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Has J. Crew pushed the boundaries of their symbiotic Obama relationship a little too far? Politico posted an item
disclosing a press release the retailer sent to reporters yesterday,
advertising the fact that Sasha and Malia Obama have been spotted out
and about in J. Crew wares. Specifically, if you must know ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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The news that the Sasha and Malia dolls are no more depresses me for one reason: Why didn't I realize that the Ty Co. would "retire" them, as it did with Beanie Babies back in the day, and buy up as many as I could find to sell on eBay? Mariah and Sydney—as the dolls, unchanged in appearance, have been renamed—just won't appreciate in value the same way.
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Looks like it's back to Barbie for kids seeking presidential playthings; the Sasha and Malia dolls are no more. Ty, the company that caused such controversy with its Sweet Sasha and Marvelous Malia, no longer offers the First-Daughter-inspired toys. From the New York Times:
On Tuesday, the company's Web site included pictures of the two dolls beneath a red sign that read "Retired."
"We appreciate the company's response to this matter,'' said Katie McCormick Lelyveld, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Obama.
It must have been Emily's argument for protecting the Obama girls' privacy that swayed them. Or maybe the first lady's complaint had something to do with it. Either way, we're still waiting for someone to snag sashaandmalia.com so we can watch Mother Lion Michelle in action again. So far her track record for defending her young from commercial predators is as impressive as her outfits.
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On this morning’s Washington Post op-ed page, my friend Ruth Marcus made a similar point as your mother, Jessica, on the upside of Ty’s opportunistic marketing of dolls with “beautiful names.” The marvelous and sweet effigies of the president’s daughters indeed provide long overdue racially correct toys for little girls to be proud of. Citing the troubling psychology experiments of dark-skinned children choosing white dolls described in Brown v. Board of Education, Ruth thinks the inherent social service trade-off might be worth it. The manufacturer of Beanie Babies has again created a direct connection to the imagination of a new generation. Even in this belt-tightening moment, I’m sure the dolls are selling like crazy and even lifting the economy. I’m not offended by the actual toys and can imagine which little girls in my life I would enjoy giving them to. My fear is that if the first family is mined as a commodity, there will come a time when their worth is depleted. Right now the public wants to embrace them like a cuddly toy. It’s time to get off the stage and get back to school.
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I agree with Marjorie, Bonnie and everyone else that using Malia and Sasha Obama's images for fun and profit is beyond gross. However, my mother pointed out the one upshot to this capitalist debacle: Little girls of all races might want to play with black dolls now. I am reminded of a recent This American Life show in which a former FAO Schwartz employee talked about a coveted brand of baby dolls. The store ran out of white dolls, and so white moms were relegated to buying Asian dollies. After the Asian babies went the Latino babies. The black baby dolls were left to languish under the cheap industrial lighting. With the creation of Malia and Sasha dolls, the girls' privacy may be slightly violated, but it might change the ethnic makeup of the toy box.
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Samantha,
I don't think it's fair to compare Obama allowing his girls to accompany him on the campaign trail to the Ty Co.'s shameless marketing of Sasha and Malia dolls for profit. In American politics, it's standard operating procedure, and the expectation of voters, for political candidates—especially male candidates seeking high office—to show that they are "family-oriented men," i.e., husbands and fathers who love baseball, apple pie, and Chevrolets. For some irrational reason, images of candidates standing with their wives and children grants them legitimacy in the eyes of voters, no matter if they are cheating cads like John Edwards, Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, Eliot Spitzer, David Paterson, or the legions of other skirt-chasing politicians who are too many to name here. Obama may have thrust his daughters in the public eye, as you say, but I don't think he "cashed in" on his daughters' cuteness. He didn't try to promote them in books, market them as dolls, or put their pictures on T-shirts. Granted, his cutie-pie daughters did melt some voters' hearts—how could someone with such typically precocious American children be a closet Muslim terrorist and secret black militant?—and demystified their daddy with the weird name and nontraditional background. Still, no amount of cuteness can get you the White House if you don't have the goods the run the place. Just look at Sarah Palin and her boatload of cute kids. McCain's brood isn't too shabby, either, although the cute factor diminishes after age 10. G.W. Bush's win was an anomaly, and one I'd not like to see repeated.
