Vatican-Approved Barbie

I don't know how I could have missed this, but about two weeks ago, an article in the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, pushed Mattel to start selling a Bald Barbie.

A little background: Late last year, a Facebook page was launched, asking Mattel to create a Beautiful and Bald Barbie for children with hair loss due to chemotherapy and other health problems, or for kids whose moms are having the same problems. The page was only modestly successful, until some news outlets starting reporting on it. And then a blogger from the American Cancer Society criticized the page's creator for trying to blackmail Mattel, and for comparing the rarity of childhood cancer to lightening strikes.*** After that, the page really took off, and they're up to about 156,000 Likes now.

Eventually, Mattel saw the light, and announced that they would be donating a limited number of bald Barbies to children's cancer hospitals. Before they did that, several other doll makers jumped on board and filled the need: American Girl Dolls, Bratz, and Moxie Girls.

And now the Vatican is weighing in on this. Mattel has said, to its credit, that it doesn't want to sell the bald Barbie dolls because it doesn't want to make a profit off of them. Very noble. (Of course, they also own American Girl, and they don 't seem to have a problem profiting off of THOSE bald dolls. But whatever.)

The Vatican paper is somewhat critical of Mattel's use of the doll up to this point, saying Barbie is "stigmatizing" because of the doll's unreal dimensions. And while Barbie has had friends like Becky, who uses a wheelchair, that wheelchair will not fit through Barbie's Dream House door. Plus, Becky's long hair gets caught in the wheels.

The L'Osservatore Romano article urges Mattel to make the dolls more widely available. Making them so limited in availability only adds to the stigma of cancer -- like it's something that needs to be hidden. (How very 1950's....)

I wish I could link to the original Vatican article; I think my rusty Italian could still handle it. Alas, I just can't find it online, and none of the articles I've seen in English  have a link to the original Italian.

It's clear to me that Mattel simply does not want to mess with the Barbie brand. It's an image of perfection, and cancer mars perfection. At least that's the message that they are sending. Which is wrong -- both morally wrong, and just plain incorrect.


**************************

[***OK, a little bragging. The ACS's critical blog post, and the ACS's response to people's outrage over the post, were so horrible -- they did everything that an organization absolutely should not do when confronted with a social media scandal -- that I had to use them as an example for an article that I wrote on how not be a social media writer. It will appear in a book on Social Media later this year. Thought I'd slip that in. I'm so much more than just a handsome lymphoma patient....]