From the Archives – The Crystal Ball

Introduction

One of the unfortunate habits of the middle-aged is our tendency to bemoan the decay of our minds and bodies.  It’s like picking a scab that, rather than healing over, grows all the time.  We can’t remember things, we’re always tired, we’re putting on weight, and blah, blah, blah.

How refreshing, then, to look back at my prime, almost thirty years ago, and see that I was bitching and moaning about my decline even then.  Since I was obviously possessed of a fine mind and body in those days, but didn’t’ want to admit it, I now have hope that my current complaints are similarly exaggerated.

Better yet, looking back at the story below, I can’t help but admit that my writing has improved over time.  Join with me as I mock my younger self.

Letter from UCSB – “The Crystal Ball” – ca. November, 1988         

Well, I took a good, hard look at myself today and I’m not too pleased.  I got my French midterm back:  84%.  Had it been a hard test, I would have still been miffed, but might have cut myself some slack.  But this was a really easy test; I’d made every dumb mistake in the book.  I wasn’t worried about the grade, but only about what it might mean:  I’m obviously losing my ability to think clearly.

And now that I think about it, my mind isn’t the only part of me in decline.  My gut has been getting awfully big this year.  No matter what I do, I can’t seem to get the weight off.  When I went back home last summer, I got a lot of crap for my spare tire.  I tried to deny it, but it is obviously becoming a problem.  Even my cycling has suffered lately.  I didn’t ride much at all last week.  The only thing I’m getting better at is making excuses.  What could be the root cause of my descent toward mental and physical decrepitude?  Probably a bad attitude and low motivation.

I figured maybe a shrink could help me with this.  But psychiatrists charge too much, and besides, so many people who go into therapy never make it back out.  But I heard about this medium named Wanda who is supposedly very insightful.  For something like 20 bucks, she has helped lots of college kids, according to this tall goony guy I ran into in the University Center.  I was looking at the bulletin board and caught the guy looking at me looking at the bulletin board, which was kind of creepy, but he did hone right in on my mental/emotional distress, which showed more insight than my friends had.  So I decided to check out this medium for myself.

The goony guy drew me a map, or I’d never have found her tent.  It was a greasy, frail, ratty old thing in the middle of a field west of campus.  Every so often, it was said, the cops go and bust her for vagrancy, so she has had to move quite a bit.  This hadn’t done wonders for her tent, but I wasn’t there to pick up tips on interior decorating.  The medium herself was more like a large.  She seemed like a pretty wretched old woman, with long, grey, stringy hair that fell in front of her eyes.  “Wanda?” I asked.  She gave a little nod, as if to say, “Who else?”

I mumbled a question about personal coaching and insight into my soul, etc.  She just stared at me, as if she were truly sad that I’d shown up in her tent.  Finally she spoke:  “I don’t do anything but show you the future.  You wanna see it, great—you’re a client.”  She chewed on her hair as she spoke.  Her voice was low and gravelly, as if she had smoked a pack a day for the last ten years.  I knew, however, that she wasn’t a smoker, since cigarettes would have covered up her hideous breath, which smelled a bit like mold and a bit like the thick, mustard-colored ointment my dad uses.

Wanda gestured to a card table flanked on one side by a little wooden stool and the other by a lawn chair.  I sat on the stool.  On the table was a lump covered by a black, oily cloth.  With a practiced, but half-assed, flourish, Wanda snapped back the cloth, exposing a crystal ball the size of a grapefruit.  Wanda intoned, “My crystal ball can tell you all, how high you climb, how low you fall.”  I couldn’t suppress a little snort.  Dropping into the lawn chair, she continued, “Fine, I’ll spare you the incantations.  Five bucks for the first minute.  A buck a minute after that.  Just look at the ball and if you like what you see, keep the green energy flowing in my direction.”

I handed her my five spot.  I’d been clutching it, all wadded up, in my hand and it was damp with sweat.  Wanda stuffed it down the front of her gown, but she wasn’t wearing a bra, so it continued southward.  Reflexively, I watched its descent.  It stopped around her belly, which I didn’t want to linger on, so I kept dropping my gaze until it reached the edge of her dress, which was almost black from dragging on the dirt floor of her tent.

I raised my gaze to Wanda’s face.  “Don’t look at me—you’re on the clock!” she said.  “The ball!  Look at the ball!”  For half a minute, I stared at the ball and saw nothing.  I decided I’d been had.  There was nothing happening on the surface of the “crystal,” which looked like nothing more than frosted glass.  Closer observation revealed a crude seam and a tiny “Made in Taiwan” label.  I glared at Wanda.  “Fifteen seconds,” she growled.  I was about to protest, but then a faint glimmer appeared on the ball.  It resolved into a clear image of myself, sitting in my French classroom.  I slipped Wanda another five-spot and stared intently, in disbelief.  The vision in the ball was like magic.

