Well, I am happy to report that my favorite rant subject is back in the news.  Artist Nickolay Lamm  used average, American teenage girl measurements from the Center for Disease Control to put together a realistically proportioned Barbie doll. 

It’s an easy topic and I was all set to get up on my high horse again, until I started reading the thoughtful comments from young women in response to this article in Teenspot.  One young woman commented that all this talk about averages made skinny girls like herself uncomfortable with their own bodies in that they were no longer considered normal.  Another said that you really can’t a doll for making girls not feel pretty enough.  It’s people being mean that’s the problem.

What I got from this is that there are some pretty thoughtful young people out there, and they’re not buying the easy target blame game.  And this means that there are a lot of good parents out there teaching proper good real life lessons.  It strikes me that there is an important truism about the power of image here, that their effect is visceral and knee jerk.  It’s a lot harder to think. So yes, we have a lot of work to do educating our children in human diversity, self image, and self respect.  It’s so easy to point fingers and much harder to effect real solutions.