International Women's Day and Barbie Dolls

The first IWD was a socialist party event in 1909.  It was originally called International Working Women’s Day and is always celebrated on March 8.  Its origins were centered in Eastern Europe and became a national holiday in the Soviet Union in 1917.  Since then the holiday has morphed, according to cultural preferences, to reflect everything from the contributions of women to chivalric concerns, to more social and economic empowerment.

            The U.N.’s formal title for this IWD is “Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step It Up for Gender Equality.”  I appreciate the sentiment but talk is cheap in an organization that lionizes Middle Eastern Islamic cultures which deny women even rudimentary human rights, let alone putting them on equal footing with anything that has even one descended testicle.  But, most of us can agree that women should be allowed to drive, protected from sexual harassment and assured equal access to education and job opportunities commensurate with their wishes, talent and drive.  We will leave the Middle East to deal with its latent homosexual fixations and concentrate on civilized Western cultures. 

            And that brings me to today’s historic milestone.  There is something just too rich in yesterday being International Women’s Day and today being the anniversary of the creation of Barbie Dolls in 1959. 

            In many ways the creation of the Barbie Doll is the kind of success story that I, as a free-market advocate, love.  Business woman Ruth Handler noticed that her daughter often put her favorite paper dolls in the rolls of adults when she was playing with them.  Since children’s dolls at that time were usually infants, Handler saw an exploitable hole in the marketing of children’s toys.  Her husband was a co-founder of Mattel Toys and was not particularly impressed with the idea when she suggested an adult formed doll.  But, after being shown a German model of the same, Bild Lille, Mattel fashioned the doll, introduced it at the American International Toy Fair on March 9, 1959.  The rest of the story you know.

            My daughters never owned a Barbie Doll.  I made it clear from the beginning that they were not to be given Barbie Dolls.  Any other kind of doll was fine, but my house was a Barbie-free zone. 

I was offended by everything Barbie.  I grew up in the heart of the feminist era, and have been true to its message from the beginning.  I consider all decisions based on biases of gender, race, any of the superficialities of culture or accident of birth to be inefficient. 

When it comes to equal pay, decisions must follow supply and demand.  I do not believe that being a woman offers any more credibility to a person than does being a man.  A woman should NOT deserve as much money as her boss, whether that person is a man or a woman.  If there are fewer people capable of doing the bosses job, the boss deserves more money for those skills.   If you want to be the boss, compete for it.  Current pay gaps don’t reflect what women are paid, so much as how many of them are in high paying positions. 

Neither should “equality” mean that women should act like men.  Ladies, I love men, but why should we really ape a lesser ape?  And how does imitating men make you their equal?  True equality exists in women being seen as worthy human beings, not as masculine knock-offs.  Who said that men were the template by which humanity is to be judged? 

I enjoy being a girl, and I keep the faith.