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Girls should stick to dolls over this online game dud...

There are all kinds of great games out there for kids these days. There are games to help them learn good manners, learn to be better spellers, improve their math skills, keyboarding efficiency. You know the drill. As parents, we are faced with a sea of choices. The problem is certainly not for a lack of options. That's for sure.

So, this morning, as I enjoyed my second cup of coffee, you can imagine that I nearly spewed it right out of my mouth when the story about Miss Bimbo disgraced my kitchen. If you have daughters, and frankly, even if you don't, you will appreciate my immediate concern, shock and absolute disgust when I heard about this so-called online game.

This game, aimed at girls, aged 8 to 14 years of age, allows players to adopt an avatar who can choose to get breast implants as a way to beautify herself, among other things.  No matter how you feel about plastic surgery and breast enhancement, the idea of your 9 year old choosing it for her fictitious character online...? That's just obscene. My hope would be that most 9 year old's wouldn't even know what a boob job was.

The avatar starts out in the buff - altogether naked. That alone, is offensive to me as a parent. Then, the player dresses her, with option to put her on crash diets by using diet pills. The thinner she is, the better her "happiness quotient" will be. She also competes with other online bimbos for the best billionaire boyfriend and can visit the bathroom to - are you ready for this -- PURGE when she's overeaten. I am so disgusted.

You have got to be kidding me. What's so sad about this is that young girls are impressionable and do not see the jeering irony behind what the 23 year old male British creators have done here. Young girls don't realize that this "game" was intended as a satirical site, or so the creators say. The girls take it as something to aspire to. The avatars are role models...even if the girls don't truly realize it.

The Today Show ran this clip regarding the game. You know, our society has done enough to uphold the images of women as objects, women who are excruciatingly thin, grossly tan and surgically enhanced. That's bad enough. But you are crossing another line altogether when you market a game like this to our daughters. This is gross. It's sick. And it's just plain wrong.

Parents, please, please, please continue to monitor what your kids are doing on the web. And if it isn't already, move your computer to a centrally located area of your home. If we don't police our kids' activities on the web, who will? (Go here for a link to Shop&Tell's articles on this very topic.)

In the meantime, I will look into ways we can shut these people down. For starters, I'm going to see if our computer's parental controls automatically block access to this site for our girls. I am hoping so. If not, I will type the address into their blocked sites list, so they can't go there.

From there, I am looking into how to really shut them down. As of right now, I can't get into their website, so perhaps, that's a start. Maybe their increased traffic from all the buzz has shut their servers down. That won't stop them for long, though. I'll keep you posted.