It’s important that children don’t pick up on the wrong messages in connection with healthy eating and bodyshape. Given that dolls and ‘action figures’ are all designed to be respectively stick-thin or absurdly musclebound, maybe we need a small addition to the market for such toys.
Today’s invention is a range of dolls, of both sexes, designed to resemble more faithfully the variations in real people. These would have body parts constructed, lego-like, from multiple ‘slices’ (eg ten or so oval sections, might be snapped together to form a fairly smoothly-tapering limb or torso section). There would be a very large number of such slices in each doll kit, with diameters varying over a wide range (to accommodate everything from an obese waistline to an anorexic ankle, using the same basic oval shape).
There would also be a collection of articulated joints which would then connect the chosen body sections together.
Using these kits, children could assemble figures with a wide variation in body geometry and perhaps learn to make their own choices about which are attractive shapes.
