I'm A Barbie Girl and I Turned Out All Right

The Toronto Star ^ | May 1, 2002 | Rosie Dimanno

[mitchbert]

I'm a Barbie girl, and I still turned out all right

Rosie DiManno

As a kid, with five tormenting boys in the house, my Barbie dolls would routinely turn up strung by the neck from the maple tree out front, or wedged in grotesque positions among the branches, or rendered headless and amputated, perhaps buried neck-deep in the garden.

I sometimes think the brothers got more enjoyment than I ever did from the endlessly entertaining indignities inflicted on that blue-eyed blonde with the knock-out knockers and impossibly tiny waist.

Despite what the fembos would subsequently charge, I never imagined that I would grow up to look like Barbie, nor aspired to do so. It was her wardrobe I coveted: the mini-designer suits and satiny ballgowns, the high-heeled mules and clutch purses.

When Barbie first appeared at the 1959 American Toy Fair in New York City, she was (barely) clad in a striped maillot and bore a startling resemblance to Disney's Tinkerbell (or maybe it was vice-versa) who in turn was said to be modeled on Marilyn Monroe. Actually, there was a Monroe Barbie, wearing that sexy white halter number from The Seven Year Itch, only one among a zillion of Barbie incarnations.

The Mattel assembly line was forever inventing new portrayals for the multiple personality doll with the serious identity issues — Stewardess Barbie, Dr. Barbie, Nurse Barbie, Astronaut Barbie, Gymnast Barbie, Co-ed Barbie, Police Officer Barbie, "Colored Barbie" (a cultural breakthrough as the first black doll, so before its time that "black" or "Afro-American" had yet to be substituted for the "colored" term), Wheelchair Barbie, and all the ethnic derivations that would follow in the universe of pan-global Barbie that accounted for upwards of a billion dolls sold since in 150 countries.

Personally, I would like to have seen further extrapolations on the original — Psycho Barbie, say, or Junkie Barbie or Lesbo Barbie or Unwed Mother Barbie. But the wicked imagination took flight where Mattel refused to venture.

Kinfolk, gal pals and an insipid boyfriend (who lacked the male assets to match Barbie's anatomical gifts) would come to round out the Barbie Galaxy and copycats would emerge to challenge but never come anywhere near usurping Barbie's supremacy. She was the first and the most enduring of grown-up dolls — Goddess Barbie.

The real Barbie, or at least the toy's namesake, was a little girl who, like most little girls, was fascinated with cut-outs that she would dress up. The child's mother, Ruth Handler, took notice and talked her plastics-businessmen husband into knocking off a $3 prototype that would launch the Mattel empire they founded.

Mrs. Handler died last Saturday, age 85, and gloriously unbowed by the harping criticism from feminists — including the National Organization of Women, just as silly on this subject as was former U.S. vice-president Dan Quayle when he dumped on TV character Murphy Brown for having a baby out of wedlock — who turned Barbie into a symbol of oppression and objectification, a malevolent contributor to the eating disorder phenomena of anorexia and bulimia and just plain wishful emulation.

This griping I've never understood, any more than I accept that the stick figure insects in fashion magazines are responsible for the neuroses of female adolescence. I liked Cathy-go-pee-pee dolls too, but that didn't mean I wanted to wet my own pants, or particularly craved a live baby of my own, either as a child or as a grown-up. By the same token, boys who messed around with G.I. Joes invariably grew out of the soldier wanna-be phase as they passed through that phase of childhood.

It was just play, you know? Make-believe. And a damn sight more creative, in role-playing, than Nintendo and PlayStations that merely exercise one's fingers.

But Barbie was such an icon that she was subjected to intellectual probing and prodding, psychological analysis and lab-rat testing. One academic expert determined that, if the 11 1/2 inch doll was actually blown up (and there were indeed blow-up versions in dirty novelty stores, but let's not go there) to 5-foot-6 dimensions, her measurements would extrapolate to 39-21-33, a form more likely to be attained by plastic surgery than found in nature, but not entirely unknown. In fact, she would have been a good candidate for breast reduction surgery, especially as she aged. Which, of course, Barbie has never done. Unless there's a droopy-breasted Senior Citizen Barbie out there somewhere which I've yet to come across.

Some of my friends, having enjoyed their own Barbie years without parental interference, have tried mightily to deny the guilty pleasure to their own girl children, banning the bitch from their homes.

This vigilance has inevitably turned out badly because Barbie is everywhere and little girls can't understand why she might be bad for them. They're quite right, of course. Barbie isn't bad. She's just a plaything. And most modern mothers, worn down by the pleading of little girls, have come to recognize that. It's not worth the bother of creating issues where none exist, especially when there's more pressing stuff to worry about. Ditto for toy guns and little boys. Or toy guns and little girls, for that matter. We tend to blame inanimate objects — or violent movies and the like — for maladjusted behaviour when we refuse to take responsibility for our own failures and poor rearing of children.

Mrs. Handler, who always claimed that Barbie fantasies actually encouraged young girls to dream about an adulthood without gender limitations, was brusquely dismissive of her critics. Said her husband: "It really didn't bother her. She thought they were wrong."

Barbie's creator/mother got out of the doll business in the late '70s, turning her energies to the manufacturing of prosthetic breasts for cancer survivors, of which she was one, this at a time when women who'd had mastectomies were making do with clumsy one-breast-fits-all replacements, left or right.

It was a fitting professional segue for Mrs. Handler, who'd first introduced those perky Barbie boobs to the world. "I've lived my life from breast to breast," she joked, while tirelessly travelling to advocate early breast cancer detection.

Barbies all over the world are shedding a tear at Mrs. Handler's passing. And pulling on their designer mourning outfits.

[mitchbert]

Rosie is a surprisingly unpolitically correct columnist for the otherwise drippingly liberal Toronto Star. One of her pet peeves is people (specifically women) who project their own insecurities onto others and try and bend society to fit their own phobias and failures. I thought some here may enjoy this.

[Benson_Carter]

bump

[egarvue]

We tend to blame inanimate objects — or violent movies and the like — for maladjusted behaviour when we refuse to take responsibility for our own failures and poor rearing of children.

Oh, my - some common sense, for once. Its about time the pendulum starts swinging away from exreme political correctness, and back toward common sense.

[GraniteStateConservative]

They'll make a "Vice President Condi Rice" Barbie in 2005. It'll be the biggest seller of all time.

[jlogajan]

It was just play, you know? Make-believe. And a damn sight more creative, in role-playing, than Nintendo and PlayStations that merely exercise one's fingers.