Help me! I’m a woman

November 22, 2014 11:34 am | Updated 11:38 am IST - chennai

It looks like the makers of Barbie can never get anything right: if it wasn’t the disproportionately designed Barbie doll, it was the accompanying baby pink kitchen or the laundromat or even the Ken doll. With an impossibly sexist book  Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer , they plan to outdo themselves. 

It doesn’t matter if Barbie is an astronaut, a career woman or a chic city shopper; the cringe-worthy book describes her as being into cutesy puppies and needing help from her geeky, male friends Steven and Brian to create a game about, what else, puppies. Soon, a virus affects her sister’s computer that she had been working on and to comfort themselves, the two have a very brief pillow fight. After fixing it with the help of MEN, and all’s well that ends well, Barbie exclaims (with just a tinge of self-doubt) that she too can be a computer engineer. Not exclaims, sorry, but takes a guess. 

Like I mentioned earlier, the makers of Barbie can’t get anything right. But there are two sides to a coin. Like the fact that Barbie is clever enough to get someone else to do the work and is quick to take all the credit, a common phenomenon in every day life, politics, business... you name it. Or that this book, like any other book is a good substitute for fuel (burn baby burn). They did get both Barbie’s and Skipper’s figures proportional and it does look like they’re eating healthy.

Maybe it's time the makers gave up on trying to bring out a normal Barbie because one, someone else has already done it for them, and two, they never seem to get the algorithm right. If sexist drivel is all they can produce then it’s only fair that they bring out a series where Ken cannot cook, do the laundry or take care of a baby.

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