So a week or so ago this post on gendered dimorphism in Disney characters popped up in my newsfeed: "Help! My eyeball is bigger than my wrist!" (http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/12/17/help-my-eyeball-is-bigger-than-my-wrist-gender-dimorphism-in-frozen/)

Then a couple days ago I was cleaning the playroom, sorting and organizing (and, yes, clandestinely tossing certain items) and in the process came across mostly dismembered Barbie and other doll heads, torsos and legs. And here's what I found:

This was a truly enormous head. For comparison, here's a Barbie head side-by-side:

So when I had matched up everything else I was left with this and my first thought was, well, this can't possibly be right!

But I tried it anyway. And I thought, whoa. This isn't "help my eyeball is bigger than my wrist," this is "help my eyes are bigger than my boobs and my whole torso could fit inside my hairdo."

Again, a comparison side-by-side with a good ol'fashioned wholesome Barbie: her head is bigger than Barbie's but her whole teeny body is about the length of Barbie's torso.

Bottom line: our culture gives us such increasingly unrealistic representations of women's bodies that at this point Barbie looks relatively normal! 

following up

So, I changed my Facebook gender to "male." Since then, here are some representative ads that keep popping up in my newsfeed:

Just to remind you, this is the ad that prompted me to this radical act:

Now that I'm a "man," Facebook and its advertisers can assume I have interests in 1) traveling, 2) playing violent video games, 3) staying warm, 4) living in a house, 5) playing poker. As a woman though, my interests were: lose weight and be sexy.

I am so glad that now that I'm a (hu)man, I can be interested in (hu)man things, and not just woman things.

Oh, and, now that I'm a (hu)man, Facebook and advertisers assume that I also probably have an interest in exploiting women! Oh, funtimes, Facebook, funtimes! Thanks for making this holiday season so special in such a mainstream, accepted, sexist and misogynist way. I'll be hitting on some single ladeez (despite my married status) right after I order some luxurious Princeton University knitwear crafted especially for alumni, despite the fact that I'm not a University alum, because I went to Princeton Seminary.