Barbie Doll

Marge Piercy wrote "Barbie Doll" over forty years ago, yet people--especially, of course, girls--can still relate to it today. You would think that forty years later society would throw away their standards of how young girls should look as they are growing up. That's not the case, though. Girls today are still under the same pressure Piercy wrote about in the early 1970s. The sad truth of reality is that you could be one of the smartest, healthiest girls out there, but if you are not pretty by society's standards, you're not really anything. And that's the worst part. Day in and day out girls are getting criticized based on how they look. Yeah sure, some girls can brush off the nasty comments as if they're nothing, but at some point that patience is going to run out (Her good nature wore out/like a fan belt, lines 15-16). That girl who acted like the remarks didn't bother her is going to crack. Just like in the poem. If you take the poem literally, the narrator kills herself because society has told her she's not pretty. If you take the poem metaphorically, the narrator seems to have undergone some sort of surgery to make herself pretty in society's eyes--thereby killing who she truly is. Either way it doesn't end well. To me, it's just sad to look at the poem knowing it was written in a different time, with different people and pretty much different everything, and still see that females are criticized on how they look in the same way. Not a lot of progression, in my opinion, and something that really needs to change.