Feminist hero or sex-fantasy figure? An icon for our times or archetypal goddess? Richard Kelly Heft discusses Barbie’s appeal
She’s disparaged by feminists, studied by academics and is a subject of artists. Two Barbie dolls are sold every second of every day and now she is a cultural icon of our times. Barbie can inspire a blitz of publicity normally reserved for big-time human celebrities.
When her manufacturer, Mattel, announced that the doll was about to undergo some physical “updating”, she made headlines around the world. The teenage-to- twentysomething whose proportions translated to a freakish 38-18-34, has been toned down. The doll has a smaller chest, thicker waist and smaller hips. She is, claims the company, now more reflective of the little girls who play with her. Also, after 38 years on her tippy toes (to fit high-heel shoes), Barbie has flat feet.
The change prompted one United States newspaper columnist to protest: “Why not just give her a moustache, cellulite and varicose veins too?”
So why mess with a good thing? The company says it is not bowing to critics, simply continuing a well-established pattern of updating its doll to change with the times. This will be Barbie’s fourth face, but the first time the company has substantially changed her looks since 1977.
She was introduced to the world in 1959 as the teenage fashion model; her inventor was supposedly Ruth Handler who, along with her husband Elliot, had co-founded Mattel in 1945. It turns out, however, that Barbie was almost a direct copy of a German post- war doll named Lilli, which was sold as a pornographic plaything for men. “Barbie had a proletarian sex-industry body,” says MG Lord, author of Forever Barbie. “Basically she looked like a little German hooker.”
The original Barbie was unsmiling, with downcast eyes. Those were simple times and the doll came with the bare necessities: a black-and-white striped one-piece swimsuit, cat-eye sunglasses, high-heeled mules and earrings.
In the earliest days she was not an easy sell. Retailers balked, believing the doll would not appeal to the target three-to-11- year-old market. But Mattel got around the initial problems by betting the house on television advertising. According to Lord, the company was the first to market toys directly to children on Saturday morning TV. The initial ads showed an animated, lifelike Barbie in all her glamorous sophistication.
The ads ran in the spring of 1959. When schools broke up for summer in June, sales exploded. Mattel has gone on to market its “teenage fashion model” in more than 140 countries, and rang up more than $1,2- billion in sales in 1996. Young American girls own an average of eight dolls, compared with six in the United Kingdom and five in France and Germany. (Although Barbie was originally a teenager, the company is now decidedly vague on the question of age. Her various careers, including news reporter, doctor, fire- fighter and, in 1994, presidential candidate, suggest she is now much older.)
What makes her so special? According to Lord, it comes down to two things: first, the endless stream of new products, identities and accessories that keep the doll fresh. “Their marketing research is like a surveillance satellite,” she says. “They know what their customers want before the customers do.” But more importantly, she says, the company “has blundered into a primal feminine archetype”. For such a seemingly happy little thing, Barbie — deeply materialistic, impossibly curvaceous, perpetually stuck in high heels, and sexually spunky, whatever the company says — doesn’t please everybody. Sandi Holder, who owns a Barbie shop in Northern California, is critical of the new lines of lingerie, including teddies, corsets and bras, marketed for Barbie. “I don’t want my daughters to think that’s all there is in life, you know, like greeting Ken at the door in a teddy.” Actually, racy thumbnail-size lingerie has been sold for her since 1960.
It is this female objectification, and the omnipresent perfect body (at an estimated five feet 10 inches in human terms, her weight was set at 48kg), that drives critics wild. “Many girls who grow up with a Barbie are growing up with a strange notion of what a woman should look like,” says Marcia Ann Gillespie, editor-in-chief of Ms magazine. “I think Barbie should come with a warning on the box: ‘This product could be harmful to your child’s self- esteem.'”
Not so fast, say her defenders, she is also a long-time career gal. As early as 1965 she was an astronaut — though sometimes such roles are hard to take seriously — and her 1985 space suit was fashioned from fuchsia-coloured Lycra.
And some, like Lord, make a case that Barbie is a model feminist who has been scapegoated for the enduring beefs of the women’s movement. “The doll is the first important role model for girls aside from their mothers,” she says. “She is highly sexual, unmarried and has been wearing career outfits from the beginning. Her longtime boyfriend Ken, on the other hand, came later and has always been little more than an accessory. Barbie has never come second in her world.”
Lord describes the multi-racial Barbie (there are black, Hispanic and Asian versions) as an archetypal female goddess. As evidence, she points to the doll’s tiny, unusual feet — like Venuses of antiquity whose feet “taper into unusable prongs”. Poor Ken, with his “genital abridgment” is the ideal mate. “It makes sense that as a goddess she is ministered to by a eunuch priest,” says Lord.
For most people such talk is so much psychobabble. An estimated 28-million adults, nostalgic about their childhood “friend”, are still occasional buyers, not to mention the legions of young girl fans around the world. hard-core collectors number about 250 000 in the US and the lion’s share of their purchases are of “golden era” dolls made between 1959 and 1970, before production was shifted out of Japan.
Mattel’s big footprint is also all over the web, where Barbie sites have sprung up like mushrooms: many which depicted “Barbie art”, satire or photos have been forced to shut down, or to remove the offending materials. The sites, with names like Vicarious Barbie, Plastic Princess, and Distorted Barbie are filled with blank spaces and phrases like “sites vandalised by threat of legal action”, where pictures used to be.
The web activity underlines the art movement associated with Barbie that dates from the early 1980s and Andy Warhol’s portrait of her. Gender-bending is a common theme, with Ken frequently represented as gay, or a cross-dresser, and Barbie’s pristine image distorted in every imaginable way.
New York artist Mark Napier began portraying her in artwork about 10 years ago and says he stuck with the theme because of the passionate reactions the works evoked. “People have a hard time separating the doll from what it symbolises,” he says. “The reality is she’s among the world’s most deeply embedded and powerful images — in the same league as Jesus Christ, Mary, Mona Lisa and the Buddha. That makes her very interesting.”
Undoubtedly that notion was behind the Barbie Liberation Organisation, which four years ago went about destabilising national sensibilities by switching the voice-boxes of GI Joe and Teen Talk Barbie dolls.
The group managed to place several of the rigged dolls back on store shelves and generate a lot of publicity because of the possibility that GI Joe would be heard uttering the unlikely words: “Let’s go shopping.” And Barbie? “Vengeance is mine.”
However, over-production in the US collectors’ market has led to $79 “exclusive” dolls selling in discount stores for $29. There have also been instances of shoddy production, and a blitz of lawyers’ letters and lawsuits designed to put a halt to people — including small collectors clubs — from using the Barbie name.
Barbie’s careers and vocations:
1959: teenage fashion model
1960s: ballerina, nurse, stewardess, astronaut, student, fashion editor and teacher
1970s: surgeon, Olympic downhill skier, figure skater and gymnast
1980s: aerobics instructor, business executive, dress designer, television news reporter, veterinarian, rock star, Unicef ambassador, army officer, dancer
1990s: pilot, diplomat, music video star, naval petty officer, United States Marine Corps sergeant, rap musician, roller- blader, chef, presidential candidate, paediatrician, dentist, paleontologist, medic, police officer, engineer, scuba diver, artist, baseball player, lifeguard and fire-fighter