Researchers say Barbie is a tortured soul

For years, feminists have fretted about the influence Barbie dolls supposedly exert on impressionable girls. Surely, the wasp-waisted, fashion-obsessed, Ken-loving Barbies were giving girls ruinously wrong ideas about everything from nutrition to romance. Now, a study by British researchers from the University of Bath (descendants, no doubt,  of the wife of Bath—no shrinking violet herself) have found that girls aren’t exactly under Barbie’s slender plastic thumb. “The iconic plastic doll is often mutilated at the hands of young girls, “ says an