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Social Media 101: My Barbie Mea Culpa

Five days ago I wrote a post about the bald Barbie facebook page that had been crossing my feed quite a bit in the two weeks prior to that.  As the mom of a girl who died of cancer, lots of folks assumed I would be interested. That was a safe assumption.  Receiving those posts from friends and readers didn’t annoy me — it was clear that folks thought I would appreciate the idea.

What did annoy me was the idea itself.  Barbie is an icon of unattainable and unhealthy ideals of beauty and she becoming a plastic symbol now preaching acceptance of young girls like my daughter made my stomach turn.  YES, children with cancer need acceptance and support, but I stand firm that they need research more.  Dolls are great and can be therapeutic.  I get it.  But one in five of the girls diagnosed with cancer will die.  Their parents and families will forever mourn their passing.  Much in the same way that plastic Barbie  dolls will forever clog our landfills.

So I wrote about it.  Sitting in my pajamas, click clacking away on my lap top, Mary Tyler Son blessedly occupied with new Christmas and birthday gifts, I wrote about it.  Me, a computer, a sofa.

I opted to use an image in the post that is the facebook avatar of one of the groups promoting the idea of the bald Barbie — there were several groups when I wrote the post.  Within an hour or so, the administrator of the page somehow became alerted to my blog and wrote several comments.  Her tone was respectful, though her arguments, in my humble estimation, were weak.  At the time of my post, the page had approximately 5K facebook likes.  There was some excitement on Day 1, as the administrator of the page linked to it on her bald Barbie page, calling it “negative” and “against our cause.”

Early on Day 2, I heard from a childhood friend, a local news anchor, that my Barbie v. Cancer post had been picked up by Jeff Crilley’s Rundown. What’s Jeff Crilley’s Rundown, you ask?  Yeah, I had to Google it, too.   Apparently, Jeff Crilley is a pretty powerful guy.  Another friend referred to him as the “Faith Popcorn of trending and emerging topics.”

Crilley runs a PR shop, all journalists, all the time.  He publishes a daily “Rundown,” a subscription service that offers story suggestions for journalists around the country of trending topics.  Mr. Crilley, somehow, probably because of the healthy traffic that was generated, listed my Barbie v. Cancer post as a story to watch and cover.

By Tuesday night, several small media outlets around the country started running stories about the call for a bald Barbie to raise acceptance for girls with cancer and other illnesses that result in hair loss.  One gal (I can’t bring myself to call her a journalist) in Salt Lake City identified me as the “leader of the anti-bald Barbie movement.”  Really? Huh.  A movement?  And here I thought it was just me in my jammies on the living room sofa expressing an opinion.

Tuesday night is when things started getting heated.  More stories started appearing.  All referenced the bald Barbie facebook page that I had featured.  Their numbers started exploding.  The bald Barbie pages I did not feature saw no change.  Flatline.  Threads on the featured page became so heated that folks championing “the cause,” as it is so ridiculously referred to, started advocating that folks who disagreed with the manufacture and marketing of a bald Barbie should be shot.  Wow.  Yeah, that is when I promised Mary Tyler Dad I would make my exit from visiting that page anymore.

By Wednesday, Day 3, bald Barbie was national news.  God bless the Huffington Post who ran a story where I was referenced as Mary Tyler Mom with a link, rather than “one blogger.”  As Tuesday’s stories made minimal reference to there being an opposing view to the bald Barbie, I started to see the irony of the situation.  Here I was — one mom, one lap top, one pair of pajamas, one sofa — influencing national news.  And with kind of, sort of the opposite effect I was hoping for (though I love all the discussion of pediatric cancer, even if it is sanitized and romanticized).  Oops.

Turns out, America loves herself a Barbie.  Even a bald one.  The bald Barbie facebook page I featured now has over 110K likes.  In four days. Posted by one of their administrators a couple of hours ago:

Okay I am trying not to slam people’s facebook pages with clutter. However, we have been getting complaints about people’s posts. I will say this we love our supporters and hope our growth can keep up. However we grew to over 111,000 in 4 days! We all have families, and some full time jobs. We are not able to catch everything immediately. If someone is completely rude and ridiculous hit the reportbutton to Facebook. Please just contact us if we do not see it. In the last 4 days we have had many media requests internationally and nationally. So it has been very overwhelming to us all how fast this has grown. This has been a more than full time job for all the administrators involved, so please be patient with our growing pains. Thank you for your patience.