The ball showed me sitting in my French classroom, drumming my fingers nervously on the table.  The teacher was passing back exams.  “I know I failed this final,” said Molly, the blond girl next to me.  “I didn’t study at all.”  She snapped her gum.  I was in love with her.  This was not important, though, in the moment.  The teacher handed her her test.  Molly had scored a 92%.  The teacher handed me my test.  It was a 68%.

I jumped in my seat.  It’s true!  My life is unraveling!  I returned my attention to the ball, staring until my eyes watered.

I was riding in a bike race.  I seemed to be keeping up, but I was with obviously riding with a group of beginners.  As we rode into the mountains, my breathing became faster and heavier.  The entire group rode away from me.  I stared remorsefully at my stomach.  It sagged lower than I had ever seen before.  The elastic waistband on my shorts was so tight it was digging in.  I took both hands off the handlebars, seized the waistband, and ripped it in two.  Now my belly was liberated, but my shorts began falling down in back.  I reached back to pull them up, and realized to my horror that the crack between my buttocks had climbed at least an inch up my back since the night before.

My heart skipped a beat and I looked up from the ball.  Wanda removed her index finger from her ear and stared at the fingernail, which was long, chipped, and dirty.  “I want to see farther ahead!” I cried.  She pointed indifferently towards a button on the base of the ball, labeled “>>.”  Fast Forward.  I pressed it for a few seconds and released. 

I was in a bike shop, trying to remove a crank from a wretched old Peugeot.  My physique was somewhere between E.T. and Moomintroll.  My jaw hung slack, as I’d become a mouth-breather.  My legs were somehow thin and flabby at the same time.  I grunted slightly as I shoved on a crank extractor.  The threads in the crank I was trying to pull were stripping rapidly.  Realizing my catastrophic failure to have removed the fixing bolt, I flung my wrench across the shop, cursed, and spat on the floor.  A young man in a clean shop apron, who was working on a beautiful pro racing bike, said nothing and left the room.  A moment later, an older man walked into the shop, shaking his head, clapped me on the shoulder, and said, “Dana … I’m lettin’ ya go.”

The crystal ball winked out.  Wanda was staring at me, her hand out.  I gave her my checkbook and pressed Fast Forward again.

A man was lying slumped in a dumpster, clutching an almost empty bottle of Yukon Jack.  His hair was past his shoulders.  There was no way to know what color his ragged overcoat had originally been.  His shoes didn’t match.  A bag of garbage flew into the dumpster and landed near his head.  His face was haggard, filthy, and—mine.  “NOOOOOOOOOO!”  I yelled.  I seized the crystal ball and threw it at Wanda.  It missed, and shattered on the dirt floor of the tent.  Wanda flew into a rage.  “You little bastard!” she shrieked, and came at me across the table, her arms outstretched, her long fingernails bared.  The table collapsed, and we grappled atop the wreckage. 

Wanda had her hands around my neck.  She was immensely, supernaturally strong.  I couldn’t get any air.  She herself began to wheeze.  Her hands were getting sweaty.  A tiny ridge of my skin found its way between her thumbnails, and then something amazing happened:  a perfectly ripe whitehead burst, discharging its seed-like head on her nail.  She instinctively recoiled and frantically wiped her hands on her filthy gown.  I took this opportunity to make a break for it, charging the light leaking through the flap of her tent.  I ran and ran and never looked back. 

Was the crystal ball’s forecast binding?  Or was there still time to turn my life around?  The next day was Saturday and I spent eight hours in the library, studying with a fervor I’d never before had.  Then, exhausted, I snatched up a copy of the school newspaper, seeking a poorly-written story as diversion.  The front page headline read, “VAGRANT DIES OF VELVEETA POISONING.”  I wiped sweat off of my forehead and went back to hitting the books.

Later—how much later, half an hour? an hour?—I found myself waking up, slumped in the study carrel with a stiff neck, a puddle of drool forming on my French textbook.  I checked my watch: 7:28 P.M.  I looked around for the newspaper article on the gypsy.  Had it really said Velveeta poisoning?  But that headline was nowhere to be seen.  The lead story was “UCSB TO OFFER ‘COED STUDIES’ MAJOR IN ‘89.”  The gypsy, the tent, the crystal ball, the visions of hopeless decline … they had all just been a dream! 

And my poor score on the French midterm … could that have been a dream, too?  I flipped open my binder.  The exam peered out at me, with “84%” written at the top in red ink.  Damn!  Still … things could always be worse.

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Self-Help & the 8th Habit

Introduction

Don’t you hate it when this happens?

