Barbie Documentary Shows How She Still Angers Some Feminists: New at Reason

Television critic Glenn Garvin checks out Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie, which explores the doll’s history and possibly doomed efforts to make her more appealing to her adult critics:

“Feminism, and how a girl sees herself, and self-esteem for girls, to put all that on the tiny shoulders of an 11-and-a-half-inch doll, is quite a burden,” says the exhausted Chidoni.

It’s a burden explored at delightful and occasionally poignant length in Tiny Shoulders. Nominally an inside look at Mattel’s 2016 roll-out of several new chubby dolls (or, as the Mattel corporate-speak dictionary had it, “curvy”), Tiny Shoulders is really a history of Barbie and her feminist tormentors. And it turns out those tiny shoulders conceal some real muscle.

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