New Dolls: Don’t cha want to be a slut like me?
By Beth Teitell
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
I never thought I’d look back on the Bratz dolls with homespun nostalgia. But they’re second-tier sluts compared with the line of dolls Hasbro plans to unveil just in time for the holiday season. As in Pussycat Dolls. As in “Loosen Up My Buttons.” A Norman Rockwell Christmas it won’t be.
Not if the hyper-risque Pussycats are beckoning to your 6-year-old from under the tree. When I first read an anti-Pussycat Dolls dolls press release from a group calling itself “Dads and Daughters,” I suspected it might be a hoax, perhaps by an anti-globalization group, or agents of rival toy-maker MGA Entertainment, the Bratz pusher.
There’s no way Hasbro, of Play-Doh and My Little Pony fame, would really try and sell a line of dolls modeled on a group founded by Carmen Electra, a highly eroticized sixsome whose first big hit, the steamy “Don’t Cha,” has lyrics like: “Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me/ Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?” And those are the words you can print in a family newspaper.
So I called Hasbro. “It’s a hoax, right?” I wanted to know. I was told that someone would try to get back to me, but alas, by deadline, no reassuring call had arrived.
As you can imagine, the looming arrival of the Pussycat Dolls (priced at about $15 each) has many people worked up, but perhaps the usual consortium of do-gooders has it all wrong. Maybe Hasbro isn’t exploiting children just to make a buck, but rather showing young girls how important it is to work when they get older. As Hasbro told The New York Times, “These are people that have real careers.”
Oh, I see, the Pussycats are role models, a la veterinarian Barbie or nonprofit director of development Barbie. Maybe Hasbro could get Willie Nelson to record a TV spot: “Mammas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys, but do encourage them to be exotic dancers.”
Or maybe recording industry tycoons. Because guess who’s going to profit from the sexy dolls? Besides the little girls learning valuable stripper moves, the Pussycats’ label, Interscope Records.
And Hasbro, for its part, is reportedly happy to get a group thought to be on its way up, rather than down, when such deals are usually struck.
Uh-oh. You know what that means: The Britney Doll II, now complete with detachable rubber “bouncing” baby.
