Drugs, Sports, Body Image, By Natalie Angier

Barbie dolls and G.I. Joe dolls have been transforming. The Barbies have been becoming skinnier with bigger boobs and waists while the G.I. Joe dolls have been becoming more and more muscular. Children that play with these dolls are getting unrealistic body images that they want to obtain. In the article “Drugs, Sports, Body Image and G.I. Joe” written by Natalie Angier, she states how these dolls are influencing young people to go to unhealthy extremes to achieve this unrealistic body. Because children play with toys that have unrealistic body images, kids go to unhealthy extremes to attain the “perfect” body.
One way the childrens toys are effecting kids today is by making the boys take steroids to reach the muscle mass of the unrealistic G.I. Joe doll. In the article Angier states, “Each new vintage of G.I. Joe has been more muscular and sharply defined, or “cut” than the model before” (424). Because of the increase in the muscle mass of the G.I. Joe doll more teenage boys have started using steroids: “Some 18 percent of high school athletes in the United States are thought to use anabolic steroids, about twice the figure of [1988], according to some estimates” (Angier 424). To stop the use of steroids we must make them aware that it is ok for them not to be as muscular as the G.I. Joe and other dolls.
Joe dolls are influencing people today is by pushing them to over exercise. Angier states in the article that, “Arnold Schwarzenegger has pointed out that top-tier athletes are not in it for the sake of “fitness,” and that they often go to grueling, distinctly unhealthy extremes in their training regimens; he has said, when he was a competitive bodybuilder, he often worked out so intensively that he vomited afterward” (425). Children are easily influenced especially by their favorite childhood toy. That pushes them to go to unhealthy exercising extremes. This needs to