𝐀𝐓𝐋𝐀𝐒, WRITING TIPS

* . ʷʳⁱᵗⁱⁿᵍ ˢᵗʳᵒⁿᵍ ᶠᵉᵐᵃˡᵉ ᶜʰᵃʳᵃᶜᵗᵉʳˢ.

the idea that for a woman to be "strong", she must be "more like a man", is completely sexist and totally misses the mark on what many people think is empowering. of course, women can present as more masculine, not wear dresses, dislike the colour pink, etc, women can do whatever and be whoever they want, and they can of course be strong characters. but the idea that ONLY non-feminine women can be strong is... not it.

an example of this is barbie (my queen). a lot of teenage girls and older woman seem to have the idea that barbie is inherently harmful to young girls, because, as a rather outspoken, misogynistic terf tumblr user once said, "dumbfuck solipsistic girly-girls are [the] bubonic plague". she is seen as harmful because, admittedly, she is beautiful, and the old-school barbies were all thin, shapely, blonde and dolled-up. yes she has size three feet, yes her body proportions might be unrealistic. but you know what else barbie is? she's an astronaut, a president, a doctor, a business woman, a fast-food worker, a maid, a formula-1 driver, a secretary, a youtuber, a veterinarian, a soccer player, a zoo-keeper, and just about every other job known to man.

my favourite barbie set when i was a young girl was barbie's veterinary clinic. i had a vet barbie who would do animal check-ups and had a cool stethoscope and lab-coat. i loved that barbie set so much. and it wasn't because barbie was "beautiful", it was because my dream when i was that age was to be a veterinarian, and i saw barbie doing it, and had to get the toy. i never picked barbie sets because she was pretty, i chose them because i wanted to play being an astronaut or a doctor, or a horse-rider. i didn't see barbie as something with ideal body standards, i never internalised any of that, i just wanted to be the jobs she was doing.

barbie's slogan in the 80s was "we girls can do anything. right, barbie?", and today, her slogan is "be who you want to be". she was created by ruth handler, a female toy developer who was constantly being told by men (who dominated her field) that young girls only wanted baby dolls they could nurture and mother. because everyone thought that girls would only ever want to play at mothering, and that that's all they would grow up to do. so she created barbie, who could be anything she wanted. yes, barbie is beautiful and was created as a kind of fashion-doll, but again, the idea that her being beautiful is a crime is the damaging idea here.

since the 80s, she's had many different appearances — she started out as a white, thin, blonde, able-bodied woman, which was what was considered "conventionally attractive" in the 80s, but since she's been produced as a woman of every race, every shape and weight, with different hair-types and disabilities. they sell a barbie who's in a wheelchair — in two races, white with straight blonde hair or black with kinky dark hair — at target, bald barbies and different height barbies, albino african-american barbies and asian barbies, barbies with vitiligo and male barbies with long hair. she did originally begin as one kind of woman — the beautiful, conventional aryan barbie — but now everyone is barbie. barbie is empowering, at least to me, the idea that any woman can be anything she wants, and i think it shaped me that way as a child.

THIS is why i think people miss the mark on what message barbie is trying to send. barbie does wear "high-heeled shoes" and has "an intense fixation on being ~fashionable~" as this same "not-like-other-girls" tumblr user states, but when did being feminine start being non-feminist? women CAN be anything — that includes being feminine, if they want — yet a lot of younger generations, particularly those who were 12-16 in the 2000s-2010s, like i was, were made to feel like femininity was bad.