American Girl

The nice folks at American Girl have announced that they will be developing a bald American Girl doll. This is a big deal.

You can find a little more information at the AG Doll Hospital site, and then clicking on the "Dolls Without Hair" link.

This is related, I think, to a controversy from last January involving bald Barbie Dolls. Some people had set up a Facebook page asking Mattel to create a bald Barbie for girls going through chemotherapy, or who have alopecia (hair loss) for other reasons.  The site took off when a couple of news outlets wrote about it, and then really took off when a blogger for the American Cancer Society wrote a blog entry criticizing the Bald Barbie Facebook page, saying the dolls would scare small girls who would worry that they might get cancer. The blogger argued that childhood cancer is actually very rare -- more rare than lightening strikes, which is, according to the blog post, "why we don’t see advocates calling for lightning strike dolls."

This statement enraged parents of children with cancer, who thought the blogger, and by extension, the ACS, were downplaying the seriousness of childhood cancer. They offered further evidence in the amount of funding that the ACS devotes to childhood cancers (less than 1%). They flooded the ACS blog and Facebook page with questions, comments, and demands that the blogger (who is also their chief public relations officer (yikes)) be fired. The ACS apologized, but mishandled the entire situation after that, erasing critical Facebook comments, refusing to respond to inquiries about the amount of money they donate to childhood cancer, and just generally showing that they have no idea how social media works. (It basically requires being open to conversation with readers. It's not that tough.)

Anyway, the ACS lost on this one. All around.

• The blogger is still employed, but does not blog for ACS anymore.
• The Bald Barbie facebook page has 157,000 Likes.
• Parents are still angry. They still regularly post Facebook comments about ACS's lack of commitment to childhood cancer, even if the Facebook post has nothing to do with childhood cancer.
• In March, Mattel announced that they would make a "friend of Barbie" who is bald, to be sent directly to children's cancer wards.
• In April, MGA announced they would be making a "True Hope" line of dolls: three bald Bratz dolls, three bald Moxie Girlz dolls, and one bald Moxie Boyz doll.
• And now, at the end of June, Mattel again announced a bald doll, the American Girl doll.

The ACS blew it.

More importantly, lots of other companies didn't. The American Girl doll without hair will be available on its own; in addition, previously purchased customized dolls can be given a replacement head without the hair.

In some ways, this whole thing seems trivial. It's only a doll, after all. But the whole point of the bald Barbie, in the first place, was to question ideas about beauty, in an effort to help girls feel better about themselves. That's worth a lot. And it's nice to see that someone gets it.