Obama certainly could not lock his girls in the family's basement until after the campaign. They are a legitimate and important part of his personal bio, much as Chelsea Clinton and the two Bush girls were for their dads. And sometimes, Obama aides have said, he just missed his family and wanted them with him.
The Obamas certainly do not forfeit their right to be outraged by companies exploiting their children's names. Although I argued for limiting the girls' exposure in the media, I don't think that Mom and Dad have crossed good-parenting lines. I just think it opens them up to more people feeling entitled to take liberties with their daughters' privacy. That's why I think they should be careful. I wouldn't be surprised if their displeasure with the Sasha and Malia dolls caused them to pull the girls back a bit.
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Responding to Sam's question about whether President Obama's campaign served his daughters up as "accessories for his Family Man ensemble," pampering and showing off our delightful children are among the great rewards of parenting. Although normally, the gifts and attention we direct to our children are on a more personal scale, bringing them into the spotlight on special occasions (announcing Dad's candidacy, Malia's birthday, Dad's election victory and swearing in), or making special treats available (the Jonas Brothers!), are a natural extension of the first couple's well-deserved pride in their charming and adorable daughters. That said, too much attention can be toxic. When they make up a guest list for the next White House sleepover, the children may feel serious politicking from among their new 2nd second- and fifth-grade classmates. The Obamas now need to definitively address the tsunami of attention the 7- and 10-year-old little girls are attracting. While there is still no sashaandmalia.com domain, there are already a number of high-traffic blogs and Web sites devoted to fans of the first daughters. Michelle's statement that the controversial "Marvelous Malia" and "Sweet Sasha" dolls are "inappropriate" is not enough. Although I love the new president's policy of transparency, he and Michelle need to draw a curtain across coverage of these minor children to protect their images and names from being commoditized in the marketplace.
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The saga continues with the Sasha and Malia dolls that Bonnie thought were inevitable and Nina thought would be more fun if they wore miniskirts and traveled in space. First a Ty spokeswoman claimed that the company avoids naming their dolls for "any particular living individual" and chalked up the release of Sweet Sasha and Marvelous Malia to serendipity ("Sasha and Malia are beautiful names" that "worked very well with the dolls we were making," she said). Now it looks like Marjorie's call for the elder Obamas to stand up for the girls' privacy has been answered; the first lady said through her press secretary that she feels "it is inappropriate to use young, private citizens for marketing purposes."
I'm all for protecting the girls' privacy as much as possible. But are they really private citizens? When Barack Obama brought his daughters on stage with him at campaign events, making them adorable little accessories for his Family Man ensemble, wasn't he making the choice to thrust them into the public eye? And when he writes open letters to them on their first day of school (which, as Emily pointed out, came off as fairly hollow and staged), doesn't he sacrifice some of the moral high ground in this debate over his daughters' privacy, some of his right to outrage when that privacy is breached?
It's tough, I'd imagine, to be the child of a celebrity. In the case of Suri Cruise or Shiloh Jolie Pitt, though, there was no choice; their parents were celebrities from a fairly young age, so any kids they had would necessarily grow up in the spotlight. With politicians, it feels a little different. Barack Obama didn't have to run for president. And no doubt when he decided to do so, one of the issues he talked through was whether it would be fair to Sasha and Malia (and for that matter, Michelle) to put them through that. Running for public office requires a pretty hefty ego—enough faith in yourself to think that your ability to make things better with a position of power override whatever damages you'll inflict on those around you, both from rampant attention from the media and splintered attention from yourself.
