Role Models

I am 31 years old and I play with action figures. Last night, I caught myself staring at my Primus figure's planet mode trying to imagine all the little roads and cities on its surface that I couldn't see. Yes, it's a toy. No, the features I was imagining are not there; but for a long moment it was almost as if I could really believe that they were - could really see where towers and plazas would be if I were able to get closer to the planet's surface. I could imagine Tyger Pax, Altihex, Kalis, the Rust Sea...here might be Vos and here Tarn or Polyhex, here might be Darkmount. I searched for the Sonic Canyons, and I wondered where inside I might find Vector Sigma.
I've been passionate about toys, especially Transformers toys, since before I had any idea that they might be kept in a collection. As I child, I had He-Man, GI Joe, and Dino-Riders figures as well. I even had a My Little Pony! (My parents were kind of progressive.) I also had MASK toys, which I loved, and they were the first toys that I really had an interest in collecting. I watched and loved cartoons like Silverhawks and Thundercats, but it wasn't only animation that I was interested in. This was the 80s, and MTV was a fledgling network. Though my family had doubts about some of the content of the videos, I saw my fair share of artists breaking the mold and forging a new path for music on television. Considering the types of show that MTV now airs, it's funny to think that my parents were worried about Madonna being a bad influence back then!
"Influence" is precisely what I'm going on about here. For many years, there has been talk about Barbie dolls and how they affect little girls. "Is Barbie a good role model?" I once heard someone ask that on the radio. Her proportions are unrealistic; we all know this. What does Barbie tell young women about how they should value themselves?

What role is Barbie playing? What role is she modeling? Mother? Wife? Woman? Can we look at Barbie and say what her values are, what her parenting style is, or whether or not she might get a bonus this quarter? If a child sees Barbie as a role model, he or she must be making a judgment about her. What judgments can we make about her, and, perhaps more importantly, how do we learn to make those judgments?
Barbie has no character to judge. She is not a person. Yes, her proportions are unrealistic - this is a common problem with women who are not real women but dolls made of plastics and paint. I'm not a sociologist. I don't know anything about the neuroscience of self-esteem. I can only speak from my own perspective. I never once looked to my toys as role models. My toys were not playing roles extrinsic from my imagination; they were my toys, and they played whatever role I wanted them to. Skeletor never beat He-Man, but if I wanted to make him kick He-Man off a cliff into a pit full of Decepticons and Inhumanoids, I could easily make that happen. I didn't look at He-Man as any example of what I should look like; He-Man lived on another planet and said things like, "We've got to stop Merman." He-Man wasn't real. I knew that. Somehow, between the point at which I was a toothless imp knowing only that my toys were things I could gnaw on and the point at which I was capable of appreciating the value of a toy as a conduit for my imagination, I learned to distinguish reality from fantasy. I never imagined that Optimus Prime's "role" was anything I should attempt to emulate. Though I deeply admired the character and totally bought the G1 series with all its flaws, I never interpreted Optimus Prime literally. Prime reminded me of my actual role model, my father.

See, unlike the character I saw in cartoons or the musicians I saw gyrating suggestively on MTV, my dad was with me from the moment I woke up until the moment I fell asleep. He made the rules of the house. He brought home food, he bought my toys, he cared for me. He watched Transformers with me. Dad is a real person with a set of clear roles to play, and he was there when I turned off the TV. I could call him right now if I wanted, and he would have all kinds of things to say about being a real person in the real world. Is Barbie a good role model? Are He-Man's proportions realistic? Of course not. I am a layman, and this is not an opinion that is informed by any science that I can cite, but I suspect that our best role models - if not our ONLY role models - are our family and our friends. These are the people who are really there in the physical world with us, interacting with us, playing roles distinct from our whims. A toy can be whatever you want it to be. The people on television are representatives of someone else's limited vision. While the media can have a powerful affect on how a child develops, in the end it is not the images, the icons, but the people in your life who should teach you how to think about yourself, how to treat others, and how you might expect others to treat you.