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GI Joe vs. Barbie: Negative Influences on Body Image of Children

Introduction

"The Real American Hero," a popular phrase, the company who has created the GI Joe, has been using since its first release in 1964 to sell the action figure. Here a question comes to mind that how could an action figure, which is based upon a cartoon and has no real life existence, be a real hero of America, while GI Joe has nothing to do with the enemies of the country. The Barbie doll, on the other hand, boasts a perfect and perhaps unattainable body figure. When young girls see this extraordinary beautiful body, it becomes the source of inspiration for them and ultimately they start believing that their body should resemble the looks of Barbie. This unrealistic depiction of bodies of both GI Joe and Barbie has, over the year, negatively impacted many people especially those in their young ages to become dissatisfied with their own physical attributes and thus developing a sense of inferiority and lowering the self esteem.

In an article “The Evolution of GI Joe, 1964-1998”, Dr. Harrison Pope, a psychiatrist from Harvard, clearly demonstrate the relationship between the character of GI Joe and disturbances among people regarding the body image. The research presented by the Harvard psychiatrist shows how the extraordinary body structure of GI Joe could impact a child's brain and resultantly the child starts thinking he should have the body structure similar to the action figure. Similarly, the perfect structure of Barbie acts the same way for girls as GI Joe does for the boys. Barbie has, over the year, always been an ideal for young girls to grow up and look like a Barbie, being completely unaware of the fact that attaining similar body structure as that Barbie is something next to impossible.

This paper aims at discussing the impacts of GI Joe and Barbie doll on the body image of children, while assessing how these characters can become a major source of food disorders, low self esteem, isolation and other social as well personality problem in the modern day society.

Discussion

Body Image

A person's body image is made up of 2 fundamental concepts;

How one perceives his or her body, and

What he or she feels about the perception

Although one's perception about his or her body can change from day to day or even from time to time in a single day, people tend view their body from stable point of view. It should be noted here that the way one see his or her body does not need to be similar with the way other people see your body. In our lives, almost all of us might have heard those people, expressing dissatisfaction with their body, who we think has nothing wrong, complaining about some particular body parts that the person likes or dislikes. Resultantly, it has been observed that people are increasingly becoming more critical of their own body than other people are of them. The attitudes ...