a rant in which Naomi Wolf goes all "stepford wife" on me, and I cry

I was perusing an old New Yorker article by Margaret Talbot that P left out on the table today about Bratz dolls. We’re familiar with them because my 12-year-old cousin has had some for about 4 or 5 years now and in our pre-baby-j days, we had time to play with her and her toys. Talbot describes Bratz dolls, accurately, as having “large heads and skinny bodies; their almond-shaped eyes are tilted upward at the edges and adorned with thick crescents of eyeshadow, and their lips are lush and pillowy, glossed to a candy-apple sheen and rimmed with dark lip liner.” I can see the appeal of these dolls in that they look “ethnically indeterminate” (as Talbot describes them) and so, rather than being an African-American or Latina doll, they simply “convey difference.”

What disturbed me when I first saw Bratz was that (again quoting Talbot) “they wear the sly, dozy expression of a party girl after one too many mojitos,” and that to take off their shoes, you rip off their feet at the ankles. Really. Scared the hell out of me when my cousin showed me for the first time how to change from the stiletto sandals to the stiletto boots.

So I’m reading Margaret Talbot’s article, and then, out of nowhere, is a quote from Naomi Wolf:

...if I were betting on culture as a form of stocks, I would get out of skinny Barbie and into multi-ethnic, imaginative Bratz dolls.

Say what? That can’t be right. Naomi Wolf, who wrote The Beauty Myth, promoting Bratz?

I just had to check out the context of this quote for myself. Sure enough, two Google-hops later, I was reading the The Dove Report: Campaign for Real Beauty, where Wolf originally wrote the above in an essay for the Dove company.

If you read the entire essay, Wolf goes on...

And I would invest in Curves – the breakout phenomenon that welcomes women of all sizes into fitness – and not invest in liposuction equipment. Most of all, I would notice, for purposes that extend far beyond body image and physical self-esteem, where the future lies –not in the outdated image of teen girl struggling with bulimia, gazing at Seventeen and wishing she could look like a model so she could feel complete, but rather on the teen girl with a picture of Mia Hamm on her wall, both a prom dress and soccer cleats piled in her closet, who likes herself just fine, who thinks her mom is the most beautiful woman she knows, and who is listening to “Girl Power” and “Together We Can” from the Cheetah Girl’s CD.

I’m torn about the report itself, which appears to be rooted in the company’s latest “pro-age” campaign, which I certainly support, but research done by a commercial organization--regardless of what I feel about the results--always makes me skeptical. That’s another topic entirely.

So back to my point and never mind the fact that this essay was written in support of research done for the Dove company.

Hey, Naomi Wolf: What the f*** happened to you? Bratz? Curves? The organization whose founder backs anti-choice groups that have recently claimed abortions increase one’s risk of breast cancer? Promoting Disney's Cheetah Girls? Yeah, the Cheetah Girls don’t look like they’ve subscribed to the “beauty myth." Methinks Wolf has been possessed.

What's up with cloaking corporate interests in feminism?

Between Bratz and the Cheetah girls, it's clear that despite what Wolf writes in her essay, the beauty myth is still alive and well. It's just even more inclusive.

And now I cry.