Barbie's consumerism should act as a warning for our children, and the future - Christa Ackroyd

And judging by the amount of daily performances on at my local picture house they are anticipating a major hit.

Well I for one won’t be rushing to the pictures to see it although I guarantee my little ones will want to see the new Barbie ‘movie’ to use Hollywood parlance.

Thank goodness at five and seven they can’t, because it’s aimed at older children, and so as a result I won’t have to sit through it.

Its not that I have anything against Barbie and I love both Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, it’s just not my bag and never has been.

In fact a decade or so ago I was led to believe that Barbie would soon be no more. That the feminist voices had all but erased her. That she was not good for our children, that she represented all that was wrong in the world. Well Barbie is back with a big pink bang. Albeit in a film which it strikes me as definitely tongue in cheek.

So did a little doll really harm the psyche of generations upon generations of little girls?

Did she really make us reach for an unrealistic goal of how we should look and how we should live ? I don’t believe she did. I think children are so much cleverer than that. They know now as they knew then she is just a doll. And what is wrong with dolls?

I should say here and now I never had a Barbie. Maybe that’s why I am so dismissive of her. Instead I had a Sindy, which was pretty much the same thing, only less glamorous, less sparkly and more British with a boyfriend named Paul not Ken at a time when we were all backing Britain.

But it was pretty much the same concept albeit without the hundreds and hundreds of accessories that come with her American counterpart.

After all Barbie needs a house, a horse, a trailer, a car, and a wardrobe doesn’t she? Well no she doesn’t. Nor do children need all the pieces of plastic they are persuaded is part of her every day living. But does the image of what is after all is just a doll really create young girls who are desperate for perfection, want the perfect body and all the accessories of a life of riches?

No she does not. She is a doll, the kind of doll you probably are drawn to when you reach the grand old age of maybe seven and decide you are too old to play with dollies any more.

Actually Sindy, like Barbie, never figured much in my life. I was never a doll kind of a girl. Once I had cut her hair with my mum’s dressmaking scissors ( ooh she wasn’t happy) and had drawn over her body with felt tip pens poor Sindy was consigned like all my other dolls to the back of the toy cupboard.

Just like my beautiful coach built pram saved up for my hard-working parents for Christmas was filled with stones to build a wall or worse still used to push around the poor neighbour’s dog. It was at that stage my mum declared me a tomboy (was that wrong?) and stopped trying to force me into beautiful hand smocked dresses which I always detested and let me ride my bike.

But even then I had an ‘each to their own’ attitude and if my friends wanted to play with their dolls so be it.

Far from being destroyed Barbie has been reinvented. There are Barbies with disabilities, Barbies with Down’s Syndrome, plus size Barbies, Barbies of different ethnicities and many many more. Barbie now wants to be a scientist or a doctor and does not see the be all and end all being to dress up and drive around in her flash pink car. She has, after more than 70 years, finally come of age.

And that’s great because little girls if they like dolls want one that looks like them and dreams like them. And for that Mattel should be applauded.

But there is still one thing that Barbie can’t get away from and that is her part in consumerism. Children are wise. They know in their heart of hearts that plastic is wrong. That it is killing the creatures in our oceans.

They use reusable cups and bamboo toothbrushes but still are susceptible to marketing where just having a Barbie and maybe even a Ken isn’t enough. They want every piece of plastic which goes with her. And do you know something so are we.

This last week saw the death of sixties icon Jane Birkin, she of the gamine, doe-eyed qualities that I could never look like in a million years but still admired.

That and the fact she brought out a naughty, breathy, record that the BBC banned and we thought was so cool because it wasn’t allowed. But she also begat the Birkin handbag.

And if Barbie champions children’s must-have marketing then we as adults should know better than to still be susceptible to it. There is nothing more ridiculous and over-priced than a handbag carried by the stars that starts at an already eye watering £8,000 and reaches a price tag of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

So if we bemoan our little ones wanting to wear pink or buy a teenage shaped doll and all her accessories we should also look at our own aspirations, or at least those that continue to be foisted upon us. If I had all money in the world I could never stomach to pay that much for a handbag. I am far too Yorkshire for that.

And if I did I would be so terrified of using it that it would be kept in the cupboard in its cover. But then I understand that’s what many women do, just to say they own one and look at it occasionally. What is the point in that?

As for a little doll corrupting our little girls there are so many more important battles to fight. In the same national newspaper where the film was reviewed and the impossibly glamorous stars were photographed on the red carpet, were a number of other show business stories.

A quick flick through identified phrases attached to various women such as ‘ample bodied’, ‘flat toned abs’, ‘sizzling figure’ and ‘channelling the blonde bombshell’. And that dear readers remains the problem, where women, successful women, are still judged by what they look like rather than all they have achieved.

But please let us not lay all our children’s insecurities at the pink plastic door of a little doll while still allowing ourselves as adults to be influenced by the body beautiful images we are surrounded by on a daily basis.

Or worse still become fixated on a piece of leather that screams look what I’ve got rather than look at who I am. And that dear readers is the most important lesson we can all teach our little girls … to know the difference.