Bye-bye, Barbie app... your hypersexualised message is poisonous
When my big daughter was little, she was obsessed with room makeover games. Given the choice, she would have spent every waking hour clicking and dragging rugs, sofas and tables into virtual room sets.
Any colour, any dimension, any style; think Ikea without the Allen key and the salty language. I used to beg her to try another app, and only half-jokingly inquired whether she wouldn’t really prefer to kill a baddy or blow something up?
She didn’t. Aged eight, all she wanted to do was download a room and prettify her interior.
Now she is 15, she has graduated to a monthly subscription to Elle Decoration, and it is her younger sister who is eight. But how times have changed.
The emphasis has moved from interiors to exteriors… and how. Little girls are being targeted by cosmetic surgery apps, some of which include
simulators to show them how their bodies could be surgically altered.
Nips, tucks, lifts and fillers are the building blocks of games such as Plastic Surgery for Barbie, which this week was removed from Apple’s app store after online petitions.
Quite rightly so. How twisted and immoral to normalise breast enhancement among girls too young to wear a bra. What sort of hypersexualised message is that sending to our children about body image and self-esteem?
Because, make no mistake, once created, these impressions – that how you look is more important than who you are that you will be judged by the dimensions of your bottom rather than by the capacity of your brain – will be indelible.
It’s vile, toxic and quite possibly happening on a smartphone or laptop near you. I’ll be honest and admit that with my second daughter, I’ve been rather less vigilant (for which read: “quite lax”) about policing her online activities. Not any more.
Trout-pout Barbie, your days are numbered.