critically monitor their appearance in ways that persuade them to believe they need grooming products and services.” 31

“the failure to live up to desired ideal or ideal self as implicated in the manifestation of shame.” 134

“occurs when the self measures itself against an ideal version of itself and concludes that it is inferior.” 134

“many participants described their poor body image construction as emerging in childhood.” 134

“Ubiquitous and near-impossible images of flawless women found in visual media are often nominated as the templates against which women measure themselves” 135

“they could not see past the airbrushing and manipulation in modern photography.” 135 people see the difference, and don’t relate to the images of celebs and models, but still try

to emulate them with things like plastic surgery 135

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“through the twentieth century as women became progressively and publically undressed, and their bodies became increasingly fragmented into parts that were subjected to escalating public scrutiny.” 135

Does Barbie made girls want to be thin? The effect of experimental exposure to images of dolls on the body image of 5- to 8-year-old girls.Helga Ditter, Emma Kalliwll, Suzanne Ive

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2006-03514-007

“early exposure to dolls epitomizing an unrealistically thin body ideal may damage a girl’s body image, which would contribute to an increased risk of disordered eating and weight cycling.”

Thesis:

Unrealistic media images cause young women to adopt unhealthy strategies in order to obtain the desirable level of beauty; Lamm attempted to combat this ideal by creating Lammily, but in actuality, he created yet another unattainable standard.

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