As I feared, the original intent of the bald Barbie — raising awareness for childhood cancer and other illnesses that result in girls losing their hair — has been swallowed by the pink breast cancer movement.  Many of the folks responding to this idea, and they are now all over the world, are women who have been affected by breast cancer.  Many more are calling for proceeds to be donated to the Susan G. Komen (I would add “for the cure”, but I’m pretty certain they would slap a lawsuit on my ass if I did that, so I won’t) foundation. I had a hunch that would happen when I first posted on Monday and it brings me no pleasure.

So, you’re welcome, bald Barbie “cause.”  I did you a solid.  And I learned a lesson.  One mom with a laptop and an opinion is a mighty powerful force. Word.

 

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Barbie v. Cancer

Bald Barbie

Bald Barbie is running rampant over my social media feeds this new year.

A movement is afoot to strong arm Mattel into mass producing their signature tart, Barbie, into a bald symbol of beauty for little girls with cancer and other health conditions that make their hair fall out feel “accepted and beautiful.”

“Mattel should make a Barbie with no hair so that every little girl fighting cancer feels beautiful!! The wish for this petition is that the Barbie is also named Hope and a portion of proceeds from the sales of this Barbie go to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.”

“Lets make every child fighting an illness that causes them to lose their hair feel special and beautiful-like the Barbies/Dolls they play with!”

“The goal of this “Barbie” is that all children know that bald is beautiful and deal with their own hair loss or a loved one’s . The proceeds from this doll would go to a pediatric Cancer research facilit.”

Imma about to step up on my soapbox, kids, so consider yourself warned.

Girls with cancer need a bald doll about as much as women with breast cancer need a pink Kitchen Aid mixer.  The hard truth, and spoken with authority as the mom of a girl treated for cancer, is that girls with cancer do not need a bald Barbie.  They do not need bald Disney princesses either.  I have no doubt that there are psychosocial benefits to having a bald representation of yourself if you are a kid in the middle of cancer treatment.  Our toddler daughter certainly preferred characters missing golden locks on top — Charlie Brown and Caillou were favorites of hers.  But need and want are at different ends of the spectrum.

You know what girls with cancer need?  They need money.  They need lots and lots and oodles and oodles of dollars for the researchers working on their behalf.  Primarily, these researchers are attached to well established pediatric hospitals and universities, as pharmaceutical companies only minimally invest in pediatric cancer. You see, it is not in their financial interest.  Stone cold truth, people.   This network of hospitals is knows as “COG,” the Children’s Oncology Group.

“The Children’s Oncology Group (COG), a National Cancer Institute supported clinical trials group, is the world’s largest organization devoted exclusively to childhood and adolescent cancer research. The COG unites more than 7,500 experts in childhood cancer at more than 200 leading children’s hospitals, universities, and cancer centers across North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe in the fight against childhood cancer.”

What do Barbies run these days?  $10?  $20?  I don’t know, honestly.  Full disclosure, I have never been a Barbie kind of girl, even as a child.  They didn’t float my boat, not then, not now.  But that’s beside my point.  If you want to support children with cancer, and it is kids with cancer — boys and girls are diagnosed at the rate of 46 every school day in America — give that $10-$20 to a charity supporting and investing in new research for pediatric cancer.

Believe me when I say, from the bottom of my broken heart, that children with cancer could use the kind of money that Mattel takes in during a single holiday season spent on research much more than they can use dolls that resemble them in follicles only. Let’s get real, okay?  If we wanted our dolls to look like our girls — if that is the premise behind the call for a bald Barbie — said dolls would not be built like unattainable fantasies of what women should look like. Can I get a witness?

The only winner in the demand for a bald Barbie will be the marketers behind such a scheme.  Supporters and petitioners can tell themselves that all “proceeds” will go to a worthy children’s health related charity, but that will be but a mere pittance compared to the much bigger dollars that will go directly into the pockets of the manufacturers and marketers.