It’s always so tempting to mock the word “paradigm,” and other concepts from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  (I mentioned this book to my brother and he said, “Let me guess … these habits include yachting, fine dining, and fox hunting.”)  And if more people knew the subtitle of the 7 Habits book, Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, they’d probably make fun of that, too.  In general, the entire self-help industry has been a giant target for all kinds of sarcastic vitriol.

For example, George Carlin is very funny on this topic.  He asks, “Why do so many people need help?  Life is not that complicated….  I really don’t understand:  if you’re lookin’ for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else?  That’s not self-help … that’s help!  There’s no such thing as self-help!  You did it yourself … you didn’t need help!”

As much as I enjoyed that riff, I can’t embrace his distaste for self-help.  I myself have no use for glib aphorisms, much traditional advice (like the importance of goals), and frankly most of the books in the self-help section.  However, I’m a big believer in self-help as an endeavor, and actually respect The 7 Habits.  In fact, in this post I’m going to give you an 8th habit—an all-important one that I think Stephen R. Covey missed.

The self-help paradox

Some of the abuse that The 7 Habits gets is based on clichés like “paradigm” and “win-win.”  The comic strip “Dilbert” has been mining that stuff for so long, “Dilbert” itself can get repetitive.  (In Covey’s defense, “paradigm” and “win-win” weren’t hackneyed when he first trotted them out, and it’s only due to the massive success of his book that they’ve been overused ad nauseam.)  But I think there’s something else people are bothered by; after all, many other self-help books, such as Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, avoid the problem of trite language.  I think a lot of people instinctively recoil from the very idea of self-help.  (I know I did, when I was younger and cockier.)

Why should this be?  Well, many forms of self-help are aimed at people with drug, alcohol, or other addictions … not exactly the kind of person we hold up as a role model.  Beyond that, I think there’s a tendency to equate self-help with weakness, and whiny-ness, and perhaps with excessive humility.  Maybe showcasing the awareness of your own frailty can come across as emo.  If you meet a stranger at a cocktail party who within 30 seconds is mentioning his or her therapist, you might start looking for an excuse to disengage.

But if you look at self-help as commitment to improving yourself (and one that can be as private as you wish), and if you acknowledge that there’s a distinction to be made between good, sound advice in book form and all the chaff that any industry will naturally accumulate, I don’t think there’s any reason to automatically eschew the entire notion of trying to be a better person.  The alternative, when you think about it, is to think of yourself, “I’m just fine the way I am.” 

To me, that’s a pathetic way to be, and actually strikes me as more conducive to being emo.  When I witness emo behavior, I see it as an overblown, melodramatic indulgence and I want to shout, “Aw, just shut up!  I know you’re feeling all sad and vulnerable, but don’t wallow in it—work on it!  You could start by growing a pair!”  (Am I sexist?  Perhaps not—after all, I didn’t say “when I witness emo behavior in a male.”  I think “grow a pair” has, like “guy,” become almost a gender-neutral term.)

Frankly, I think the biggest problem with The 7 Habits is simply that not enough people actually read the book.  More broadly speaking, I think too many people—for reasons of pride, or insecurity, or laziness, or some combination of these—are unwilling to challenge their personal status quo.

So here’s my 8th habit:  get help.  Or to be more specific, don’t get too comfortable.  Concede that you’re not perfect, and work on yourself—and don’t pretend that your natural instincts about this process are any match for the careful, thorough thinking that very good minds have already done.  After all, if you knew how to be the perfect you, you’d be perfect.  And you’re not.  (Nobody is, except perhaps Atul Gawande.)

An example

I’m a cheap bastard.  When my daughter’s Stumpjumper (a great bike, but ~15 years old) wasn’t shifting right, I was determined to fix the shifter instead of replacing it.

I tried the easy route recommended by my mechanic pals (hosing the shifter’s innards down with WD-40), but that didn’t work.  This thing was completely gummed up.  So I took it apart.  Damn, that thing’s complicated.  There are all these washers and bushings and pawls, and it’s got 3 springs, one of which you have to wind up and hold tension on while you bolt the shifter back together.  I took photos as I went, but I wasn’t methodical enough, and missed important information, and wasted vast amounts of time in vain.  Throughout the ordeal there was this voice in my head:  “You’re an idiot!” and “Your brothers are right, you’re not mechanically minded!” and “You suck!” and “You call yourself a bike mechanic?” and “Like an idiot, you bought your kid an ancient bike you can’t get parts for and now you’re screwed!” and so forth.

I took a break from the shifter repair to closely examine these strong feelings I was having, and question whether there’s something wrong with me that I can’t take little failures like this in stride.  In the big scheme of things, a new shifter wouldn’t actually be that expensive.  Any third party would probably having trouble understanding why this meant so much to me—and maybe for good reason!  What if I’m being totally unreasonable, I wondered, and some deep fracture in my ego is starting to show itself?  These are all worthy ideas to investigate, and it’s a worthy thing to have the bravery to confront yourself and entertain such doubts.