Do any of you moms hold it against him that he chose to go for it anyway, even though it would almost certainly make a "normal" childhood impossible for his daughters? Or is a selfless style of parenting just as damaging as one that could be labeled selfish? Being hounded by paparazzi and commodified by toy companies is bad, yes, but for all that, Sasha and Malia get to grow up with a front-row seat to the ultimate role models: a man and woman who put it all on the line because they thought they could make a difference in the world and were determined to take that as far as they could. Perhaps it's a good trade.
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Sweet Sammi, these two girls are already America's sweethearts, and there is not a kid over 5 years old in this country who can't tell you which one of the president's daughters he or she likes best. J. Crew and the makers of Ty Girlz dolls are not the only retailers to take advantage of that. The commercialization of Sasha’s and Malia’s adorableness started the moment their dad was elected. The manufacturers of the dresses the girls wore to Grant Park instantly exploited the connection. I'm surprised www.sashaandmalia.com is not a Web domain for some savvy marketer yet. The Obamas cannot keep their daughters’ popularity in a bottle, and I don't know what their mother will do to protect them. Now that former White House cute kid Caroline Kennedy has an opening in her schedule, maybe she can come help Michelle Obama figure that out.
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Turns out you don't need to live in the D.C. area to give your kids the joy of playing with Sasha and Malia, thanks to the latest in the mass of Obama-related merchandise: the "Sweet Sasha" and "Marvelous Malia" Bratz-like dolls manufactured by Ty (of Beanie Babies fame). As Amy Benfer wrote on Broadsheet:
This line shares the notorious Bratz dolls infatuation with the letter "z," visible lip liner and skimpy clothing of questionable taste ... Unfortunately, as a post at Packaging Girlhood points out, the dolls are part of the teen line and thus come complete with breasts, which seems a little odd in dolls named after two little girls who are now 7 and 10 years old. The poster at that site asks: "Couldn't they have just portrayed them as they are now, perhaps as two little girls with a dog and a leash?"
I agree that the plush (and womanly) depiction of the Obama girls is a bit unnerving. But equally upsetting to me are these descriptions on the site—not just for Sasha and Malia, but all the dolls. I'm old-school when it comes to kids' toys and favor ones without a prepackaged back story—the kind that require actual imagination to bring them to life. (Note: this theory has not been put into practice. I'm 24 and childless.) I find the American Girl dolls a little overbearing in their descriptions of each doll's interests and lives, but that's refreshing compared to the nonsensical blurbs on the Bratz site, which have to do entirely with clothes and appearance.
I played the "Which XX Factor writers have Ty Girlz dolls in their honor?" game, and here're the findings. They spelled your name wrong, Hanna, but you'll be happy to know that Hip Hannah, in her "pink tennies and white knee-high socks," is "the definition of cool!" The cheerleader Exciting Emily comes close to having your hair, Emily, but her eye color is a little upsetting. Apparently her "team colors (lavender and teal) really bring out the color of her eyes." Oh right. Her lavender and teal eyes. And the Sweet Sammi doll that I can only assume was named after me has a similar ocular malfunction. Clad in an orange hoodie, blue-eyed Sammi is also, apparently, benefiting from an outfit that "really brings out her eyes!"
I wonder how the Ty team would describe Molly, the bespectacled 1950s American Girl doll I grew up with. Obviously they'd do away with that pesky and fairly educational storyline about her dad being off at war. And I have a guess what they'd say about those wire-rim frames of hers.
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I am…
Wondering why it takes a week to count fewer than 350,000 votes in Alaska.
Anticipating D.C. getting its party plans on for our own version of Grant Park on Jan. 20.
Witnessing spontaneous conversations in public places between white people and people of color. (See Chris B. and Chris W.’s hilarious instructions for white people in The Root.)
Reassured by the assembling and assessing of financial experts to FIX IT!
Enjoying the inside-baseball gossip, mentioning, and positioning for the plum assignments.
Picturing Malia and Sasha playing with their puppy in the White House and appreciating hope and change.
Weeping at the Civil Rights images every time I look at them.
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