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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

In defence of Barbie, that waist is at least partially utilitarian. It's there to hold the cloths on. Dresses would fall off a more human figure as soon as the kid turned it upside down. It's an answer to the interesting design challenge of trying to scale clothing down to doll proportions without resorting to paper-thin microcloth.

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Also, the argument that Barbie isn't realistic doesn't make much sense. We exaggerate almost everything for kids to make it easier for them to understand. E.g. moms speak to their kids in what academics call 'motherese', to make it easier for them to pick up on the syllables. Kids get dressed in gaudy colors that would look ridiculous on adults. And they get fed foods with super exaggerated flavor profiles, e.g. ketchup. All of this is because children's senses are still developing.

So I don't see why it's surprising that popular children's toys would represent sort of the platonic ideal of the human form. In reality most people's calves and hips do flare out to some extent, so it makes sense that those sorts of features would be accentuated when reduced to toy form.

The effectiveness of motherese is a matter of debate, since it is not a cultural universal. There is a lot of cultural variation with the other simplifications for children that you mentioned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_talk

His point doesn't rely on it being effective. He's just pointing out that it's a widespread part of culture.

It works for dogs too. Universally, a slightly higher pitch is used when talking to puppies. The dogs learn that higher pitch is for them an so pay more attention when hearing it.

Do you mean when we speak with them, or parent dogs "talking" to their puppies?

On the recorded lectures from Robert Sapolsky, he talks about motherese being both about teaching language and expressing emotion. The aspect of language is absent when people "talk" to their pets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIOQgY1tqrU

Also, my Max Steel dolls were completely unrealistic but I wouldn't have liked it if they were made to look like a typical american male.

Your child should have only a cube, a tetrahedron and an icosahedron to play with, if we're talking platonic ideals, and dodecahedra are way out.

Agree on your points about exaggerated stuff for kids, but...

> And they get fed foods with super exaggerated flavor profiles, e.g. ketchup

What? Since when is ketchup a kids food? That's a pretty widely popular condiment among all ages.

Most people whose eating habits I've observed over a long period (i.e. my family) use it much less as adults than they did as children. When I was young I dutifully glopped it onto all the traditional foods. Now it seems kind of gross: cloying sweetness with a hint of tomato sauce, and it kind of smells like cough syrup. Sweet is fine, and tomato sauce is fine, in the right dish. Neither of those flavors are appealing straight out of a medicine bottle. All the kids I know consume mass quantities, but most adults have more sophisticated taste.

Kids use it more sure, but most adults still eat ketchup, just on certain dishes like fries for example. That children over do something doesn't make it a child's food.

The (amusing in its existence) lobbying group for the hot dog industry agrees (scroll down a bit or just search for ketchup)

http://www.hot-dog.org/culture/hot-dog-etiquette

Well it counts as a vegetable in school lunches....

> [ketchup] counts as a vegetable in school lunches...

That is a myth. The truth is fairly complex but boils down to that one agency briefly proposed adopting rules that might if adopted have allowed things like pickle relish to "count as a vegetable" in certain contexts.

Ketchup was not explicitly listed in the proposed rule and the rule never took effect so we'll never know how local authorities might have used that bit of new flexibility.

TL;DR: Ketchup has never counted as a vegetable. (Salsa, on the other hand...)

More here:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2517/did-the-reagan...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable

As an adult who loves dressing with vibrant colours, I wonder if I'm still developing my senses or just look ridiculous!

So we exaggerate female proportions so that girls understand how they should look?

We exaggerate female proportions so that they are better recognized as female by children. This is true of cartoons (barbie is essentially a cartoon person) TV, film, advertising, even music. When you want to sell something to a group you adopt an image which leaves little room for debate.

This holds true for male dolls too. I saw a great interview with Mark Hamel once about the evolution of Luke Skywalker dolls, which are now more WWE than a realistic portrayal of his character.

I wouldn't say that we exaggerate, we give recognizable symbols. For example, in many cartoons, female cartoon characters have eyelashes drawn on their eyes to distinguish them as females, children and adults alike. Now this actually makes no sense because men naturally have thicker eyelashes, and what those eyes were originally supposed to represent were mascara, but then it caught on as a recognizable symbol for being female, despite having no basis in reality. And it's crazy how effective it none the less is.

The eyelash thing is part of the larger phenomena of cuteness. Mammals, be them human babies or puppies, have larger eyes in relation to their heads. It's one of the things that identifies them as young. Women use makeup to draw attention to their eyes, to make them appear bigger and therefore more youthful. So while men may have thicker eyelashes, it is women who generally accentuate their eyelashes, resulting in the social convention that any cartoon with drawn eyelashes is female.

Look at the animation in Archer. Lana and Archer both have thick eyebrows, but Archer doesn't have any eyelashes.

For more on this (and it's a bit creepy, btw... yay, biology!), google "Neoteny"

Well yeah, I wasn't trying to claim it came out of nowhere. Just that the convention broadened to such a degree that it didn't make sense anymore, but we still understand it because humans are all about symbols.

We for sure don't feed kids corn syrup and dress them ridiculously because their senses are still developing.

Would clothes fall off a Barbie doll if you flipped it upside down? Do they fall off of Ken? I find that argument highly questionable.

> We for sure don't feed kids corn syrup and dress them ridiculously because their senses are still developing.

http://gladwell.com/the-ketchup-conundrum/

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/06/30/do-babies-...

> We for sure don't feed kids corn syrup and dress them ridiculously because their senses are still developing.

In some senses, yes, we do. Children often like brightly colored clothes (and objects in general), or clothes with large, obvious representations of things they like.

Foods with strong uncomplicated flavor profiles also go over well. Mac & Cheese, Chicken tenders, etc.

Ken wears pants

But what if ken wants to wear a dress?

Or a kilt?

Or a sporran. I'd like to see them make a leather strap that size that can be tightened but not break, and still not fall off.

Not to mention the size of stitches and seams will be greatly magnified on a very small clothing mannequin (which is what Barbie is ultimately -- it's all about the outfits). This means that places where the clothing should hang and flow also have to be exaggerated, so the tiny waist makes sense.

And any fasteners are ridiculously oversized so they can be handled by human fingers.

Especially tiny human fingers.

The article says that Barbie copied its figure from an scort doll. And it is from there that it got its figure. Or maybe I missunderstood the title, the article and the pictures.

GI Joe dolls have clothes and the physique of a refrigerator.

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