
Lammily - Average is Beautiful - rodrigocoelho
https://www.lammily.com/average-is-beautiful
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maqr
I never thought much about it until now, but accurately proportioned dolls are
uncanny and creepy. I wonder if that's why Barbie wasn't accurately
proportioned to begin with.

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ovulator
It sure doesn't look like a fun toy. As a male I never played with Barbie, but
I sure didn't want to play with a toy that looked like my parent. I wanted to
play with the action figure that was bright, fun and imaginative. IE GI Joes,
Turtles, Super heroes, etc.

I think the problem with girls toys is how they are promoted to be played
with. The point of Barbie is to make sure she looks pretty, regardless of the
dolls initial proportions. So little girls are taught to focus on appearance
and making sure things are visually appealing as possible (including
themselves).

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nilved
> As a male I never played with Barbie,

I don't mean you call you out, but you should note that comments like this are
essentially exactly why this project exists.

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girvo
Um, sorry, I don't follow. Can you expand on that?

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nilved
You're enforcing gender roles.

~~~
jpd
I do not see how creating a doll with a more regular dimensioned body will
make boys want to play with them more.

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fchollet
Isn't the entire point of Barbie dolls to represent a ridiculously unrealistic
ideal? In the same way that boys' action figures are impossibly muscular, and
superheroes have super-strength/superpowers.

When making a toy, the question to ask should probably be "is it exciting?"
rather than "is it beautiful" or "is it realistic". Is average exciting?

~~~
lukifer
This is a good idea on paper, but it feels a little "Harrison Bergeron". I
agree that there are major problems in our culture with body image, but Barbie
seems like a minor culprit compared to advertising, fashion magazines,
Photoshop [1], and celebrity culture. And I don't think there's anything
intrinsically wrong with a certain level of idealization and fantasy in
abstract representations like Barbie and He-Man.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(South_Park)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_\(South_Park\))

~~~
slvv
Or, maybe Barbies are way more damaging because they're aimed at children.
While celebrity culture and photoshop are hard to escape for adults looking at
most media, children are learning what ideal bodies look like not only from
those sources but also from toys like Barbies and Bratz dolls.

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ajaymehta
For more background on this campaign, check out this TIME piece from the
morning: [http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/03/05/the-new-barbie-meet-
the-...](http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/03/05/the-new-barbie-meet-the-doll-
with-an-average-womans-proportions/)

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orik
I'd feel more comfortable pressing the "Back This Project" if the button said
"Powered by Crowdtilt" underneath it.

The whole "looks like a kickstarter but isn't on kickstarter.com" thing scared
me off.

~~~
mappum
More people are starting to handle their own crowdfunding. Lockitron got
rejected by Kickstarter so they created an open-source app for it:
[http://selfstarter.us](http://selfstarter.us)

~~~
ajaymehta
Definitely. Many of the largest crowdfunding campaigns of the past year have
been self-powered (see Soylent, Tile, Lockitron, Coin, Star Citizen).

Might be helpful to check out Lockitron co-founder Paul Gerhardt's views on
self-hosted campaigns:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6261442](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6261442)

This campaign for Lammily is powered by our open source tool CrowdtiltOpen
(formerly Crowdhoster). We've taken Selfstarter's awesome groundwork and
turned it into an end-to-end solution.

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pyrrhotech
Average in the US would be 20-30% overweight

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NAFV_P
Reminds me of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumm-
Ra](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumm-Ra)

His action figure came in standard and special editions.

With Lammily they could bring out a special edition "Lammily after a night on
the tiles":

Stilleto heels, one of them broken, a black eye from picking a fight with a
cabbie, ciggie hanging out of her mouth, bottle jack-d in her hand, vomit
dripping from her chin and an inappropriate tattoo on her arse ... she has a
button on the back which when pressed repeats the phrase "hey fuck you,
asshole".

Far more realistic.

