After reading Cheryl Gray's piece on "plastic perfection," based on Barbie the childhood companion most girls grew up with, left me with quite a few opinions of my own.
To be quite honest, I really do not understand what point she was trying to get across to the reader. All Cheryl did was list statistics, draw from her own personal anecdotes and ramble on about Cindy Jackson, who had worked hard to achieve her lifetime goal of looking like a replica of Barbie.
In the beginning of the article Cheryl listed a percentage of girls who had developed self-image problems due to owning a Barbie doll between the ages of three to ten. At this point, I thought I was reading an article about the negative effects that Barbie can have on young children. But then in the last paragraph Cheryl starts the conclusion with referring back to the Cindy Jackson, who had basically achieved her goal of looking like Barbie and is now a singer as well as writer, thus considering herself a success. Was Cheryl agreeing with this? Was the fact that Cindy had achieved her goal supposed to be positive? I felt that Cheryl has not made clear to the reader what her opinion was to the reader and should have did that early on in the article. Was she trying to portray a negative or positive retrospect of Barbie itself?
This left me both confused and disappointed. I basically wasted ten minutes of my time reading an article full of statistical information regarding Barbie and some woman who wanted to look like the doll, without even getting a glimpse of the author's opinion on the whole thing.