The document discusses the harmful impact of traditional beauty standards portrayed by toys like Barbie on young girls' body image, leading to unhealthy behaviors. It introduces Lammily, a doll designed with average female proportions, aiming to provide a more realistic representation of beauty, but critiques the notion of average itself as problematic. Ultimately, it argues that the focus should shift from any set standard of beauty to celebrating individual uniqueness and promoting healthy self-acceptance.

1. Nagy 1
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.

7. Nagy 7
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.

8. Nagy 8
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

9. Nagy 9
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 images
Virginia 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 beauty
University Wire [Carlsbad]
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/docview/1630145790?pq-origsite=summon
 “changing the way children view themselves and their toys”

10. Nagy 10
 “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 Girls
Marita 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

11. Nagy 11
 “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
 “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 Images
http://reader.eblib.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/(S(fubndb2qvxgl3xbhlpvasjqe))/Reader.aspx?p=164
5679&o=44&u=CijCcEDrnsg%3d&t=1429122120&h=E5E9E59B9D3A2CDCAD7AF3DC6AF
CE71EB9155584&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

12. Nagy 12
 “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
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 Surgery
Megan Northrop
http://reader.eblib.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/(S(cydohlwvi45xui1olwvibpo3))/Reader.aspx?p=95
8454&o=44&u=CijCcEDrnsg%3d&t=1429129875&h=118926141BBF26BDE39D0FB51C412
C0DA1254E83&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

13. Nagy 13
 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
 “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.