Did You Really Feel the Need to Identify With Your Barbie?

The Internet is singing praises to the company Mattel after it announced the new and improved diverse Barbie dolls. Now, Barbie comes in various skin tones and body sizes that young girls can "identify" with. This is cool. I'm here for it. But as a woman who grew up playing with the incredibly skinny Barbie while simultaneously getting bowls of spaghetti shoved down my throat from my off-the-boat Italian family, I can't honestly say that the plastic toy I played with was something I ever wanted to look like in real life. Primarily because Barbies aren't real life.

Luckily, Kirstie Alley took to Twitter to express her relief of growing up in a time when toys weren't taken so "seriously." Here's the Twitter tea:

I feel that. I mean, c'mon. How could I identify with someone who didn't even talk? Did playing with Polly Pockets mean I aspired to be two centimeters tall? I was a Beanie Baby aficionado. But did I go from wanting to be a purple platypus one day to a multi-colored ape the next? Can't say I did.

Same thing can be applied to movies and TV. Mulan was my bae, and 1. I'm not Asian and 2. didn't foresee myself fighting in a Chinese war in the near future. And I was OK with that. I loved CatDog but wasn't disappointed when I woke up without a dog growing out of my backside every morning.

Point is, these thoughts never even registered in my mind as a kid, because I was entertained. I played and used my imagination. I wasn't sitting there thinking about how I could show up to my first grade classroom like a boss, channeling my multi-colored Troll Dolls. We know the Internet has made us hypersensitive, so let's just chill out and be a little more playful, if you catch my drift.