So did I look online for a good therapist who could sort out my feelings of self-loathing?  No, in the final analysis I determined that that wasn’t the kind of self-help I needed.  I just needed a good website with some better photos of the shifter.  And man, I found an awesome site!  Click here:  this guy not only posted 17 great photos of the left shifter alone, he annotated them and provided complete instructions!

Frankly, I was plenty daunted by the website, because it gave me even less excuse to chuck the shifter and buy a replacement.  But more than that, this guy’s success, and his generosity in putting up the instructions and photos, inspired me.  He obviously has great patience, and a more methodological approach, and I thought, “Why can’t I be more like him?”  So I gave it another crack, and it really did end up being a self-help project (i.e., requiring my own effort and insight) because I couldn’t just follow the guy’s directions … I needed to conceptualize the pieces in 3-D, and try out various ways of putting them together (since I’d buggered the thing up to the point that some were installed wrong).  In case you’re interested, here’s my own set of photos:

(That last photo is a still from a movie I made, which was instrumental because even when I had the shifter assembled correctly, I still had to reach through a gap in the housing with a screwdriver and click the internal pieces back and forth, to work in the oil, before the lever finally started working—which it totally does now, like a champ!).

My point is this:  at the core of self-help is a refusal to let yourself off the hook too easily.  Sure, there is good advice out there about being compassionate with yourself, and the self-loathing voices that countless people have in their heads are not often very constructive.  But for every person who pushes himself too hard and needs to lighten up, I’d say there are 10 who are just too complacent to push their comfort zone, or too reluctant to get help on something they can’t handle on their own.

Giving up too easily can lead to serious consequences; standing down and accepting defeat is no good for the soul.  When I got that shifter working again, I just sat there for a spell, clicking away, putting it through its paces, as delighted as Eeyore savoring his birthday presents:  putting his (popped) balloon from Piglet into the (empty) honey pot Pooh gave him and taking it back out again.

Without getting help (and inspiration) from this complete stranger on the Internet, I’d have failed to fix the shifter, and that self-annihilating voice might well have taken to reasserting itself every time I looked at the mismatched replacement shifter on my kid’s bike.  Instead, the repaired shifter is now an emblem of my perseverance.  (Is it okay that I berated myself so much during the process?  Yeah, probably.  I’m a loud person from a loud family  so my internal voice is bound to be loud as well.  I think my self-esteem is fine.  Sometimes my stubbornness plays a little rough, that’s all.)

One more point to be made here is that not all self-help resources are touchy-feely.  A how-to guide, or the shifter repair instructions on a website, are still self-help.  Why are so many people perfectly casual about instruction manuals and how-to guides but suddenly get nervous when the book is about fixing yourself instead of some object?  A self-help book is either good or it isn’t … there’s no shame in giving it a go, even if (or perhaps especially if) the process might subject you to uncomfortable self-examination.

The cynical justification for the 8th habit

Okay, maybe you’ve been gagging on my whole essay here because you’re just too cynical to go in for this idealistic self-help business and my saccharine success story.  That’s fine—but you should still embrace my 8th habit—get help—for one purely pragmatic reason:  chances are very good your boss will appreciate it.

Who is it, after all, in the “Dilbert” strip who’s always spouting stuff about “win-win” and “paradigms”?  It’s the bosses!  Who are the people, in the real world, who have used these terms so much, and for so long, that they’ve become clichés?  The executives! 

Now, there are various ways to account for this.  One way is to say that executives just have a weakness for this stuff and those who spout banal platitudes and ideological sound-bites are bound to flock together.  But another possible explanation is that a willingness to embrace the self-help ethos is what actually helped propel these people to power.  I don’t think it matters which of these you believe, because the bottom line is, management does respect the self-help impulse.  (Over a dozen C-level executives are quoted in the “Praise for…” section of The 7 Habits.)

When you think about this, it makes perfect sense.  Any healthy corporation needs to foster a culture of earnestness, while rooting out cynicism (which can hugely erode employee morale).  I don’t think you can ever go wrong, career-wise, by erring on the side of humility.

So am I saying you should leave The 7 Habits on your desk for your boss to see, and/or gush to him or her about this or that self-help book?  Not at all.  This essay being the exception, I’m generally pretty quiet about my own self-improvement projects.  Moreover, there’s no telling what your particular boss might think of this or that self-help resource.  But if you suppress your cynicism, and acknowledge the reality that earnestness isn’t the 8th deadly sin, and at the very minimum resist the temptation to pooh-pooh the various professional development programs and rah-rah sales kickoff meetings or whatever, your attitude is bound to evolve, and this will be noticed.  Humility is a habit that very few people, I think, would hold against you.

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10 Reasons to Cut Barbie Some Slack

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.