Sometimes things happen in the world that make us angry. And sometimes, the things that happen are just so dumb and subtle that we can’t even summon the energy. I mean, we have things to do. And if we got angry about everything we’d be angry all the time. That would, for starters, require a lot more coffee.
So last summer Mattel debuted a new line of fashion dolls for girls called Monster High, where all the characters are the offspring of Hammer Horror monsters. While on the surface I think we can accept that a cross between the cartoon version of Beetlejuice and Bratz is just waaay too interesting to not exist; the problem, as Fox News discovered and Jezebel brought to our attention, is in the personal bio of Clawdeen Wolf, daughter of the Wolf Man.
Apparently, Clawdeen knows a thing or two about grooming:
My hair is worthy of a shampoo commercial, and that’s just what grows on my legs. Plucking and shaving is definitely a full-time job but that’s a small price to pay for being scarily fabulous.
Okay we get it, Mattel, she’s a werewolf. It makes sense that she’d feel self conscious about her hair. But maybe she could just… have hair? I mean that’s the best excuse ever to say “F-you, American society’s expectation that women be completely bald from the eyebrows down!” She’s got supernatural hair.
Obviously this is way too much to ask of a line of fashion dolls full of bad puns (casketball, fearleading, Justin Biter, we could go on).
Fox trots (/rimshot) out a psychiatrist to talk about what in particular is bad about this:
Young girls especially do not need a doll to point out physical flaws or encourage body image preoccupation in teens and young girls. Dolls are for play and escape and pleasure, and they should not be another source of criticism for young girls these days. It used to be that dolls were part of childhood and represented and offered an extension of innocence, but now some dolls are encouraging the opposite of innocence.
We agree, mostly. It used to be that dolls encouraged young girls to be good mommies and homemakers, and now that we’ve moved beyond that phase I guess we’re having a little difficulty in figuring out what the new universal aspiration for women should be because, hey, not all girls grow up to want the same thing out of life.
Like being on the fearleading squad. The puns are just as bad as that Clawdeen’s bio, if you ask me.
(via Jezebel.)
