Sports Illustrated released the 50th anniversary of its swimsuit edition on Tuesday, featuring a model on its promotional cover-wrap who caused quite a stir on social media sites: Barbie.
The sports magazine teamed up with Mattel for its “unapologetic” ad campaign featuring the doll posing in a black and white striped one-piece bathing suit. Barbie is not only in the four-page advertising feature in the magazine, but also in ads across the country featuring the word “#unapologetic” beneath it.
“This is not a program targeted towards girls. As a brand that is always a part of the cultural conversation, Barbie, for the first time, has an active voice in the debate with her #unapologetic stance. The goal of the campaign is to empower fans to engage and celebrate all that makes them who they are,” a Mattel spokeswoman told CNN.
While many are praising the campaign for being empowering and spunky, we can’t help but feel grossed out.
To put a children’s doll on the cover of a magazine that targets adult men seems just a tad inappropriate, even for Sports Illustrated’s standards. Not to mention the fact that the swimsuit edition is known for sexualizing women.
Beneath the cover-wrap is the actual swimsuit edition cover, featuring three topless models (Chrissy Teigen, Nina Agdal and Lily Aldridge) looking back at the camera and showing off colorful and barely-there bikini bottoms in front of a blue ocean scene. In Barbie’s photo she’s also looking back at the camera in a similar pose.
Does Mattel want the young people who play with its plastic dolls to aspire to look like it the way that their parents aspire to look like the cover models on Sports Illustrated? The fact that a magazine that features some of the sexiest people in the world has now featured a doll with a notoriously impossible standard of beauty on its cover-wrap is incredibly disturbing.
However, some pointed out that the union of brands made sense.
“It’s actually kind of perfect,” Occidental College professor Lisa Wade told CNN. “Barbie is the perfect model for the SI swimsuit issue. It’s always been about celebrating conventional definitions of attractiveness for women, and Barbie is an icon of idealized femininity.
“Both Barbie and the swimsuit issue have been making women and girls feel inadequate for decades. It’s a perfect partnership.”
Though Mattel’s four-page spread on their plastic cover-model praises “legends” and cites her 150 careers and 26 animated movies, it’s the last thing anyone’s thinking about or discussing while she’s on the cover-wrap in a bathing suit.
While Barbie has been everything from a doctor to an astronaut, Mattel and Sports Illustrated would rather throw her in a bathing suit, slap some sunglasses on her head and call her unapologetic, a marketing campaign used by self-proclaimed “bad girl” Rihanna back in 2012 and also the name of her album that year. Again, not the best technique for marketing a doll to young people.
“The fact that the version they want to focus their marketing blitz on is a sexy bikini Barbie tells us something,” Nicole Rodgers, editor-in-chief of RoleReboot.org, told CNN.
Excuse us if we’re #unapologetically disgusted by Mattel right now.
By Haley Costen
