Published December 19, 2024
The backers of the blockbuster film Wicked knew before its release they would face the inevitable backlash from conservatives concerned about its not-so-subtle “LGBTQ agenda.” But they and their marketing partners did not expect to face a class-action lawsuit for peddling hardcore pornography.
Yet that is what the toy-making giant Mattel finds itself up against when parents learned that it had shipped tens of thousands of Wicked character dolls with packaging directing children to an explicit adult website to learn more about the film rather than to the correct URL: WickedMovie.com.
A South Carolina mother initiated the suit, Ricketson v. Mattel, alleging that “after opening the box that contained the Wicked Doll, Plaintiff’s minor daughter used an iPhone to visit the website shown on Defendant’s packaging.”
The story would certainly be darkly humorous if it were not so appalling. An anti-culture that produces a hit movie with the title Wicked and a mother who buys Wicked dolls for her daughter, we might gibe, has little cause for complaint if the product steers customers to genuinely wicked material. Moreover, we have connived for so long in the wholesale sexualization of childhood that porn sites on toy dolls might almost seem par for the course.
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Brad Littlejohn is a Fellow in EPPC’s Technology and Human Flourishing and Evangelicals in Civic Life programs. His wide-ranging research and writing encompasses work on the relation of digital technology and embodiment, the appropriate limits of free speech, the nature of freedom and authority in the Christian tradition, and the retrieval of a Protestant natural law ethic.
