Bratz

From the December 4, 2006 New Yorker:

Fara Warner, the author of "Power of the Purse: How Smart Businesses Are Adapting to the World's Most Important Consumers - Women," goes further, writing that Bratz represent "a future where young girls don't need their dolls to show them the career choices they have open to them. They already know they can choose any career and pursue it. It's a future where the rules about the size and shape of women's bodies, and how women express their sexuality, are far broader and more open."

Oh, God. "Post-feminist" rhetoric, get thee behind me. This stuff makes me ill to read. And, you know, probably more so because I just finished Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (recommended) and am in the middle of Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (also excellent). But dear God, has Ms. Warner ever seen these dolls? (link has sound). Or, more to the point, has she ever lived in the same world I live in? I just...I don't understand.