On Tuesday, the Mattel subsidiary American Girl unveiled the newest member of its iconic sorority: a blank-eyed boy named Logan.

Are mediocre white men not prevalent enough in today’s society, so now their avatars must haunt even our tea parties? They already have a Tea Party. Sure, maybe the company’s intention is to show boys that it’s O.K. to play with dolls. (Though if you’re trying to gender neutralize, maybe don’t call your company American Girl.) To longtime fans, it feels more like girls are losing something that used to be theirs alone.

The company is the brainchild of Pleasant Rowland, a textbook author who created a line of dolls designed to educate girls with the aid of accompanying biographical books. Addy fled to Philadelphia with her mother to escape slavery. Kirsten struggled to eke out a frontier existence while watching her Sioux friend starve. Felicity loved horses in a historical way. Beginning in 1986, America’s young women were able to learn about American life during World War II while also learning how good it felt to brush the sleek, synthetic hair of a doll dressed in 1940s period clothing. Ms. Rowland helped invent a lucrative new category in a toy market dominated by blobbish baby dolls and buxom Barbies: dolls that looked like girls.

Logan, with his “gray eyes that open and close” and his “unique hand positioning,” is a mutant born in the fallout of the 2001 dollpocalypse, when American Girl’s focus shifted from past to present. Perhaps the most offensive thing about Logan (besides the fact that his fanfared debut implies these spunky, self-sufficient girls needed a boy in their lives) is that, like the other rootless dolls in American Girl’s bland “contemporary” lines, he is marketed as interesting not because of his historical connections, but because he is available for purchase.

Per Logan’s official biography, he plays drums in a band with his friend Tenney, another new doll. That, apparently, is Logan’s whole thing. He knows Tenney. (Tenney’s whole thing, with her blond curls, passion for songwriting and glassy, unseeing stare, is apparently that she is Taylor Swift.)

What could Logan possibly have to talk about with Samantha, an Edwardian orphan who spoke out boldly against child labor practices and had a beautiful cranberry Christmas dress with a lace collar? The polio that weakened one of Maryellen’s legs had been all but eradicated by the time Logan was born, so he doesn’t even have polio.

Narrative issues aside, Tenney is the more dynamic plaything simply because she comes with more: more hair, more accessories, more hardships to overcome when boys like her friend Logan grow up to earn one dollar for every 80 cents she earns, and then try to take away her reproductive rights. Logan’s description reveals “he arrives in a plaid button-down shirt, a T-shirt, jeans, underwear and shoes” — just like every other man America’s girls are going to meet for the rest of their lives. Can’t we give them an imaginative childhood free of mediocrity?

While lacking compelling historical context, Tenney can still impart to young ladies American Girl’s sharpest lesson: Being a woman is expensive. In addition to purchasing Tenney, shoppers can pick up her guitar, her banjo, her “Spotlight” outfit with shimmery pink skirt, her stage, her gingham pajamas, her picnic outfit, her picnic potato salad, her hat, her necklace and her dog. Logan’s single accessory: a drum set with “two drumsticks that Logan can hold.” Congratulations, Logan. You can hold two sticks. But you have nothing to wear to a picnic, in the spotlight, or even to sleep, and Tenney is writing your songs. You are a $115 accessory for Tenney.

An American Girl spokeswoman, Julie Parks, claims that the new dolls enrich the American Girl diaspora with “more experiences, more diversity and more interests.” But why must women increase diversity by welcoming men? Why can’t Hot Wheels unveil a new car that, in addition to being a die-cast miniature automobile, is also a confident woman who lives in a common-law marriage with a male surgeon — and guess what: She’s a surgeon, too, and she’s actually a better surgeon than he is?

Of course, there’s nothing to stop girls from interpreting Logan as Tenney’s short-haired friend who joined her Riot Grrrl band to rock against the patriarchy. If Logan were being advertised as the company’s first transgender doll, his story would fit right in line with American Girl’s origins, imploring kids to consider sophisticated issues at a second-grade reading level.

Disappointing, then, that he seems to be a glorified background player getting all the attention because he’s a man.