All that pink you see in October?  A fraction of that is actually being delivered to researchers.  Marketers and manufacturers trade on the knowledge that millions of women will pony up for pink merchandise and they laugh every step to the bank, counting their pink pennies all the way.  If they see an opportunity, they will do the same with gold.  For many in the pediatric cancer community, that would be a win — making gold, the awareness color of pediatric cancer, as recognizable as pink.  To me, that always seemed a hollow goal.  Having major corporations raise awareness of pediatric cancer and the need to fund its research is A-OK in my book, but making a profit on that is not.

This opinion may not be popular in a host of circles, and that is okay with me.  I speak with an awareness of what kids with cancer actually need and I would wish that knowledge on no one — not the people who slam me for not being active enough in the pediatric cancer community, nor the people who slam me for championing pediatric cancer over breast cancer.  As I say, you can’t win for trying, but I will keep trying.

Kids with cancer need research more than they need a bald tart.  That’s right, Barbie, I called you a tart.  What of it?

Oh, and if you are wanting to help those kids with cancer with those research $ they so desperately need, here are two organizations with excellent charity ratings that get the job done and don’t make a profit at it:

CureSearch and St. Baldrick’s

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Outsourcing the Birthday Party

Dino birthday 

I throw my arms up in the air sometimes singing, “ayo, I need a break-o!”

This is one of those times.  Mary Tyler Son has a New Year’s birthday.  January 2 to be exact.  It kind of sucks.  The holidays are hard on families that are missing a child.  There is all this call for cheer and family togetherness, except we will never be completely together again, and we will never be so naively cheerful a familiy as we were before cancer.  We know too much.

Mary Tyler Son gets caught in the crossfire of that a bit, but we work hard to protect him.  So not only is his birthday — such a lovely event in a child’s life — on the heels of Christmas, but it is on the heels of Christmas within a grieving family.  Poor kid.

Last year, his second birthday, we threw a sweet party on his actual day.  It was lovely, really, but hard on us.  Mary Tyler Dad and I host a New Year’s Eve party at the hospital where Donna was treated, so there are lots of preps for that.  On New Year’s Day, we ran around like banshees cleaning out the clutter of Christmas, and on party day we had a knock-down drag-out fight about a cake.

That’s right, a cake.  A dinosaur cake to be exact.

Mary Tyler Dad and I don’t fight very much.  We’re simpatico like that.  There is a noticeable lack of drama in our home that we value immensely.  So on party day, we had “creative differences” about the dinosaur cake we were making for our boy.  It was my vision, but I needed Mary Tyler Dad’s skill to execute.  Well, he had his own vision, and the fight ensued.  Yeah, it wasn’t pretty.  In the end, we got through it, but I think that damn dinosaur cake made an impression on us both.   

This year Mary Tyler Dad, the King of kitchen DIY, didn’t raise an eyebrow when I suggested we have Mary Tyler Son’s birthday at his favorite restaurant, a local grill.  An eyebrow was raised when I suggested we have a bakery cake, but that was more about his New England thrift than a bakery cake. 

We’re beat.  Both of us.  He is working, I am working.  I’ve got this new Pinterest addiction to manage (that takes time, yo), and we still haven’t finished the deholidification process after Christmas.  Embracing our limitations, we are outsourcing the birthday party.  First time ever.

It is actually a bit thrilling, this outsourcing thing.  The grill will cook, the bakery will bake, we will show up and celebrate.  I got some things to decorate the restaurant to satisfy my inner Martha, and I’ll rope Mary Tyler Dad into that to include his inner Stewart.  There is the joy of gift bags for the little ones.  I get to feel excited about those, rather than oppressed by another responsibility. 

Truth be told, I’m looking forward to this outsourced event.  And, hey, we’ll also be supporting two local businesses we love, so take that, sucky economy! 

Much thanks to our friends at The Moose Grill and Maddiebird Bakery (shop local!) for helping us give Mary Tyler Son a joyful celebration!

Here is to keeping the joy and outsourcing the stress.  Happy 2012, folks!  Happy birthday, Mary Tyler Son!