While the Barbie doll’s body has been getting thinner and thinner over the years, action figures such as GI Joe have been getting more muscular. It is not only size but definition. One study, co-authored by Harvard’s Pope and Olivardia in 1999, compared action toys from different decades. The earliest models had no abdominal muscles; the 1970s models showed some; but by the mid-1990s the toys displayed ‘the sharply rippled abdominals of an advanced bodybuilder’. Tellingly, Ken, Barbie’s boyfriend, was the exception, but then he is regarded as a doll not an action figure, and is aimed at girls.

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