T O D A Y

What's it all about, Barbie?
Introducing Salon's special Barbie supplement

Banned in Vermont
Birkenstock moms savage the bodacious blonde

The Littlest Harlot
Tracy Quan explains why Barbie is a role model for hookers

My Barbie, Myself
Camille Paglia, Cintra Wilson and others recall intimate Barbie moments

The skinny on Barbie
Fun Facts about America's doll wonder!

- - - - - - - - - -

T A B L E++T A L K

What is the truth about giving birth? Does it hurt like hell? Share your pain in Table Talk.

- - - - - - - - - -

R E C E N T L Y

"Just because I'm HIV-positive, can't I bear children?
By Lori Leibovich
Should a 38-year-old, HIV-positive ex-drug addict have a baby? Patti Radigan thought so -- and a pioneering San Francisco clinic agreed to help her
(11/25/97)

Reluctant role model
By Susan McCarthy
My classmates wanted to hear how easy it is to combine kids and graduate school
(11/24/97)

Coyote dreams
By Cynthia Romanov
Peter Coyote rescued me from a miserable divorce
(11/21/97)

Cujo's bite is worse than his bark
By Anne Lamott
The main pleasure in owning a pit bull is in detonating a sense of fear in your neighbors
(11/20/97)

Escape from parenting
By Ariel Gore
New York City turns a responsible mama into a reckless adolescent
(11/19/97)

Toying with us
By Albert Mobilio
Dissecting kids' lust for loot
(11/18/97)

ARCHIVES

- - - - - - - - - -

Mamafesto
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

V E R B O T E N__B A R B I E

BY KATE MOSES | The "Verbotens" were from Kansas, which was as exotic as anything I'd ever known in the small, rural California town where I grew up. They moved to the back end of our cul-de-sac right after I completed second grade, and I spent that summer lugging my Barbie Dream House up the sidewalk to their house.

We played at their house because mine was too frightening. My parents' marriage was unhappy and it made me an anxious child. I wore undershirts and shorts under my dresses and rubber-banded my knee socks so they'd stay up. I didn't know why, but I didn't like to play with my Barbies: Something about Barbie's gratuitously female body made me deeply uncomfortable, as did Ken's undifferentiated pubic lump. If I had to play Barbie, I played with Skipper, the flat-chested little girl doll with long blond hair who was supposed to be Barbie's kid sister.

The opposite was true of the Verboten girls, who practically vibrated with premature hormonal energy. I believe it was one of Ursula's accounts of babymaking that led to our stripping all of the dolls, including Skipper, of their fascinatingly cunning clothing for the purposes of examination and discussion. "Barbie and Ken are married, so let's put them in bed together," Ursula suggested, but the bed that came with my Dream House was only a hard plastic single with a pillow molded onto it, so the dolls kept falling off. "We'll pretend," said Heidi, salvaging our play by running to the bathroom for a face cloth.

When she returned, she handed it to me. "You put them in bed together, Kathleen," she said, and though Heidi's urging had the ring of genuine playtime to it, Ursula's seconding did not. "Yeah, you do it, Kathleen," she said darkly, "but make sure Ken is on top."

My knees were sweating under the rubber bands by this time. I leaned over the dolls, picked up the face cloth and took Ken in my hand. I was just draping the face cloth back over Barbie and Ken like a one-man tent when all the air got suddenly sucked out of the room as Mrs. Verboten yelled, "What the hell is going on in here?" Her mouth had tightened like a sphincter around her cigarette and she ratcheted my arm up and out of its socket and launched me toward the front door. After kicking the screen door open she handed me the Dream House.

"You're a bad influence, Kathleen Moses," she hissed into my stunned face. "You're not a nice girl, and I won't let you play with my children anymore."

It was all right if I was banished from the Verbotens', I thought on the way home; in fact, I was sort of relieved. But the not-nice girl and the bad influence part bothered me. I thought I was a not-nice girl and a bad influence, too. I had just been hoping nobody else would notice for a while.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

M A L E__I D E A L__O F__A__W H O R E__B A R B I E

BY COURTNEY WEAVER | Like most little girls, I was fascinated by Barbie's breasts. Whenever I got a new Barbie, I would immediately take off her little top and stare at those giant, unproportionate mammary glands. They looked as odd to me as if she had three legs, or horns growing out of her head. Would I have breasts like that? I hoped so.

Then when Growing Up Skipper was introduced, the charm with Barbie's breasts ended for me. I didn't like to see them sprouting up gradually, I didn't like to think that something similar was going to happen to me. I just liked Barbie's breasts the way they were: fixed, huge, pert, immovable.

I guess another thing I wanted to say about Barbie is how sexualized she was. Even as a kid I knew the doll reeked of sex! What were those Mattel people thinking? They surely must have known that this female icon they were pushing on little girls was in actuality the male ideal of a whore.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

D A M N__T H E__T O R P E D O E S__B A R B I E

BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK | Some people might say that Barbie did a very bad thing to me at a very young age. It had nothing to do with body image per se: In fact, my older sisters and I used to ridicule Barbie's body, her torpedo breasts and her chevron waist. "Who looks like this?" we'd say, pointing and laughing, because even at 4, I realized she didn't look like any woman I knew. Now I look at her body and I think of her as if she were a car: streamlined, like a Cadillac with fins -- a marvel of industrial design, not the devil's tool to keep me submissive and confused.

But anyway, Barbie did work her voodoo on me, and she continues to work it to this day, because her wardrobe and her accessories inspired in me a wild and unruly love for clothes. The store-bought Barbie outfits -- they had names like "Midi Magic!" and "Fab City" -- cost a small fortune, and I prized them; the little plastic shoes you could get in packages of five or 10 pair, and I hoarded them. But most of my Barbie's clothes were homemade, either by myself, my sisters or someone else. There was always a table at the local farmer's market -- I grew up in upstate New York -- with dozens of homemade Barbie shift dresses for sale, fanned out like peacock feathers. And once you figured out how to finesse the darts -- damn the torpedoes! -- Barbie clothes were easy to make. Polka dots, far-out paisleys, fake Pucci prints -- Barbie could have it all. And before I knew it, my Barbie case was bursting with magnificent little outfits that Barbie could never have enough dates to wear. Kind of like my closets today. She's an evil influence, that Barbie. Damn her and God love her.

Stephanie Zacharek writes about movies and books for Salon.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -