In the quest to find a few hours of peace and quiet in the sunshine, parents — and the companies marketing to them — can be forgiven for looking for holiday activities that capture the imagination of demanding children.
However, a holiday company has found itself under fire for promoting outdated gender stereotypes after offering “Barbie VIP packages” designed for girls as young as two, promising to help them look glamorous and “picture perfect.”
The Forte Village in Sardinia, a luxury resort described by Conde Nast magazine as a place “where each guest’s every wish comes true,” offered two Barbie packages — Pink and Glamour — in the hope that parents would stump up the ￡364 (US$612) weekly cost.
Parents, who will have paid about ￡4,677 for a week’s holiday for a family of four at the resort, can get some time to themselves while their little princesses spend their days in the pink Barbie House, making jewelry, designing outfits for their dolls, learning how to walk on a catwalk and — for an additional price — getting a manicure and facial.
Equal-opportunities groups said the trip perpetuated unhelpful gender stereotypes and could contribute to a negative body image later in life.
The feminist writer and campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, who led a successful campaign to have more women represented on British banknotes, called the packages “depressing,” adding that they sent a limited message to both girls and boys about how they should behave.
“What I find so disheartening about this is that we push these things on little girls from such an early age — they must like pink, they are supposed to enjoy everyone looking at them, that they must prettify themselves — and then when they reach adulthood we vilify them for caring about how they look,” she said.
“Not only are we told from the age of two that caring about how you look is what makes you a girl, we are then laughed at for being vain and trying to achieve that impossible ideal,” she added.
The holiday packages, which were highlighted — presumably ironically — in the Sunday Times travel supplement as an option for parents whose daughters were not “glamorous or girly enough,” attracted fierce criticism on Twitter, where @booksanddance called the idea “beyond horrendous,” while @ugglymuggly wrote: “I have just been a little bit sick. Aspiring to be Barbie?? I don’t think so.”
Megan Perryman, co-founder of the group Let Toys Be Toys, which lobbies the toy and publishing industries to stop marketing gender-specific toys and books, said the packages ignored that girls and boys were more alike than dissimilar.
“It’s pretty shocking, particularly that it’s aimed at girls as young as two,” she said. “It perpetuates this message that girls and boys should behave in certain ways instead of treating them like individuals.”
“Children like rules and they like to please, so we end up with this self-perpetuating cycle where a child is told this is what it means to be a girl, and so they try and fit into that box,” Perryman said.
Forte Village is not the only travel company that aims to capitalize on the enduring popularity of the blonde doll, who academics have said would be too thin to menstruate were she a real woman.
The Royal Caribbean cruise company offers girls from four to 11 the Barbie Premium Experience, a “Barbie dream cruise complete with fun, fashion and runway moments.”
According to the promotional material, girls can create the perfect look for their Barbie before learning how to “walk the runway” and putting on a Barbie-themed fashion show with the help of a “fashion beauty expert.”
Back in the UK, surrounded by a group of girls and boys screaming in a soft play area, mother Victoria Smith was unimpressed.
“I’m sure age eight or nine I’d have loved this sort of thing, and I’m not convinced of the harm in makeup and dressing up for kids — but what bothers me is the gendering,” she said. “This is being offered specifically to girls within the context of a world that’s obsessed with pink/blue gender divisions. Boys are excluded from this and when they’re attracted to it we problematize it, either shaming them or suggesting they’re not proper boys. One of my sons loves glitter, princesses and long hair, but already I can see him starting to wonder whether he’s ‘allowed.’”
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