I just finishing watching the documentary Sext Up Kids and I am literally in SHOCK.
This documentary discusses the idea that our society has become so sexualized and the fact that children are growing up WAY TOO FAST! Young girls are growing up believing that they need to offer sex in order to get boys attention – and this theory is starting at a younger and younger age. One of the (many) reasons that they believe this is becoming such an issue is because of the sexualized content that young kids are being exposed to. They use the example of girls playing with barbie dolls that are wearing short mini skirts, tons of makeup and have unrealistic (and disproportionate) bodies.
At first I had a hard time agreeing with the documentary when they said that Barbie dolls are, in a sense, brainwashing young girls. I kept thinking “well all of my friends played with Barbie’s and we didn’t grow up sending naked pictures or sexting”. BUT – I now realize that barbie’s are only a SMALL part of the problem!
You literally walk through stores and pass magazine covers with half naked women. You can turn on the TV and see explicit sex scenes. You go on the internet and can access porn at the click of a mouse. It is literally EVERYWHERE. I simply typed in “explicit music videos” and this website was the first one that popped up. Finding videos of half-naked women wearing the least amount of clothes (if any) is WAY TOO easy to access!
Don’t get me wrong, I never went around looking for this stuff on the internet when I was young, but I feel like it wasn’t THAT easy to access. Obviously it was there – maybe I am just being naive? I don’t know. But either way, it’s a scary world out there.
One thing I want to touch on is the whole “Barbie Doll” playing a large role in all of the “body image” problems young girls are starting to acquire.
One of the things that freaked me out the most about this film is when they talked about how young girls are being exposed to such sexual content and trying to copy it at such a young age – I am talking like 8,9,10 years old. They were showing toddlers playing with Barbie dolls, which made me remember that I had once hear that Barbies would soon be changing. I couldn’t remember the exact details, so I decided to look them up and came across this article. Essentially, Barbies are being made to be more “realistic”. Mattel has created “project Dawn”. They are on a mission to make Barbies more diverse, multi-cultural, and have more “realistic” body shapes. Since this, these dolls are now offered in petite, curvy and tall body types, many different skin colours, different hair textures and different styles of make up. The company is stating that they are making these changes for many reasons, one of them being that “…she’s a bad role model for girls and has an unrealistic body image.”
Watch this video to see the transformation of Barbie over the years and the reasoning behind why they are changing the product.
I think that this is a great step in the right direction to help show young girls that not only does your body not define you, but you are not defined by your body shape. Skinny is not the only body type and it definitely isn’t the “only” way that women should look. But, I think that we, as a society, have a ton of work to do if we want to reverse this idiotic “trend”.
What do you guys think? What other steps can we take in order
From Learning to Teaching 
Hey Taryn! I agree with you in the sense that when I first watched this documentary a few years ago, I was also shocked! It really is a scary world (actually the title of my own post) and it scares me to think that often it is out of our hands. The video you shared is so interesting and something that I’ve never seen before. I think it really speaks true to how the whole ‘Barbie’ effect works. Like mentioned in the article, the whole idea of this STILL categorizing barbies/children into body type categories because of the ‘dress won’t fit’ situation is something that also makes me question how we even get out of this mess that we are in as a society? How do we teach our kids about this when they’ll have different Barbies but maybe only some of my own old Barbie clothes that I’ve passed down? what does this say about how accepting we really are? Then aside from Barbies, we can look at Monster High dolls or Bratz, the makeup on those things are insane- which is a totally different aspect of this, but still links back to the same problem. In the end, I think we just need to teach kids to be aware that this is a trap? I wish we had an easier way to make it stop.