WHAT BARBIE REALLY TAUGHT ME: Lessons from the Playroom,
Both Naughty and Nice
by Yona Zeldis McDonough
Now that my son is 6 and
inextricably linked to the grade‑school social circuit, he gets invited
to birthday parties. Whenever I telephone to say he is coming, I ask about
gifts. And whenever the child is a girl I secretly hope the answer will be the
dirty little word I am longing to hear. The word is Barbie. No such luck. In
our Park Slope, Brooklyn, neighborhood, there is a bias against the doll.
"My daughter loves her, but I can't stand her," laments one mother.
"I won't let her in the house," asserts another. "Oh,
please!" sniffs a third.
But I love Barbie. I loved her in
1963, when she made her entrance into my life. She had Jackie Kennedy bouffant
hairdo. Her pouty mouth gave her a look both all knowing and sullen. She
belonged to a grown‑up world of cocktail dresses, cigarette smoke and perfume.
I loved her in the years that followed, too, when she developed bendable
joints, a twist and turn waist, long, ash‑blond hair and lifelike
lashes.
I've heard all the arguments
against Barbie: she's an airhead, she's an insatiable consumer of tarty
clothes, a dream house filled with pink furniture, a Barbie‑mobile who
teaches girls there is nothing in life quite so exciting as shopping. Her body,
with its no‑way‑in‑the‑world breasts, wasp waist and
endless legs, defies all human proportion. But at 6, I inchoately understood
Barbie’s appeal. pure sex. My other dolls were either babies or little girls,
with flat chests and chubby legs. Even the other so‑called fashion
dolls—Tammy, in her aqua and white playsuit, and Tressy, with that useless
hank: of hair—couldn't compete. Barbie was clearly a woman, and a woman was
what I longed to be.
When I was 8 and had just learned
about menstruation, I fashioned a small sanitary napkin for Barbie out of
neatly folded tissues. Rubber bands held it in place. "Look,"
said my bemused mother, "Barbie's got her little period. Now she can
have a baby." I was disappointed, but my girlfriends snickered in a
way that satisfied me. You see, we all wanted Barbie to be, well, dirty. Our
Barbies had sex, at least our childish version of it. They hugged and
kissed the few available boy doll we had the clean-cut and oh-so-square Ken,
the more relaxed and sexy Allan. Our Barbies also danced, pranced and
strutted, but mostly they stripped. An adult friend tells me how she used
to put her Barbie's low‑backed bathing suit on backward, so the
doll's breasts were exposed. I dressed mine in her candy‑striped baby‑sitter's
apron—and nothing else. Girls respond intuitively to the doll's sexuality,
and it lets them play out those roles in an endlessly compelling and yet
ultimately safe manner.
I've also heard that Barbie is a
poor role model. Is there such widespread contempt for the intelligence of
children, that we really imagine they are stupid enough to be shaped by a
doll? Girls learn how to be women from the women around them. Most often
this means Mom. Mine eschewed beauty parlors. She was a painter who wore
her long, black hair loose, her earrings big
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of "serious" incarnations: teacher, Olympic athlete, dentist.
And later this year we'll even get to see the Really Rad Barbie, a doll
whose breasts and hips will be smaller and whose waist will be thicker,
thus reflecting a more real (as if children want their toys to be real)
female body. I personally don't think any of this matters one iota. Girls
will still know the reason they love her, a reason that has nothing to do
with new professions or a subtly amended
Fortunately, my Barbie love will
no longer have to content itself with buying gifts for my son's female
friends. I have a daughter now, and although she is just 2, she already
has a half‑dozen Barbies. They are, along with various articles of
clothing, furniture and other accouterments, packed away like so many sleeping
princesses in translucent pink plastic boxes that line my basement
shelves. The magic for which they wait is not the prince's gentle kiss. It is
the heart and mind of my little girl as she picks them up and begs to play.
McDonough is a writer. This
passage is from her book, A Real-Life Barbie Turns Forty.