Mattel apologises for book that says Barbie can't develop a game without help from boys

Now what exactly do you expect a Barbie girl to do? As this very enlightening Aqua song enlightened us back in the nineties, a Barbie girl’s life is plastic, hence ‘fantastic’. “You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere, imagination, life is your creation,” Barbie girl told the world in a baby voice.

However, Barbie was not be restricted by pop music stereotypes. Very valiantly, she took to other enviable professions. She tried her hand at being everything from a surgeon and member of the US Marine Corps to an astronaut. Heck, she even became the President of the United States.

But they all looked the same - impossibly thin waistlines, shiny hair, chiselled jawline et al.

So when last year Random House decided to come out with a book titled Barbie: I Can Be A Computer Engineer we didn’t quite expect the said Barbie to look like a dark circled coder. Obviously, the book didn’t disappoint.

Barbie, as represented in the book, is a waist-less willowy girl with shiny blonde hair. She is (obviously) obsessed with pink and even wears a pink heart shaped flash drive around her neck. But this is hardly the main problem with the book.

Aja Romano writes in the Daily Dot , “The book is bafflingly called Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer. It was written by Susan Marenco and published by Random House. Despite its encouraging title, Marenco’s book actually tells pre-teen girls that Barbie can only contribute to the design of the game she’s building.”

The Guardian excerpts a part of the book in their article on the book:

“I’m only creating the design ideas,” Barbie says, laughing. “I’ll need Steven and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game!”

Obviously, women can’t make real games. And if this Barbie is anything to go by, it seems that women can only design the wardrobe of the characters of a game, at best.

Understandably, the book led to wide-scale outrage, resulting in Mattel and Random House taking it off Amazon.  

TechCrunch reports that though the book has been around for a while, Walt Disney writer Pamela Ribbon found it at a friends house and was horrified at the contents. She then wrote a blog that went viral and was then published on Gizmodo  yesterday.

The attention that the blog got also translated into overwhelming criticism against Mattel. Twitter burst out in outrage, even if a little late, forcing Mattel to apologise for the broad generalisations made in the book.

In fact, on its officia l Facebook page, the Barbie makers put an apology up: “The Barbie I Can Be A Computer Engineer book was published in 2010. Since that time we have reworked our Barbie books. The portrayal of Barbie in this specific story doesn’t reflect the Brand’s vision for what Barbie stands for. We believe girls should be empowered to understand that anything is possible and believe they live in a world without limits. We apologize that this book didn’t reflect that belief. All Barbie titles moving forward will be written to inspire girl’s imaginations and portray an empowered Barbie character.”