This was the first essay I turned in for the semester in my English 100 class. There are numerous errors regarding citations - but there is ZERO plagiarism! I thought about cleaning it up and maybe some day I will, but I left it like this to show my progression throughout the semester.

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Louis Wischnewsky
English 100
MW @ 1:00 PM – 2:50 PM
Quirk
February 16, 2011
Saying Goodbye to a Friend
In the 1980s, G. I. Joe was the iconic toy for young boys. Oddly enough, “G. I. Joe” was
not an actual character. Rather, “Joe” was the quintessential soldier that anyone that wanted to be
a soldier against the evil that Cobra Command represented. In any case, it turns out he was not a
passing trend of pop culture. He's still around. Yet, listening to G. I. Joe's cousin's detractors, any
toy like Barbie will result in an adult population that never “grows up.”
Hilary Tham writes about how she feels slighted by her former best friend in her poem,
“Barbie's Shoes.” Marilyn Ferris Motz, in her work, “'Seen Through Rose-Tinted Glasses:'The
Barbie Doll in American Society,” writes an even more damning view of the iconic doll that
blames Barbie for everything that's wrong – or perceived as wrong – with adult women. Maybe it
can be debated as to whether these two women ever grew up themselves and gracefully accepted
that pretend does not translate into reality. However, the fact is that, overwhelmingly, most
women laugh when asked if they are disappointed they didn't grow up to be like Barbie. A
familiar reply, in fact, may be along this line: “Are you serious? Barbie was a toy. You know:
make believe.”
The notion that Barbie causes a negative effect on society, and particularly women, is

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quite a reach of the imagination. Barbie is not warping the minds of young ladies. Compare the
idea to a child playing with her Barbie in the child's bedroom in, say, Louisiana. Barbie having a
negative effect on women is like the child insisting Barbie really is in Paris to the point of a
tantrum. G. I. Joe can be seen as a destructive, even violent toy, but he certainly isn't causing
boys to grow to be Marines. According to Harry Waters, in his analysis of the “original” TV
detractor Paddy Chayefsky's research, even Chayefsky did not find a shred of evidence that there
is a link between violence on the tube correlating to an increase in real life crime. The critics do
have one thing right: some people have not yet grown up.
G. I. Joe is a doll working much the same way Barbie does. When, through their
imagination, little boys become G. I. Joe, suddenly they have a direct relation to and their direct
involvement with tanks, guns and other weapons that could hardly be considered promoting
world peace. Yet, as grown men, not many of them are designing and building tanks or going
around blowing up buildings in pursuit of the smallest Cobra evil. In fact, looking closer, it's
pretty obvious what grown men are not doing: they are not enlisting. Military enlistment has been
on a steady decline for decades now. All of this contradicts the claims that what children believe
as a child with a toy, or doll in this instance, results in a warped adulthood.
Waters, in his work, “Life According to TV,” admits the decades-old argument that
violence on television results in a more violent populace is erroneous. Robert Kubey and Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi (Csikszentmihalyi) delve deeper, considering whether the myth that violence in
video games increases crime. Their conclusion pointedly states the research does not support the
claim and, in fact, the exact opposite actually happens. Today's most popular video games are

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played in the first person point of view. With these types of games, children and adults are going
much deeper into the adaption of the role of the character, or doll, they are playing with.
Shouldn't this level of involvement with virtual reality result in a greater likelihood of an
inability to differentiate fiction from reality? It would by the Barbie detractor standards. Yet, all
the research has concluded that this is not happening even at an only noticeable scale. Young men
– and even young ladies – are immersing themselves into the roles of trained, professional killers
while playing Halo's Master Chief or Call of Duty's Ghost, but none are becoming international
or galactic soldiers of fortune.
With the almost unnoticed passage of age comes that day when little boys and little girls
realize they have not opened their closets and taken out any of those G. I. Joe guys or Barbie gals
in months. They feel guilty. Joe and Barbie were their friends and they were ALWAYS there for
those young men and women. Now, though, they are leaving those “friends” in the dark, cold
confines of an uncomfortable closet, stacked indiscriminately atop each other or under heavier
toys. It is then they realize it is time to say goodbye to a friend. Not long after comes the rite of
passage when all of the toys are given away to younger siblings, nephews or nieces, or worse, to
the donation box. The detractors seem to regret that day. They become angry that they did not get
enough time with Barbie and if they had, eh, maybe they could have been more like her. This is
not a reflection of Barbie being a negative impact on society. It is a reflection of an inability to
accept the fatality of life. Maybe instead of focusing on how much Barbie could have been “more
realistic,” the detractors could look back on those days with fond memories and enjoy the time
they did have with Barbie. Barbie was a friend that never once questioned a little girl's motives.

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Barbie just did whatever was imagined without hesitation. Even Tham and Motz would love to
be like that and, one has to wonder, who wouldn't?
Barbie is not harmful to society. This can be seen from two different angles. Little boys
are not growing up hunting down international terrorists on any grand scale. In fact, fewer and
fewer are taking on militant careers. There has long been a debate about society confusing reality
with televised fiction. Yet, as people plunge themselves deeper and deeper into the fictional
warrior role, more and more science is proving those same people easily to step back into reality.
Finally, it isn't that Barbie was a cruel joke on some little girl's psyche. Rather, instead of loving
the time these young ladies had with their childhood friend, they are angry at her for not being
there in adulthood. Saying Barbie is the cause of all the negative habits of adult women, thus, is
as imaginative as believing a neighbor's son is G. I. Joe at the forefront of the hunt for Osama bin
Laden. In that sense, the detractors are right: some people just haven't grown up.

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Works Cited
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, Kubey, Robert. “Television Addiction is no Mere Metaphor.”
Common Culture; Reading and Writing About American Popular Culture.
Eds. Michael
Petracca, Madaleine Sorapure. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2010. 147-154.
Print.
Motz, Marily Ferris. “ Seen through Rose-Tinted Glasses:”The Barbie Doll in American Society.
Common Culture; Reading and Writing About American Popular Culture.
Eds. Michael
Petracca, Madeleine Sorapure. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2010. 15-20. Print.
Tham, Hilary. “Barbie's Shoes.” Common Culture; Reading and Writing About American
Popular Culture. Eds. Michael Petracca, Madeleine Sorapure. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 2010. 10. Print.
Waters, Harry. “Life According to TV.” Common Culture; Reading and Writing About American
Popular Culture. Eds. Michael Petracca, Madeleine Sorapure. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 2010. 137. Print.