Friday, June 09, 2006
Bring out the Barbie Dolls!
Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time hanging out with friends playing with dolls and listening to all kinds of people telling their Barbie stories.
Whether your grandma gave you a new Barbie every birthday or your Mum wouldn’t let you play with such plastic rubbish, everybody has a Barbie story. That’s not surprising: Mattel sells $1.4 billion of Barbie products worldwide each year. By one calculation, if you lined up all the Barbies sold in her first 30 years head to toe, Barbie would put a girdle around the earth four times. That’s enough plastic protagonists for a whole Golden Treasury of stories. Even if many girls today are trading in Barbie for a football, like Pink, or buddying up with Bratz dolls instead.
To collect some of these Barbie stories, some colleagues and I set up a display table of Barbie paraphernalia on campus at IUSB, and invited passersby to chat about every gal’s plastic pal. Love her or loathe her, people had a lot to say about Barbie.
“She’s too perfect!” “Too white!” some exclaimed, indicting Barbie as a cruelly unrealistic and exclusionary beauty ideal for women. “She’s way thin: Have a cheeseburger, Barbie!” Others shook their heads over “all those negative comments,” revering Barbie as an American idol, nostalgic for a ‘fifties childhood when girls were contented with dolls, and little boys with trains, and nobody even questioned why Barbie had to be white. “I wanted her fabulous wardrobe, she was so beautiful,” one woman yearned. Another wrote, “I wanna be Barbie: that bitch has everything.”
Well, maybe we should condemn Barbie for promoting superficial beauty and acquisitiveness among girls. Yet Barbie’s pink world is centered firmly on herself and her interests, limited though they are. That may be a useful message for girls who are still told to find themselves in a man. Everyone knows that dear dopey Ken is just an extra in Barbie’s rose-tinted teen drama: “Ken is just arm candy.”
Barbie’s fashionista obsession will ensure that Mattel keeps making profits by selling new outfits. But people also fondly recalled a folk tradition of home-made Barbie clothes, of grandmas stitching Barbie tracksuits in their girl’s team colours, even while Mattel hawks Barbie cheerleader poms.
Several confessed to torturing Barbie: “I bit her toes off,” “I pulled her head off,” “We buried our sister’s Barbie.” Others admitted to secretly acting out sexy love trysts with Barbie and Twist and Turn Stacey. Mattel has always re-packaged rebellion into a fashion statement, as with Rocker Barbie. But real girls have always coopted Barbie as a prop in thinking through their own concerns.
Which brings me back to my own recent adventures playing with dolls. Since Barbie is such a potent catalyst for conversations about body image, ideals of beauty and gender roles, one way to engage girls in thinking about these topics is through doll play.
So, my colleagues and I hunted through friends’ basements and Goodwill stores for discarded Barbies, assembled a bunch of fabric, beads and scraps, and put together a workshop for pre-teen girls to do a Barbie make over.
As we wielded pink feathers and bottle-caps, cobbled cardboard into sandals, made outrageous crowns of snail-shells and spangles, we talked about who the girls wanted their Barbies to be. One girl padded out Barbie and swathed her in a beaded purple gown to show you can be plump and still elegant. Another transformed Barbie’s torso into a blue velvet globe and urged us to “Save the Earth: with Barbie.
These girls used Barbie to flesh out their dreams.