This week, Mattel released a Whitney Houston doll to coincide with what would have been the artist’s 63rd birthday celebration on August 9th. With a tsunami of dolls constantly flooding the toy market each year, Antonino Tati wonders why he wasn’t allowed to play with even one of the harmless toys when he was growing up.
When I was a kid I always wanted to play with dolls. I never really got to due to the fact that in relatively sexist 1970s Australia, boys weren’t allowed to play with dolls. Still, my good little sister Lorena would be happy to swap the odd Barbie for one of my Tonka Trucks, and thus my love of deconstructing gender norms was born.
Today, however, not only can boys play with dolls – some spending more time with the inanimate plastic objects than their sisters – they have literal truckloads of new and various dolls arriving on shop shelves every year. While comprehensive unit-sale tallies across doll manufacturers are not fully compiled (because it’s the financial figures that matter most), in 2025 it was estimated that between $13.95 billion and $16.05 billion in total revenue was made from the sales of dolls. Mattel’s doll category alone hit the $2.05 billion mark (again, the company does not report the precise total count or number of individual dolls sold, instead opting to report financial figures in gross billings and sales revenue).
Dolls are funny things: they can appeal in their inanimate harmlessness, putting the onus of action fully into the hands of their adopters. Or they can appear pretty freakish – like the kind of porcelain-headed Annabel-looking dolls of the late 1800s. My partner Ben says that one of his Grandmas used to have an entire room full of porcelain-head dolls and that it used to freak him out a bit. Now, I begged to play with dolls as a kid, but a roomful of the things would probably freak me out, too.
Suffice to say, there are dolls to appeal to everyone and anyone these days – from children needing to bide time while getting in a little family-building practice, to strange, if not creepy, collectors of old dolls and action figures who probably still live in their parents’ basement.
A doll of your likeness is actually becoming a must-have on celebrity wish lists, as if it were to add to legacy as imperatively as a good record or quality film might. Everyone from Elvis Presley to Cher, Marilyn Monroe to Beyoncé, and Bowieto Kylie have had a doll made into their likeness – mostly by Mattel.
Heck, if you wanted to create a doll in your own likeness, it’s now as easy as logging into Temu. Careful, though, once you log into Temu, that site will virtually be glued to your phone and never stop bugging you. My point being that dolls are a dime a dozen these days and shouldn’t be seen as some kind of bucketlist box ticked by celebrities. Instead, perhaps they could focus on bringing up their own kids properly.
But the Whitney Houston doll is out this week and while she’ll never be as popular as Barbie, she’ll at least tick the DEI box for a corporation that probably still thinks there’s a colon in the middle of the word landfill.
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