Now Mattel, sniffing out the potential millions, is serving up its Barbie for us in a feature film ad. The blonde bimbo is already on several magazine covers, and the candy merchandise is quickly showing up in shop windows. This film (which I have not seen) seems to delight critics and fuels a false debate about whether the famous, long-maligned doll is in fact a feminist icon… Spin smart if any, because this surge of dwarf pink is nothing more than a gigantic campaign aimed at selling more tons of products (made in China).
We can think that Mattel is inspired here by Disney which, at the beginning of the 2000s, carried out a lucrative campaign to remarket the princesses, which allowed the multinational to collect hundreds of millions of dollars. Tons of merchandise related to princesses followed… And suddenly all girls young and old became obsessed with Cinderella, Aurora, Snow White, etc., and other new versions all created or revisited with sauce empoweris lying, the magic formula of the moment that makes you swallow (and buy) anything.
It remains that at present, we still seem far from the fairy tale.
Let us think of the Snow White of the traditional tale, left for dead in her glass coffin, after biting into the irresistible poisoned apple offered by her jealous stepmother. In the version of 2023, all the young girls of today have in their hands a sparkling unhealthy Apple, a cruel mirror that sends them back to infinity the same question “who is the most beautiful? “. You have to see them in the metro, in the street, everywhere, hypnotized by the same images that they quickly scroll through… Those of idols and potential rivals taking the same pose, with the same pout, the same long hair, the same false eyelashes… Vanity has already been a fault that had to be overcome.
And what about the updated version of Sleeping Beauty? Beauty in the Tinder woods who wakes up to a prince who is anything but charming…need I say more. Without forgetting either, Cinderella, the whipping boy, now struggling with her drag or trans sisters-in-law who compete with her, and accuse her of not loving them enough.
Anxiety, depression, return of eating disorders, mental health problems, girls, instead of being fulfilled, are tortured (and more and more early) by images: their own and those of others from which they cannot look away.
The terrible marriage of feminism and consumerism, sealed for good, has triumphed. The resulting message, more diabolical than ever, that emancipation comes through consumption is endlessly declined. The commercial featuring the platinum-haired hooker is just one of its latest incarnations. Girls deserve better. Fifty shades of pink will never be enough.