I agree with most of what the two of you have said in your interesting discussion; I'll just add my own $0.02 here. There do seem to be lots of inborn predispositions, which could be thought of as 'threshold potentials'--which would explain why e.g. people who experience extremely traumatic events are traumatized to very different degrees, sometimes becoming inviable as human beings, but sometimes remaining capable of pretty much everything other humans can do.

I don't know what makes it so that some men or women become so self-identified with certain cultural images of ideal body shapes -- be it Barbie or He-Man/G.I.Joe. But it's an interesting fact that these people will keep seeing confirmations of their choices everywhere: they will look for all the aspects of society that support them, while avoiding contrary tendencies as irrelevant. The feedback effect can sometimes grow to enormous proportions.

Personally, I have nothing much against Barbie (other than the fact that she reflects only one ideal among many possible ones). As I said, my daughter plays with it, and she plays with lots of other toys; as far as I can see, she knows that toys are toys and are not supposed to be role models for reality. Maybe I'm fooling myself, but I really think she's simply going to outgrow her Barbie and concentrate on other things later on. Just like we all tend to do with toys.

Kristin Wiig is scary good.

I guess it's that whole nature-nurture arguement. Everything seems to come down to that eventually, doesn't it? Well I guess my answer is that the toys we play with as kids are a reflection of pre-existing warped social roles, not the cause, but they help to cement them. But they aren't the only things in culture that do. I bet that those parents who buy their girls barbie after she begs for it, but are reluctant, help to teach them that while it's fun to fantasize, Barbie isn't real and having Ken and the dreamhouse are not what matters in life. Same thing with boys, being told that while being strong and athletic like an action figure isn't a bad thing in life, they're not going to look like he-man and that it's also good to be smart and caring. Whereas if I'd been raised by my grandma who thought that it was wrong that my best friend was a boy and I liked to play with ninja turtles in the woods and therefore tried to make me into an 'appropriate girl' by buying me wedding day barbie and a tea set every christmas, I'd have ended up with more warped ideas.

As to your question why do some people end up starving themselves or taking steroids? Why do some people react to any presure or stimuli in a negative way while other people don't, some mix of different experience and a predisposition to reacting that way. For example, many people who have lung cancer smoked cigarettes. But not everyone who smokes cigarettes will end up with lung cancer. Now that's a simplistic comparison, but I think it works. Just because you're exposed to something doesn't mean it's going to affect you in a negative way, but it can if you have a physical or mental predisposition for the problem.

But boiling the whole thing down to Barbie is incredibly silly, like video games and violence or to use a more recent example, sexting and suicide. And I'm not advocating some kind of Barbie and action figure boycott, letting kids explore their imagination is a good thing. No one thing can be the cause of such complicated issues but I guess that doesn't mean that we shouldn't look at some of the things that we CAN control. We can't control media images of over-sexualized women with fake boobs or hyper masculine men with ripped abs and steroid fueled biceps. But we can teach kids that while it's fun to play with Barbie or He-Man they aren't real people and they shouldn't expect to grow up with He-Man's muscles or Barbie's boobs.

But no one ever explained to me that the Boba Fett action figure I treasured so much as a child was actually the personification of the ideal male, and thus, the source of all my shortcomings since I never actually grew up to become a badass, intergalactic bounty hunter. Like an idiot, I just thought I was playing with a cool toy.

But I've learned a lot from feminism since then. For example, if I get laid off from work, I'm totally going to blame it on violent video games.

@ Phio: I'd hazard a guess that Jim's "weak-minded" comment was intended to be sarcastic. My point was not that I feel like I'm completely unaffected by pop culture; however, I feel like some of the strenuous hue and cry over Barbie (much like the hue and cry over skinny models in fashion mags) makes it seem like the average woman's self-image is so delicate that she must be protected from anything that might make her feel bad. It just doesn't sound like a very feminist thought to me.

@Kozmic: I think the big question is, what makes people (women and men alike), end up with such a warped self-image? I mean, American pop culture is pretty homogeneous. I'm pretty sure that the majority of American guys of a certain age played with He-Man or GI Joe, while the majority of women played with Barbie at some point. Yet it's only a small subset of that population that ended up taking steroids or binging on diet pills and other nonsense. To me, blaming toys for messing people up makes about as much sense as those old arguments that listening to Judas Priest made kids violent.

I never played with Barbie, my grandma kept buying her for me because I wasn't quite enough of a girl for her tastes, I much prefered the ninja turtles, but I just kept trying get our chocolate lab to eat her. But I would argue that characters like he-man do have the equal potential for negative effects on boys. Walk into a gym lately? How many men versus women did you see hitting the weights trying to get HUGE? For sure, he-man (and seriously, could you get any more ridiculously gender normative and constrictive than a character called he-man?) doesn't generate nearly the level of debate that Barbie does. I suppose that could be simply because there is more focus on deconstructing femine norms, in part because those norms are more apparently (but not actually) destructive and limiting. A desire to be huge and muscular and manly doesn't have the dangers of wanting to be skinnier than humanly possible and resort to breast implants. But men are starting to have crazy surgery like calf implants and of course the steroid issue. So maybe it's time to open up the childhood toy debate to both genders. Boys shouldn't be encourage to want to be the Incredible Hulk (another masculinity cliche, uncontrolable anger, really?) anymore than girls should want to be Barbie. To fully break down one set of gender norms you have to break down the other.

And skin bleaching has been a legitimate phenomena, but among non-whites. However, blacks and asians wanting to appear white is a very serious issue for which I don't think we can say Barbie is the cause, however she is a reflection of the white = normal and attractive social problem.