saving girls from themselves

Them's the nicest kind.
Well, second nicest.

That's a shame. The first thing I learned about Australia is "throw a shrimp on the barbie".

It's the game, not the toy.

Take guns, for instance.
Do they mean that the kid who plays with them will become violent, even trigger-happy?
A gun today may become a pen or another type of instrument tomorrow.
The question is, how does the kid play with guns? How can the parent give content/context to the game. The kid must know why must the rebels defeat the Empire, and show both creativity, grit and humanity in his task. And he must learn to choose sides: be the fighter for independence, the GI-Joe in Normandy, the Vietcong, the Knight of Freedom, the Zapatista against the "Pelones" (and talk proudly with a heavy peasant accent), the proud defender of the slave escapees in their route North. And understand that the Indian killing cowboy, the henchman of the Nottingham Sheriff, the invader, the tyrant, are bound to lose, for they have no moral grounds to hold a sword, a gun, an arch and arrow.

Or take Barbies.
A big part of the creativity of that game is making/designing clothes for them, doing and undoing their hair. And making stories: the key here is the story to be played.
My daughter happily recalls the times when she played Barbies with my mother (God bless her soul), and my mom managed the "Cuban Barbies", who spoke with a heavy Cuban accent and always created some type of havoc, disgracing the male dolls and the "Sissy Barbies". Once the Cuban Barbies, tired of the machismo of the Jesse Ventura doll (yes, my daughter had a Jesse Ventura doll; my second son makes strange gifts), practically abducted him, made him dress in a Barbie Butterfly costume and paraded him in front of all the other dolls and stuffed animals.

Lol!! Sure.....I'll come back to you re the violence, and I understand what you mean re the Barbies...but would they be any LESS fun if they had remotely normal bodies?

dlowan wrote :



in my younger years in germany "kaethe kruse puppen (dolls) " were the rage for the girls .
if a boy ever dared touch one of those dolls , the girl might give him a fat lip .



i doubt that the measurements of those dolls would live up to ebrown's ideal - they'd probably be a little overweight . i doubt however that those dolls made any german girl unhappy .
too bad that my mother never bought me one of those dolls . i see that on the "antique roadshow" some of those dolls are appraised at 1,000's of pounds !
hbg

I figure the Toni doll I threw out is worth a lot now...


Anyway, these dolls are very cute.
I just realized I'm not yet over knitted doll sweaters. (My mother knit one for one of my dolls...)

It's not the measurements that make them so unPC, but the suspiciously Bavarian pigtails

Osso keeps mentioning her Toni doll and I had no idea what they looked like - so here is a picture. Apparently the doll came with a permanent wave kit. I think giving a pretend child a pretend chemical perm is as creepy as anything Barbie has been accused of.

I wore plaits just like that!!!

They are SO not Bavarian!!!

They look kind of worried, though, those dolls.

But tres cute.

My frigging mother threw out all my toys without asking me when I was 11.

I would likely have kept my special doll, and my sister's similar one, until I died.

Except that almost all the mums had perms back then...so it was like any pretend to be adult game.

That's how Barbie got started. The creator (a mother) saw her daughters liked to play with paper dolls that were adult women and she got the idea that they would like a 3 dimensional doll in which they could pretend to be adults. Baby dolls turn all little girls in mothers, Barbies let them express themselves as independent women.

Snort... that is true, I see it as strange too, green witch. The dolls were your basic promo, I think, for Toni home permanents. My dad directed the tv commercials. I was in one of them, as part of a classroom of kids - and what relevance the classroom of kids had to the home permanents is long excised from my memory if I ever understood it. I'm almost positive those particular ads weren't about the dolls.

Oh, ****, I wonder if those ads are online somewhere.

While i was overseas, my grandmother threw away many of my childhood mementos, including a baseball autographed by the 1954 New York Giants. That last may not mean anything to you, but it would to baseball fan, and that baseball would be worth a whole heap of money today.

I have a barbie.

What kind of things do you cook?

Prawns.

Real prawns, or just very large shrimp?

What are the Prawn measurements? Any prawn-ography?

for anyone who wants different dolls for their girls , how about these three ?



..................SAILOR .....................CAPTAIN.......................HELMSMAN

do they portray the real world more accurately ?

or how about this one ? it'll warn any kid not to get sick !



enough of a choice now ?

Them is pie-rats, ain't they?