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The Wretched Sasha and Malia Dolls
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First up for the Obama daughters: an unwanted invasion of privacy!
The country’s marketing sharks appear to have found their next Hannah Montana: Malia and Sasha Obama. The ink was barely dry on Barack Obama’s first executive orders when Ty (the company best known for Beanie Babies) released its Marvelous Malia and Sweet Sasha plush dolls, as part of its TyGirlz collection. One wonders how many Ty company lawyers it took to craft the statement that the dolls are “not based on the Obama girls.”
The Obama daughters are going to be followed around for the next four to eight years by heavily armed men wearing dark coats and ear pieces. They don’t need some company cashing in on them, too.
Thus has another cultural line been erased: Hannah aka Miley Cyrus’s parents chose to have their pubescent daughter pose for semi-nudes with Annie Leibovitz. The Obamas chose public service at one of the most challenging moments in our nation’s history. And the end result is that all three girls become, quite literally, someone else’s dolls.
These poor girls deserve better. They are going to be followed around for the next four to eight years by heavily armed men wearing dark coats and ear pieces. Whenever they are out in public with their dad, they are going to be standing behind sheets of bulletproof glass. Half of Washington, D.C. with a cellphone camera is going to be looking to find them in a too-low top or too-short skirt, playing, dancing, or someday sneaking a cigarette or a drink. They may find themselves in their twenties and thirties dodging long-lens paparazzi snapping shots of their boyfriends or girlfriends or zooming in tight on their bellies to see if they have baby bump. They don’t need some company cashing in on them, too. And we don’t need to pay or play.
I’m wondering if right about now, Oprah is going to be calling up American Express to ask them to put a stop payment on her reported $100,000-a-night presidential-suite tab at the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C., which she rented for the inauguration. You see, Ty Warner, the toy magnate of Beanie Baby fame, owns a stake in the Four Seasons. And as a result, US Four Seasons hotels routinely hand out Ty toys to their pint-size guests—Marvelous Malia is presumably next.
If marketers are so desperate, why not choose to mass-produce celebrities who actually sell the baby pictures of their kids. How about a Brangelina doll line? There are already six figures already available, it seems guaranteed to increase every year or two, and there are a whole range of satellite family spin-offs—Jennifer Aniston, Billy Bob Thornton. But let the Obama girls be girls. They should be playing with dolls, not having to wonder if their faces are going to be for sale in whatever toy store they might have a rare chance to wander into.
Lyric Wallwork Winik is an award-winning writer and author and the Washington correspondent for Parade Magazine. Her next book will be about Magellan’s voyage for Crown.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Obama, the Un-decider
Lee Siegel has written about culture and politics and is the author of three books: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination; Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television; and, most recently, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. In 2002, he received a National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism.
Inaugural Hell Freezes Over
Lyric Wallwork Winik is an award-winning writer and author and the Washington correspondent for Parade magazine. Her next book will be about Magellan’s voyage for Crown, and she is married to the bestselling historian, Jay Winik.
Inaugural Hell
Lyric Wallwork Winik is an award-winning writer and author and the Washington correspondent for Parade magazine. Her next book will be about Magellan’s voyage for Crown, and she is married to the bestselling historian, Jay Winik.
My Pals Sasha and Malia
Lyric Wallwork Winik is an award-winning writer and author and the Washington correspondent for Parade magazine. Her next book will be about Magellan’s voyage for Crown, and she is married to the bestselling historian, Jay Winik.
I don't really have a humongous problem with the opinions of the author, however this article was very poorly written.
I should really just stop reading Daily Beast articles, because with the exception of Christopher Buckley, it's obvious none of these authors are quality writers. most of these articles are basically overglorified rants.
Lyric not sure where you did your research but Ty Warner does not own a stake in the Four Seasons company. He owns two hotels that are managed by Four Seasons of which the Washington DC hotel is not one of. And the hotels do not hand out beanie babies. His company made a series of Four Seasons bears years ago that are no longer in production.
I'm confused. What age girl are these dolls intended for? And, what age are the dolls suppose to be representing? And, why do "girlz" dolls have breasts?
Yawn. This story is old news. Lighten up, Lyric. There's a long history of fashioning dolls after real people, and this company put out dolls named after Bush's kids, etc. in the past and nobody blew a gasket. These kids are adored by the Nation and if a doll can provide a good role model for a little kid--who is, after all, an innocent who doesn't look at the doll and say "hey! this is exploitation--then I'm all for it. Besides in a poor economy, any stimulus is a good one!
@brakingnews: Daily Beast desperately needs a copy editor to proofread the blog posts.
@ChuckDC: and apparently they don't have a fact checker either!
Distasteful, no doubt, but the problem isn't just the manufacturer of these dolls: it's the consumers buying them as well. Long-lens paparazzi are fuled and funded by us, we the people, with our insatiable appetite for celebrity and all things Obama. Truly, Obama-dazzle is a study-worthy phenomenon. The screaming fans, the sycophant worship, the adulation - geeze, it distracts me from the man and the work he is trying to do. And it worries me.
Generally there are two types of public reaction to this type of star power. On the one hand, you get the 'emperor has no clothes' syndrome, replete with yes-men, hangers-on, and deep pockets willing to pay anything in any form for some of that cachet to fall on them. That leads to a president with limited access to balanced, sane people he can count on to tell him facts and truths, however unpleasant or unpalatable.
The other public reaction tends to be utter revulsion. Public denigration, refusal to cooperate with even reasonable ideas, and unspoken support for extremist wack-jobs can result from this reaction. We know what that leads too all too well.
President Obama has enough on his plate to guide this country through some of the worst times since the Great Depression. Let's treat him, and his family, like the nice people they are. No worship, no adulation, just quiet respect, common civility, and perhaps a little uncommon kindess, even from those who disagre with his ideaology. Wouldn't be a bad way to treat everybody else either.
In 1930s Britain, dolls of the Little Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were manufactured and sold, and nobody made any complaints about an invasion of privacy, not even the King and Queen. Moreover, anything that could boost the economy, then as now, was seen as a good thing.
Thank you.
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