Well, if we wanted to go into the history of the Barbie mystique, that discussion could take years. Suffice it to say that Barbie was a marketing product of the 1950s, when the idea of a woman as a toy was making a huge comeback after women were laid off from the blue collar workforce with the return of the WW2 veterans. The beginning of the 1950s were the first era that actively sought the "leisure lifestyle", and Barbie, with her "perfect toy woman" look was not only the kind of role model kids sought in those days, she was also the expression of time that sought to refocus how men and women perceived each other. She was also the first toy to be heavily marketed on that new medium, television. Others were, sure, but not to the degree Barbie was. And being a passive medium by its very nature, the marketing could be all the more persuasive because it didn't allow interaction. And since many of the Boomers grew up with the Barbie image hopelessly ingrained in them, it's no surprise that she should be the model of "beauty" for not only the Boomers but succeeding generations. We've had nothing to counterpoint it. Just as a side note, I had a friend over for dinner the other night, an advertising art director whose agency handles a chain of women's clothing stores in the region. They were doing new ads for the chain's lingerie, and he commented with a laugh that they had taken the photos of the models and "selectively stretched" them to give them longer legs and a more "fashion illustration" sense of proportion. We seem to have life now mirroring not just art, but a particularly impossible art form at that...