Terry Prone: Forget the PR — in a Barbie world, girls are being bombarded with misogyny
Mattel got a lot of publicity — including in this column — for launching a range of Barbies featuring women in STEM, including Prof Sarah Gilbert (third from right). But I couldn't find Vaccinologist Barbie for sale anywhere, and girls are still being denied such positive, aspirational role models. Picture: Mattel/PA
The makers of Barbie have been knocking themselves out to move beyond anatomically weird sex object dolls and get into diversity. So they now have dolls of all hues, dolls in wheelchairs, even doctor dolls.
About two months ago, they made an enormous fuss of making a Barbie doll based on Professor Sarah Gilbert, the Oxford vaccinologist, who was key to the development of one of the Covid vaccines now being deployed worldwide. The publicity included her view that if the doll inspired girls to study science and go into medical research, that would be a win.
Fair point.
Go to Smyth’s the toy people, however, and the best of your purchasing intentions are frustrated by blank stares. No such a doll in their range of Barbies. Email their European PR people and, a week later, nothing. Having initially — in this column — drawn attention to the publicity around the ‘Dame Sarah Gilbert Barbie’, I want the other hacks who did likewise to feel as gullible as I do.
Age Friendly Ireland have been talking to older people’s councils (OPCs) about ageism in advertising and have learned that older people resent the hell out of the way they’re portrayed. This doesn’t happen elsewhere.
If, next year, you spend time in Florida, you can play spot the difference between how older people appear in advertising in Ireland and in Florida. For starters, they appear constantly in Florida. They appear in property ads offering gated communities. The pictures show older couples in pastel shorts, playing golf or tennis, laughing, made-up (in the case of the women) and attractive. On TV, they appear serving people in shops, having their eyes lasered, their wrinkles botoxed and their music tastes catered to.
Everywhere, they are, in the most positive possible portrayals.
Of course, Florida has rakes of old people. So has Ireland. So why is the portrayal so different here, where they’re ignored or presented as subservient, unattractive, dependent and grateful? (The latest gratitude is of an older woman to a young driver who doesn’t run over her. The forbearance of him.)
While Age Friendly Ireland are at it, maybe they’d look at the other side of the portrayal of older people in mainstream media, in news and current affairs coverage. The pandemic caused many media outlets to fall in love with a stock shot of wrinkly hands, one atop the other, over the crook of a walking stick. The over-60s didn’t fall in love with that shot to the same extent.
The majority of Irish people over 60 don’t need a walking stick and don’t live in a nursing home. They work, many of them, particularly those in family businesses.
We have publicans in their 90s still pulling pints and keeping order. Some older people play golf, are part of reading groups, mind grandchildren, or run the local meals on wheels. Many of the women take as much care of their hair, figure, fitness, wardrobe, and makeup as they did in their 40s, so that they could easily match the models in the Florida posters.
We have a bigger old person market than ever before. We have more fit, financially secure, intellectually competent, presentable old people than ever before — which makes the exclusion and the misrepresentation false and demeaning, and as offensive as misogyny.
I get my flu shot. The nurse in the GP clinic talks about the logistics of providing the vaccine booster to their 200-plus patients entitled to it. At a time when supply chains everywhere are getting the bends, our vaccine rollout looks more and more impressive.
Today, Boris flew to dinner in a men-only club. He had distinguished himself, in Glasgow, by falling asleep in the middle of proceedings, right beside David Attenborough, who was wide awake, despite his much more advanced years, because Attenborough actually cares about the survival of the planet.
Then Boris soared off to London in a private jet, thereby doing 50 times the damage to our planet than if he’d taken the train. Line him up there alongside Ursula Von der Leyen, who apparently takes jets to cover 50km journeys. This from the woman who got rid of Phil Hogan because of him driving around a bit during Covid.
Meanwhile, our own Taoiseach, fortunately, wasn’t one of those travelling in the 400 private jets at a conference to save the planet from the gasses emitted by private jets.
Some day, when aliens visit our uninhabited planet, one of them will tell another about this, and the other will say: “Nah. Couldn’t happen. Human leaders could never have been so stupid.” But they were. They are, right now.
Overnight, I had a recurrence of what used to be a regular nightmare about misplacing my baby, no doubt because of Cleo, the toddler abducted in Australia and recovered overnight by the cops.
My nightmare goes back to when my son was a few months old and always takes the same form. I am in town when I suddenly realise I should have a baby with me and don’t. I ring my husband who calmly reconstructs the crime and says I undoubtedly left our offspring on the bus, so I should go to the CIE lost property office, which I do, finding there a man bored out of his tree by his job who only half listens to me before pointing to a dark corner and saying, “the lost babies are over there”.
I go over and find a roundy coat hanger with a circular yoke at waist level like you’d normally stick a lost umbrella into, although the spaces are larger. At least six babies, swaddled to a point, are snuggled into this thing. They look at me in silence, do those babies, and I spin them around time after time, trying to work out which is mine and failing.
In the old days, when this happened, my husband, alerted by my sobbing, would wake me. Only once did the reverse happen: I woke up to find Tom moaning beside me as if recently stabbed. I woke him and he gave a shuddering sigh of relief, turned over, and started to go back to sleep until I demanded to know of what the nightmare consisted.
“They weren’t passing the ball through quick enough,” he muttered.
Pfizer announce they have a drug that’s phenomenal at killing Coronavirus. This puts a whole new and infinitely more positive cast on “living with Covid”.
The Revenue extend the property tax deadline. This is neither here nor there since I found out that the chartered surveyor putting a value on my house liked it. It may sound paradoxical, but you really don’t want the valuer to like your abode. You want them to hate it and value it at half nothing.
But you can’t accompany them around, rubbishing your own home saying things like “D’you see that leak?” Or “You didn’t miss the crack all the way up that wall, now, did you?”
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