Introduction
Mattel,
facing flagging sales of its Barbie dolls, manufactured some controversy
recently by doing a tie-in with the
Sports
Illustrated swimsuit issue. Though
some of the coverage of this (
highly lucrative) controversy
was quite good, mostly I came across lightly researched, predictable puff pieces. (An example of the indifferent
reporting: few stories bothered to point
out that Barbie wasn’t actually on the cover, but only appeared with a “cover
wrap” in about a thousand issues.) The
low quality of existing coverage has emboldened me to tackle the topic despite
my routine unwillingness to do a lot of research myself.
Originally I
thought the controversy would be about swimsuit models suffering from lowered
self-esteem after being compared to Barbie dolls, but I didn’t actually find
any evidence of this. And when I watched
a
video that accompanied a story about the supposed controversy, I stopped worrying about the models.
The video didn’t even mention Barbie; it was just a few models having a
routine interview interrupted by the big news that they’d made the cover of
Sports Illustrated. They jumped up and down and shrieked; one
curled up on the floor, overwhelmed; and one—mid-hug—cried, “Oh my God!” and
then (fearing a wardrobe malfunction), “Oh,
my hair extensions!” Worthy of
Shakespeare, that.
So I’m
focusing instead on the original charge that Barbie dolls present an impossible
ideal of womanhood that damages the self-esteem of girls. As long as I’ve been a parent I have
instinctively rejected this, and now upon reflection I am more convinced. Here are ten reasons to cut Barbie some
slack.
Reason #1:
Avoid the obvious hypocrisy
I have
always puzzled over why feminists and other concerned parties seem to single
out Barbie, when the rest of mainstream pop-culture is just as bad and probably
worse. It’s not as though Barbie were
the only representation of the ideal
female as tall, skinny, and beautiful. At least Barbie doesn’t have fake boobs! And at least she’s inert until animated by
our daughters, unlike the hussies you see on TV and in the movies.
I suppose it’s
because Barbies appeal to very young girls that people are concerned. But I’m not convinced that preoccupation with
body image begins in little kids. My
ten-year-old does enjoy coordinating her Barbies’ outfits and her own (which
tend still to be pink and purple) but she spends very little time in front of
the mirror and would be perfectly happy going to school with bed-head. It’s her twelve-year-old sister, far beyond
the age of Barbies (and who, significantly, never played with them to begin
with) who has taken to stalling the family’s egress from the house with
last-minute hair brushing.
Attire, physique,
and grooming are aspects of a Barbie-like image that girls and women can strive
for. But what about beauty stereotypes women
have less control over, like hair color? Should we ban blond Barbies in
particular? After all, only 2% of people
worldwide are naturally blond. Couldn’t
we argue that those mothers who dye their hair are equally culpable in creating
an unrealistic standard? And what about
mothers who do manage to have an exquisite physique that their daughters cannot
achieve? Is their loss of self-esteem their
mothers’ fault?
Reason #2:
Avoid the gender double-standard
At least I
can’t harm my daughters’ self-esteem with my 8% body fat. After all, they don’t look to their father as
a role model of womanhood. But what if I
had a son? Looking at how much flack
Barbie has caught over the years, it’s worth wondering how Ken has managed to
escape scot-free. I’d argue that Ken is even
more unrealistic than Barbie, because
real-life men so often let themselves go after their teenage and young adult
years.
When I went
to my wife’s twentieth high school reunion awhile back, I encountered a lot of
fit and trim women who were paired with seriously overweight men. It was like a parody of some kind. Sure, no woman had the wasp-like figure of a
hypothetical real-life Barbie, but they were closer to Barbie than the men were
to Ken. Perhaps you feel assured that
the self-esteem of these men has made it through this transformation
unscathed. Well, how do you know? Another person’s self-esteem is always a
matter of conjecture.
And how come
nobody ever worried aloud that playing with GI Joes would make our sons want to
become soldiers, or that they’d feel wimpy because they’re not tall and
muscular? Why haven’t concerned adults
campaigned for bald, tubby GI Joes or portly, bespectacled General Kyles?
Reason #3:
Avoid the model vs. athlete double-standard
Could it be
that looking out for little girls, without a corresponding concern for little
boys, is just sexist? As if the little
girls must be defended against societal ills while the boys can take care of
themselves? Think about what little boys
are messing around with instead of Barbies:
baseball cards (historically) and video games (nowadays).
There isn’t enough
disk drive space available on the Internet to cover the many ills of modern
video games, but let’s consider a small subset of them, that being sports games
featuring real players. Nobody seems to
mind when little boys (or girls) idolize pro athletes, who to a disgusting
extent have manipulated their bodies artificially to gain advantage. This is worse than Barbies, because we have
actual living humans embodying impossible physiques.
