Barbie with Down Syndrome

[ysabetwordsmith]

Mattel has released a Barbie with Down Syndrome.

I didn't think it would sell well, but apparently it is already selling out. That says nice things about a doll market that is often vicious. If you can't find a Barbie, there are other dolls with Down syndrome.

I've written about Barbie history before, several times. I did an article on Goddess Barbie. I had a list of fantasy Barbie/Ken pairs with Barbie as the dominant role and Ken subordinate.

I've also written about dolls as representation in "To See a Doll of Yourself" and sex dolls as people in "A Dangerous Thing to Be a Doll."  "A Haven That Purifies Emotions" introduces a man with Down syndrome as a genetic counselor, and his wife is an art model.

Comments

[acelightning73]

https://youtu.be/u1m3HKW1VqU
A young man with Downs syndrome is working in the Children's Hospital in Boston, doing light clerical work (running stuff through the copier, helping patients get ready, playing with the children to help them feel less fear). He started trying to help voluntarily, and someone said, "let's PAY him to do this!" (It's certainly a step up the employment ladder from cleaning tables in Burger King there used to be a BK near me that went out of their way to hire handicapped workers.)

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

That's logical.

Terramagne-America tries to help everyone find work they enjoy and are good at. Certain fields recruit heavily from disabled people, including health care (to demonstrate that a disability doesn't mean being useless), accessibility analysis (for the lived experience), NASA (most of their robonauts are disabled), plant and animal care (great for many neurotypical and mentally disabled or injured folks), and the theoretical branches of math, physics, etc. (which need brains more than bodies).

In Werner's case, people acknowledged that anyone with a genetic disorder would be especially qualified for genetic counseling, so they helped him design a college plan to support that. Every once in a while I stumble across something like that and it's just delightful.

Re: Thoughts

[acelightning73]

There's a small cheesemaking company in western NY - They were a couple with a non-verbal autistic son, and they bought some land for pasturage, called it Bobolink Farms, and they raise pasture-fed cows and make artisanal cheese with the milk. They also bake bread in a hand-built brick oven, and they keep pigs who forage in the woods next to the pastures, and they get the pigs slaughtered by an Amish butcher over the state line in Pennsylvania, and I used to buy my lard from them and render it myself (I use lard for pie crust and baking-powder biscuits, and a few other things where it's critical to the flavor and texture.). One year they didn't have any lard. I found another place in upstate NY that mail-ordered me some lard packaged with dry ice, but they don't exist any more (I tried to order more lard, and the website doesn't work. I called the phone number, "not in service". I still don't have a good source for lard, but I can work on it - there are more farmers' markets springing up everywhere.

Anyway, as their special-needs boy grew, the realized he wasn't going to be going to do ordinary kid things. He turned out to have a natural rapport with the dairy cows, as he put in an interview once, 'I don't talk so good, but the cows don't mind." (Cows seem to understand human body language reasonably well.) So he's an experienced cheesemaker and cow friend. And this dairy has stalls in farmers' markets from South Jersey to New York City. (I hate cheese, but people who enjoy it say this farm's cheese is pretty special.)

And this is why people say you shouldn't call them "disabled", but "differently abled". I know there are quite a lot of people working in call centers who are either blind or mobility-impaired; they are perfectly able to answer the phone, provide or take in information, and hang up on assholes. And someone once told me about a deaf hairdresser, and think of all the famous blind piano players in history (up to and including Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder) Also look at the video of the Thousand Hands Quan Yin - the dancers are all deaf, the musicians are blind. Maybe you can't sing, but you do really beautiful embroidery. Or your left arm doesn't work, but you have a spectacular soprano voice. You can't walk - sit down and write a poem or a novel or a script. You can't talk; look for videos of Judy FilkSigner (that's not a typo) doing real-time interpretations for live filk performances. Never mind what you can't do. What can you do? Do that, and get good at it.