THROW ANOTHER BARBIE ON THE BARBY

Apparently it's very common for children to mutilate Barbie dolls:

Barbie, that plastic icon of girlhood fantasy play, is routinely tortured by children, research has found.

The methods of mutilation are varied and creative, ranging from scalping to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving, according to academics from the University of Bath.

Psychologists studying this phenomenon have, of course, found this to be more than just kids being kids:

“You might expect little girls to love their Barbie and expect an imaginary love in return. Instead girls feel violence and hatred towards their Barbie,” Agnes Nairn, one of the researchers, said.

“The children never talked of one single, special Barbie. The girls almost always talked about having a box full of Barbies. So to them Barbie has come to symbolise excess. Barbies are not special; they are disposable, and are thrown away and rejected,” Dr Nairn said.

She added: “On a deeper level Barbie has become inanimate. She has lost any individual warmth that she might have possessed if she were perceived as a singular person. This may go some way towards explaining the violence and torture.”

Okay, enough of the psycho-babble, why are kiddies torturing their barbies?

“The children we were talking to were aged 7 to 11, whereas the right age for having a Barbie seems now to be 4, even though Barbie doesn’t exactly look like it is aimed at four-year-olds,” Dr Nairn added. She and her colleagues Christine Griffin and Patricia Gaya Wicks concluded that, while adults may find a child’s delight in breaking, mutilating and torturing their dolls to be disturbing, from the child’s point of view they were simply being imaginative in disposing of an excessive commodity, in the same way as one might crush cans for recycling.

I wonder how much it cost to work out that astonishing revelation? Better yet, why would anyone give a damn why kids mutiliate Barbies?

Update: It's good to see a lefty blogger who finds humour in Suicide-Bomber Barbie. Wonder if she'd see the humour in a GI Joe doll holding Osama's severed balls?

Anybody got any idea what became of poor Cody.