Obviously
football players on steroids jump first to mind, but in some sports athletes go
the other direction and become so thin they’d make Barbie look stout. You think Chris Froome got this skinny
without a little help from his friends?
Thank God nobody has the poor taste to put out a Chris Froome doll.
Reason #4:
Recognize that our daughters are not stupid
It’s common to take it for granted that our children’s play is shaping who
they’ll become some day. But this isn’t
a simple connect-the-dots matter. The
nexus of imagination and child development is complicated. Isn’t the whole point of make-believe to
entertain notions that are totally different from reality? Lots of kids’ books start with the parents
being killed (James and the Giant Peach, the
Lemony Snicket books, and the Harry Potter books come to mind) but most adults
have the good sense not to worry about these books filling our children with
untoward fantasies.
To some
degree, everybody acknowledges our daughters’ discernment, even in the case of
Barbies. Nobody bats an eye at how our
kids gloss over the more glaring instances of these dolls’ unrealistic traits,
such as what’s beneath the clothes. If
we really believe our daughters’ standards are shaped by Barbies, we should
worry that these little girls will one day want to have their own nipples
surgically removed, and/or marry men completely lacking in genitalia. Why do we expect kids to completely ignore these anatomical fictions, while being nonetheless
brainwashed about general body type?
Today I
asked my daughter Lindsay, the one who loves Barbies, “Do you want to look like
Barbie when you grow up?” She
emphatically replied, “No!” I asked why
not. In a tone of near exasperation at
my cluelessness, she said, “Because she’s too skinny, and her arms are too
wimpy!” I asked Lindsay if she would
prefer more realistic Barbie dolls, and she casually replied, “No.” I asked if, when she grows up, she would want
a husband who looks like Ken. “No way!”
she said, impassioned. And why not? “His abs are too big! He looks too much like a boxer! And he has a painted-on face and molded
plastic hair.”
Reason #5: Barbie gives us insight into our kids
As I see it,
Barbie doesn’t shape so much as reflect
our daughters’ play. I remember when I
was a kid watching my friend’s little sister playing Barbies, and her play
consisted mainly of one Barbie lecturing another about safety. Thus it didn’t surprise me to observe, over
the years, how worried and overprotective her mom proved to be.
The
brilliant writer Jo Ann Beard describes, in her memoir
The Boys of My Youth, growing up in a blue collar Illinois town out
near the sticks, where “things are
measured in shitloads, and every third guy you meet is named Junior.” Her account of playing Barbies with her cousin
reveals much about the kind of adults she had encountered in her young life:
“Let’s say it’s really hot out
and they don’t know Ken is coming over and they’re just sitting around naked
for a while,” I suggest.
“Because they can’t decide what
to wear,” Wendell clarifies. “All their
clothes are in the dryer.”
Black-haired, ponytailed Barbie
stands on tiptoe at the cardboard sink. “I’m
making us some pink squirrels,” she announces.
“But we better not get drunk, because Ken might come over.”
Both Barbies do get drunk, and
Ken does come over. He arrives in an
ill-fitting suit, and the heat in the Barbie house is so overwhelming that he
has to remove it almost immediately.
“Hey baby,” Ken says to no one in particular. The Barbies sit motionless and naked in their cardboard kitchen, waiting for
orders. This is where Dirty Barbie gets
murky—we aren’t sure what’s supposed to happen next. Whatever happens, it’s Ken’s fault, that’s
all we know.
The contrast
between this and my daughter Lindsay’s play is a great relief. Much of the time, Lindsay is creating worlds
for Barbie and Ken, like this hotel that threw our bathroom into disarray for a
few days:
You see the
bowl of water on the second shelf down?
That’s a soothing footbath for Barbie.
The stacked cylinders next to it make her chair.
Here’s
Barbie’s music room, made out of sofa cushions. The wooden cylinder
in the foreground is the handle of a parasol Lindsay set up to get the lighting
just right:
Reason #6:
Outfits
Barbie comes
in many ethnicities, but only one basic physique, and it’s easy to trot this
out as proof that she’s held up as some ideal body type. But there’s a more basic reason: it’s essential that the outfits be completely
interchangeable among every Barbie ever made.
After all, mixing and matching outfits is one of the common forms that
Barbie play takes.
This
interchangeability seems innocent to me.
A more cynical and venal doll company might deliberately introduce
incompatibilities, just to sell more clothes.
