Lemondrop

We were all fired up about the newly released images of Mattel's upcoming 'Mad Men' doll: Rather than take the opportunity to create a doll with Christina Hendrick's curves, the toy manufacturer made a Joan Holloway figure with Barbie's classically unrealistic waist-to-hip ratio.

But are we being overly critical about something that's "just a toy"? Some readers seem to think so.

Asha Vaught says, "This is ridiculous. As a little girl I played with barbie dolls and I never even THOUGHT to wonder about the proportions. All I cared about was playing with the Barbie dolls and my imagination!"

As a women's site, naturally we're hyper-aware of the messages being sent to young, impressionable girls. But Kevin says, "Let a little girl play with it and not make it into a political statement!"

JA adds, "I want to scream every time someone says, 'Barbie is sending out the wrong message to our kids. Making them have eating disorders.' I suffered from an eating disorder for years. It did not have a damn thing to do with Barbie. Raise your kids to eat healthy, give them love, teach them that ALL people are beautiful and most of all that Barbie is a toy!"

"If you don't like them, don't buy them for your children," argues Joe. "Besides, these dolls have been this way for 50 years." But five enduring decades of pin-thin Barbie dolls emphasize our point precisely. Even as ladymags make strides to include a variety of body types in their glossy pages, the most popular toy in the world remains desperately in need of a realistic makeover.

One reader testifies that she did contemplate Barbie's abnormally skinny figure as a child. Says Sara, "It always struck me as odd that Barbie wasn't just thin, she was inhumanly skinny, with proportions so exaggerated that they were anything but realistic, even for thin women."

Rachel understands our point of view but sees it in a slightly different light: "Since Mattel has never made a Barbie that is "curvy", so to speak, people may take the new curves the wrong way and say that Mattel calling Joan Holloway fat (which she is not) and making fun of her. They probably thought it was better to just keep all of the dolls equally proportioned as to not offend anyone. I think it is kind of a lose-lose situation for them."

Tell us! What do you think -- does Barbie's implausible proportions play into the body image perceptions of little girls? Or are we making too big a deal about something that's just a plaything?