A new app aimed at children as young as nine is accused of promoting plastic surgery by allowing the user to operate on a cartoon girl to ‘make her beautiful’.
The iTunes game shows a female cartoon character named Barbie who is getting plastic surgery. The role of the user is that of a liposuction doctor.
The app, named Plastic Surgery & Plastic Doctor & Plastic Hospital Office for Barbie, was created by Corina Rodriquez and was released in January last year. It was promoted for children as young as nine years old. Although it used the ‘Barbie’ name, it was apparently unconnected to Mattel, the creators of the Barbie doll.
The blurb for the app was shocking enough to sound like a joke. It read: "This unfortunate girl has so much extra weight that no diet can help her. In our clinic she can go through a surgery called liposuction that will make her slim and beautiful. We’ll need to make small cuts on problem areas and suck out the extra fat. Will you operate her, doctor??"
Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism project, said: "We are calling on iTunes and Google Play to reconsider whether these kind of things are what their platforms want to be offering to children."
The app was taken down yesterday after fury spread across social networking sites.
Whether the app was promoted to children aged nine or women in their thirties, it’s still wrong on so many levels. Body image pressure hits girls and women of all ages, and many women see plastic surgery as the norm.
A healthy body image should be promoted across all platforms, from films, to music, to gaming. Do we really want another generation of girls thinking that they need a prominent thigh gap or that a flat stomach is the key to happiness? Body confidence should be about being healthy and happy with yourself, not planning procedures to make yourself prettier, as this app seems to think ‘slim and beautiful’ is the core aim for young girls.
At nine years old, girls should still be girls, playing outside and having fun with friends, not sitting in their room worrying that their bum is too big or even considering the notion of ‘problem areas’.
This small victory in getting the app taken down says a lot about the power of social media, and that no app or game will ever teach young girls that they are not already beautiful, regardless of shape or size.
