For a Barbie girl in a Barbie world, life in plastic may very well be fantastic. But it’s not real.

For better or for worse, Barbie dolls are part of our culture. Barbie is also just one of many aspects of society that set impossible expectations for young girls, teenagers and women to meet a standard of conventional beauty.

Digital artist Nicolay Lamm, 24, recently gained recognition for his creation of a “normal” Barbie doll based off of an average 19-year-old’s body measurements, taken from the Center for Disease Control. Images comparing Lamm’s model to the doll many of us grew up with have gone viral on the web.

This kind of artistic experiment is necessary, as it starts a conversation about what we perceive as beautiful and what’s realistic.

Rehabs.com, which helps people learn about options for treating addictions, created an infographic proving that Barbie would never be able to exist in real life.

According to the website, if Barbie was human, she would have a 16-inch waist that is smaller than her head — and that head is much too large for her miniscule neck. She wouldn’t even have room in her torso for internal organs. Her legs would be 50 percent longer than her arms, while the average woman’s legs are only 20 percent longer. Her ankles would be so tiny they wouldn’t even be able to support her body or allow her to walk.

Lamm thanked the media that helped publicize his project, including “Good Morning America,” The Huffington Post and Business Insider. He said, “You helped show that average is beautiful.”

Average is beautiful — because the “average” he is talking about means normal and healthy, not the completely irrational ideal that patriarchy has crafted for us.

According to the CDC, the average American woman older than 20 years old weighs 165 pounds — about a size 12 or 14. Fashion designer and photographer Karl Lagerfield made headlines last year when he called singer Adele “a little too fat,” when she was a size 16.

This idea that women must meet a beauty standard is dangerous. It’s why women feel they must wear makeup, endure extreme dieting and even undergo plastic surgery to change their natural features.

Actor Dustin Hoffman learned this when he was made up as a woman for the 1982 comedy film, “Tootsie.” An interview with the American Film Institute from the 1980s was posted in December 2012, but suddenly spread across the Internet this past month.

Hoffman said he quickly realized he did not look beautiful as a woman. He felt his character didn’t meet the physical demands that we are brought up to think women should have. He teared up in the middle of the interview and said he felt he’d been brainwashed into believing the only women worth knowing were those that looked a certain way.

Hoffman had the same realization many girls have had to deal with at a young age — that moment when it’s clear society thinks we should look a certain way. But that’s just not how we are built.

It’s unfair and unrealistic for women to be expected to look any way other than how they are born. It’s sad that women and girls doubt their self worth based on superficial expectations they cannot meet.

We’re bombarded with dolls, models, movie stars, magazine covers, billboards and music videos that reinforce this conventional beauty, but every now and then we see projects and hear people explaining why this isn’t right and that this isn’t how things should be.

This is the right direction to head in, and we need more of that.

The “normal” Barbie sets a much better example for young girls than the classic Barbie doll. But not until this type of Barbie is manufactured, distributed and accepted as the actual norm will I feel more confident that things are really changing.

Laura Cohen is a junior magazine journalism and women’s and gender studies major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at [email protected]. 

Published on July 17, 2013 at 9:16 am