Life-Size Barbie

What does Barbie look like if she were a real person? For National Eating Disorder Awareness Week, high school student Galia Slayen decided to make a life-size Barbie, using the same proportion as the iconic doll:

Slayen brought the life-sized doll to the Today studios Monday to show off her handiwork. The Barbie stands about 6 feet tall with a 39" bust, 18" waist and 33" hips. She is made of wood, chicken wire and papier mache, and is dressed in a size 00 skirt that was a remnant from Slayen’s one-year bout with anorexia.
“I’m not blaming Barbie [for my illness] — she’s one small factor, an environmental factor,” Slayen said. “I’m blond and blue-eyed and I figured that was what I was supposed to look like. She was my idol. It impacted the way I looked at myself.”
The goal in creating Barbie’s likeness was to start conversation. “Talking about eating disorders is taboo to many people, and this made people talk about it,” Slayen said. “It’s a shocking image. A lot of people have seen it, and it’s started debates,” she said, particularly after she wrote about it for the Huffington Post. “Her proportions are not 100 percent correct, but her look is not invalid.”

Link | Galia's story in her own words at HuffPo

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1) This girl is a teenager, who had an eating disorder i.e. a MENTAL ILLNESS when she was a younger teen. A MENTAL ILLNESS characterized by compulsion and obsession to the point of self harm. So yes a pre-teen viewing a faux sense of beauty and thinking she's perfect, I want her shape is 100% logical because she had a mental illness. You can't look at something that is irrational and view is if she were a logical rational human being at the time. Once you start eating 200 calories a day... logic is gone.

2) http://www.peacelovelunges.com/sports-fitness/ask-sam/what-if-barbie-were-a-real-woman/ The in this articles barbie is actually NICER than what other people say. Google other peoples results.

The doll wasn't meant to be perfect it's meant to inspire debates. The problem with many of the media is we say "Value women who are normal and not emaciated" and then they give us plus size models... its the extreme opposite. Normal is normal. Sizes 6-10 would be fine to have in the public eye for what women should look like ( and I say that as an obese woman working on changing my body now).

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A Cultural Analysis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTINT2pAqAY&feature=channel_video_title

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Come on, guys, don't take this too seriously. She's trying to illustrate a point about media influences on self-image, not discredit Barbie. She even says she DOESN'T blame Barbie for her eating disorder, just a small environmental factor, which can be easily translated as 'there were more traumatising, sensitive things which may have caused an eating disorder to accumulate'. So she isn't saying that she desperately wanted to be like Barbie, just that it was a small unconscious prod in that direction. And eating disorders are probably a bit taboo for some people, especially those who are suffering. Not everyone can talk about the things you can.

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Look, I get this is a touchy subject that people identify with, and there is a need to have a conversation about it. But the way these conversations go are locked within a schismatic separation of causal continuity. There is no If P Then Q solution to the issue. In logical form it would look something like: If S believes that if p, then (q unless S does x); and S desires that not-q; and S does not believe that if p and S does x, then something r will be the case such that S desires not-r more than S desires that p; etc.; then, ceteris paribus, probably S will do x.