Barbie is no unconscious sexual icon to children. We were totally hip to what a smut-primed rack she had. The first thing any of us would do around a GI Joe would be to peel his camo fatigues off and have Barbie stare at the mound of brown plastic where his command unit was supposed to be. Then we'd strip Barbie real slow, replete with dialogue like, "Take off your tu-tu, Barbie," in a lecherous baritone.
"Oh, no, I can't!" she would twitter, porn-thirstily.
Something violent would happen; Joe would have a 'Nam flashback, or something would make him pull a gun or compel him to rip the clothes off Barbie, who liked it, even though she fought back.
"Let's have it, Tiger," Joe would growl.
"Oh, Joe," she'd hiss.
Then we'd clack their plastic bodies together for a hot round of inanimate scrogging. This is the only thing you can do with a Barbie, besides dress her, and if you weren't rich, chances are she only had a couple of outfits anyway. We learned a lot from Barbie, in the vein of all that scurrilous man-woman drama as-seen-on-TV. Even at 7, we knew she was a wanton, submissive bimbo. After Joe left, she'd hang around naked for days, with her hair all mussed and one of her toeshoes floating in the dog dish. She had no self-respect.
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BY CAMILLE PAGLIA | Barbie's arrival on the scene was well after my own childhood (when I loathed dolls and loved swords and other Amazonian regalia). However, I have followed her rise to power with interest, since her streamlined, pornographically android body type was so different from that of the pudgy, cuddly, Shirley Temple-like moppets that came before her. As someone who worked for a college summer in the toy department at Woolworth's, I definitely believe that toy sales are a key to the Zeitgeist. Barbie not only became a major sexual persona influencing celebrity style from Farrah Fawcett to Ivana Trump, but she ominously prefigured the destabilization of sexual identity that would lead, among other things, to an epidemic of anorexia and bulimia among white middle-class girls. She's no pushover: Barbie to me has the glittering, militant panache of Raquel Welch in her cavewoman bikini. Adored and reviled, Barbie is a fetish and an objet de culte, eerily reminiscent of the sleek, faceless Greek Cycladic idols that predate Christ by a millennium.
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BY JOYCE MILLMAN | I don't have any happy Barbie Moments. In fact, I don't have any Barbie Moments, never having had a Barbie. Oh, I remember asking my mother for one, preferably with long blond hair and a fishtail evening gown. But instead, I received a succession of no-name Barbie knock-offs. My mother, you see, couldn't resist a bargain. Once, when I was 6, I asked her for a Beatles album. What I got was an album of Beatles songs as sung by those mop-topped sensations the Liverpools. As if a kid wouldn't know the difference! To spite her, I grew up to be a rock critic.
Anyway, back to my Barbie Moment, such as it is. One day, my mother told my younger sister and me that she was taking us to the beach. A happy bus ride ensued. However, she did not take us to the beach. She took us to the doctor, whose office was near the beach, for booster shots. Afterwards, apparently feeling guilty (as she damn well should have), my mother took us to a nearby odds and ends store to buy toys. She was feeling so guilty, in fact, that she magnanimously offered to buy me a Barbie. Of course, the only Barbies in the store had red hair and short bubble hairdos -- all the good Barbies got sent to real toy stores. Although this was far from the flowing-haired blond doll of my dreams, I accepted my mother's peace offering. Some time later, I learned that the doll she had bought me wasn't even a Barbie, it was a Midge. So there you have it, the Barbie Moment that made me the neurotic, suspicious, beach-phobic person I am today.
Is it any wonder I prefer Jane West?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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BY LISA PALAC |I had all the Barbies: Barbie, Ken and Skipper, regular and Malibu; Stacy, Barbie's British friend who said things like, "Smashing!" when you pulled the string that came out of her neck; Francine and P.J., and Christie and Brad, the Black Barbies. I even had some kind of Hippie Barbie who wore a tie-dye midriff and bell bottoms along with a fake suede headband and fringe vest. The best part about Hippie was that she was this crazy, multi-jointed doll that came with a 45 called "I'm Happy, I'm Barbie" and a battery-operated platform -- when you stuck her feet in the slots and turned it on, she did a frenzied, Woodstock-style dance. I had almost every Barbie accessory, too -- the two-story house, the dune buggy, the camper, the swimming pool -- and a huge trunk of Barbie clothes, which cost my parents a small fortune.
Despite this paradise there was, however, a Barbie problem. I kept breaking their legs off. The first time it happened, I was making P.J. do the Chinese splits and CRACK! Her leg came off at the hip. Next, Barbie was doing a hi-karate side kick and CRACK! Same thing. A different day, another Barbie accident. My father tried to fix the dolls by gluing their legs back on and then clamping them in a bench vise until the glue dried. It didn't work. Now their broken legs were completely immobile from the knee up. While I was disappointed about their legs, I was extremely inspired by the sight of a nude Barbie in a vise. Why, these Barbies didn't want to be cheerleaders or black belts -- they wanted to be punished! They wanted to be tied up, bossed around and then blackmailed by Ken and Stacy. They wanted an evil baby sitter. And I, of course, gave them exactly what they asked for.
Lisa Palac is the author of the "The Edge of the Bed" a personal history about sex and pop culture, due out this Spring, and the producer of the erotic Virtual Audio series Cyborgasm.
Okay, I admit it: I saw New Moon on opening weekend
There's a "New Moon" Out Tonight
Carrie Prejean Goes Down. Literally!
Open Salon box office in review (10/25/09)