When I was a
kid, my brothers and I liked to play with the album cover of our dad’s “
Papas & Mamas Exchanging Faces” record. This was a complex multi-page album
cover, split horizontally, so you could superimpose the top half of any
singer’s face on the bottom half of any other singer’s face. What made it so fun was Mama Cass’s corpulent
visage juxtaposed with the more traditionally good-looking countenances of the
others. This now strikes me as less
innocent than the Barbies’ interchangeable outfits.
Reason #7:
Social politics can be dodgy with kids
When
teaching my daughters to be thoughtful, considerate people, I try not to
introduce too many abstract concepts, like political correctness. When I see Lindsay playing Barbies, my
instinct is not to run over and ruin
her fun with a lengthy dissertation about Barbie and gender politics. And Barbie’s figure is only the
beginning. I’m sure many a parent in our
community has sat his or her daughter down and said, “It’s time to talk about
Barbie, beauty, and race.” My wife and I
have not done this. (This isn’t because
of any fully formed ideology, mind you; we’ve just never gotten around to
sorting out our position here).
It so
happened that when Lindsay picked out her very first Barbie at Ross Dress for
Less, she chose an African-American one.
The cashier was also African-American, and she looked suspiciously at my wife Erin and said, “Why did you pick a black one?”
Erin, feeling a bit awkward, said, “I didn’t choose it; I just told my
daughter to pick out whatever doll she liked.”
So the cashier redirected her question to Lindsay, who casually replied,
“Well, it’s because she’s beautiful, and I like her dress.” The cashier seemed pleasantly surprised. And she didn’t have to wonder if Lindsay was
being sincere or just being the good liberal and sucking up to her mom.
Reason #8:
Barbie is the victim of an unfair assumption
We tacitly assume
that little girls self-identify with their dolls, but I’m not sure they do. I asked my older daughter why she never played
much with Barbies. She replied, “I don’t
know. They just didn’t interest me. I didn’t like dressing them up, and their
feet were weird. I preferred stuffies.” (That’s her word for stuffed animals.)
Of course it
had never occurred to us to worry that Alexa would want to become a bear or a
tiger or a dog some day. We never feared
that she’d develop low self-esteem due to lack of fur and fangs. It’s easy enough to see that when a kid plays
with a stuffed animal she’s not pretending that she is the stuffed animal; the stuffie is a third party. (Just as it didn’t affect my self-esteem when
my brothers cut the hands and feet off my Smurf and painted the stubs red, to
teach me not to play with dolls.) Likewise,
the Barbie doll is not necessarily a representation of self for the girl at
play. Sometimes a toy is just a toy.
Would you
like proof? Consider this odd Barbie
behavior:
I couldn’t
figure out what Barbie was doing there.
Later, I found Lindsay playing with the Barbie at a nearby desk, and
asked what Barbie had been doing in the light fixture. Lindsay explained, “She was looking down to
watch me solve the bear puzzle, so she could learn how to do it. Now she’s doing it herself.”
Got
that? Barbie is not Lindsay’s
avatar. She is just a playmate.
Reason #9:
Barbies are well-crafted
Barbies are well-crafted
and durable. (I took this for granted
until my daughter received a cheap knockoff Barbie for her birthday; the poorly
made doll tended to fall apart mid-play.
It was heartbreaking to see how carefully Lindsay moved its arms and
legs and how shocked and dismayed she became every time a limb came off in her
hand.)
Take another
look at the violinist Barbie above.
She’s wearing a handmade dress we bought second-hand; an old lady in our
community made a tremendous number of them over the years, in an endless
variety of styles, and sold them to the used toy store. Lindsay has Barbies and Kens that are older
than I am. She checks their manufacture
date (embossed discreetly on the torso) like a rare book connoisseur inspecting
a title page. I like this. In a society where so many grownups buy a new
smartphone every year or two, it’s nice to see a product that lasts long enough
to be venerated.
Reason #10:
Barbie is a known entity
It’s often
put forth that Barbie is a throwback to the unenlightened ‘50s and that it’s
time to move in a more progressive direction.
But how many modern toys actually do this? We’ve seen all manner of alternative female
doll, but they tend to be
tarted up, brazen, rebellious, and ironic: all the things we hope our sweet
little girls don’t go too far into during their upcoming teen years. Why should the toys we buy them lead this
charge?
I won’t even
get into the vast array of consumer goods that replace toys entirely, like all
these electronic media devices that rush our children headlong into
adult-oriented time-wasting activities.
We’ve had over fifty years to dissect and disparage the ‘50s, but it’s
not clear to me that many people are keeping an eye on the societal value of the
modern digital life, with its social media, continuous connectedness, and
ever-increasing screen time. Maybe
instead of worrying about Barbie’s bad influence on kids, we should pay more
attention to our own.
