Barbie: Fantastic femme or plastic paradox?

She's had over 75 occupations, from rock star to nurse. She's been an astronaut, an army officer and an airplane pilot. She's been an Olympic skier, a gymnast, a soccer player and a skater. And she's done it all in arch-breakingly high heels.

Barbie, who strutted onto the under-12 scene in 1959 with over 350,000 sales, is now, according to cnn.com, a $1.9 billion per-year industry, making her the bestselling toy in the world.

Barbie's proportions, 36-18-33, are humanly impossible. Barbie's feet are so small that a real person with comparable dimensions wouldn't be able to walk.

Yet her biologically baffling bod has become a standard of beauty many young girls strive to achieve. And that's a heavy burden to carry on such tiny shoulders.

Boobs, butts and blatant lies

While Barbie has risen to the status of America's blonde-haired, blue-eyed sweetheart, the 11 1/2" icon of innocence has a dirty past.

Though Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler named the doll after her daughter, Barbie Millicent Roberts, the name was where their similarities ended. According to Forever Barbie by M.G. Lord, Handler based Barbie's body on that of a doll, "Lilli," she found during a trip to Germany. The doll was sold as a sex toy for men.

In 1959, after revamping her look and replacing her sexual parts with smooth plastic, Handler stuck the doll in a black-and-white-striped swimsuit and distributed the previously pornographic plaything directly into the hands of little girls.

Forty-three years later, Barbie has had over one billion articles of clothing, says adiosbarbie.com. And like her wardrobe, her influence has grown considerably. Child therapist and licensed clinical social worker Vicki Zaitz is not so sure that's a good thing. Mass-production of the pink, plastic princess, she believes, sends girls the message that only one body type is acceptable. "Barbie reinforces the idea that all bodies look the same, that there is one perfect way to look," Zaitz explains. "And if you don't look that way, there's something wrong with you."

If that's the case, then more than half of the human race is severely flawed, says senior Mahogony Lee, who just doesn't believe that Barbie's measurements have anything to do with reality. "Nobody has a waistline that small; it's unrealistic," she scoffs. "And let's talk about her boobs! What size are they supposed to be? Triple E?"Though Lee sees right through the anatomical conundrum, Zaitz says Barbie's proportions are not the only misleading aspect of her looks. "Before Mattel made Barbies of color," she explains, "there were the added criteria that you had to have white skin and straight hair to be beautiful."

Even now, the vast majority of available Barbies look like prototypes of Hitler's Master Race, and most of the few existing black Barbies have blue eyes. Thus, says Zaitz, girls get the message that brighter is better.

As a child, Lee was confused by her "Black Like Me Barbie," which, she says, was not black like her. "I had a black Barbie when I was young. It had pink lipstick and long, straight hair," she recalls. "And black people's hair isn't supposed to be straight; it's supposed to be bushy."

Lee eventually remedied the racial identity crisis her Barbie was having. "After I played with her for a while, her hair got real nappy," she laughs. "I was like, ‘That's more like it!'"

Dumb blonde

It's not just Barbie's physically impossible build that can harm girls' self esteem. According to Zaitz, since Barbie's main play interest is accessorizing, girls learn to prioritize surface beauty over talent and activity. "With Barbie, the focus is on combing her hair and changing her outfit. Girls become preoccupied with creating perfect feminine beauty," she explains.

And while Barbie can do more than just model the latest fashion—she sunbathes by her dreamhouse, drives her Malibu Jeep, plays dead—most of her "careers" revolve around her outfits.

What's the difference between "Surgeon Barbie" and "*NSYNC #1 Fan Barbie?" One wears a band t-shirt, the other kicks it in form-fitting scrubs. Even with a Barbie whose occupation calls for saving people's lives, just about the only thing you can do with her is change her clothes.

In 1994, Mattel furthered the perception of Barbie as blonde, buxom and brainless by giving her a voice box. Uttering ditzy phrases such as "Let's go shopping" and "Math is hard," Barbie confirmed the old adage that it's better to keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and be known one.

But Zaitz feels that Barbie's words harmed more than just her reputation. Having the idol of many young girls support the sexist view that girls can't do math, she says, is a "very negative thing" which can lead to detrimental self-fulfilling prophecies. "Even to little girls who might be enjoying their Barbies and not finding math to be hard, we're sending a false message that math is not for girls," she says.

Zaitz says that by perpetuating this stereotype, the doll exacerbates the already large gender gap in the two fields where women are most under-represented. "The lack of role models in science and mathematics makes young girls feel that they can't go into those fields," Zaitz explains. "And here we have Barbie saying, ‘Math is hard,' so not only will girls think of math as a boy's thing, they won't even identify the strengths within themselves."

Senior Brittany Butler believes that Barbie's case is hopeless unless Mattel fills her hollow head with something other than hair that grows when you turn her arm. "They could make her smarter," she says. "Even Teacher Barbie looks like a ditz."