A new app that taught girls as young as nine to perform plastic surgery on an overweight blonde woman has been pulled from sale.
The free app, called “Plastic Surgery for Barbie”, invited players to use liposuction to “suck the fat” out of the woman to “make her beautiful”.
“This unfortunate girl has so much extra weight that no diet can help her,” the game’s description read. “In our clinic she can go through a surgery called liposuction that will make her slim and beautiful.
“We’ll need to make small cuts on problem areas and suck out the extra fat. Will you operate on her, doctor?”
The game – which was aimed at players aged nine and older – appeared on the Apple and Google stores last week and caused outrage almost immediately.
“Not only is this app teaching girls incredibly narrow standards of beauty to which they will certainly compare themselves, it’s also equipping them with the tools to ‘take care’ of this imaginary problem of ‘extra weight’. Exactly what nine-year-old girls need,” Isha Aran wrote on feminist blog Jezebel.
A Twitter protest led by EverydaySexism resulted in iTunes quietly removing the app from its stores overnight.
