A boy appears in a Barbie ad for the first time

NY Post ^ | November 16, 2015 | Tim Donnelly

[ExCTCitizen]

One day my friend and I (during lunch break from school) went to his house, took his sister’s ez bake oven and made a Chocolate Barbie and Ken cake. His sister was mad and his parents grounded him. (We had to go to my house if we didn’t want to eat lunch at school. We live close to school, we just had to walk about 1000 feet if that.)

[Tired of Taxes]

LOL. Brothers love to torture their sisters, but brothers are so much fun. To this day, my brother still makes me laugh.

[Yaelle]

They pulled the ad. It really was pathetic and insulting. Having a boy play would have been perfectly fine, but not one with such a haircut and saying fierce and winking. Stupid and insulting.

Just have kids playing naturally, have the boy in there, but don’t let him speak. That is inclusive enough.

YES, FREEPERS, DONT GIVE ME HECK, boys play with Barbies sometimes and girls play with cars and dinosaurs. And that is as it should be. Kids should pick what interests them without you worried about their future sexuality.

[Yaelle]

I’m learning about how girls play with dolls. First of all, I don’t get her the adult Barbies because she is so young. I get her (used on EBay) the little preschool girl versions of Barbie (called her little sister but Barbie is such a slut it’s probably her illegitimate daughter). She sets up relationships with the dolls - families, schools - and plays. She is still so young that the “play” peters out into some small segment of it, and sometimes there is hilarity when they fall off a table, etc, but after raising three boys where the play is the thing, for this little girl it is the relationships between the characters she is focused on.

There really does seem to be a boy brain and a girl brain, and sometimes clearly they don’t match the body. But girls have fun just with the relationships in their doll play, and they do like the hair brushing and changing clothing too. (The latter is not a focus yet for my girl.)

But my daughter loves trains and cars and dinosaurs, and adores Legos. All of these are part of her learning about the world and enjoying manipulating small toys. As long as the plaything is safe (not Dan Aykroyd’s Bag O’ Glass), any child should be able to play with any toy.