On Barbie

Barbie is everywhere this spring. And it’s not just because she’s super cute and perfectly accessorized (after all, so is Polly Pocket and most of the American Girl gang), it’s because she’s turning fifty! That’s right, the Barbie doll has been around for half a century. Which means that she has been at the very least an option for young girls (and boys) to play with for three generations. My mother had a Barbie - oh how sad and stiff she was! But her boyfriend, Ken, was even sadder, even stiffer. I had lots of Barbies. And while we have thus far avoided Barbie in our own home over the past nine years, her presence here is inevitable.

With her golden anniversary, Barbie offers fifty years of reflection on feminism, fashion and everything in between. And no, "everything" is not a stretch. In her time Barbie has covered relationships (Ken, Surfer Ken, and now Blaine), careers (cheerleader, executive, teacher, military personnel) home decor (dream house or beach house?), and even parenting (Barbie’s oldest friend Midge was at once pregnant and scandalous). Barbie has even been a political pioneer, bringing winking and feminine wile to the national stage long before Sarah Palin (my cowgirl Barbie was winking all the way back in the second grade) and running for President in both the 2000 and 2004 elections.

Barbie’s big birthday is ideal fodder for the stay-at-home mom-thinking-woman blogger. The Barbie-as-role-model debate has been all over parenting blogs and feminist blogs of late. It seems that Barbie provokes as much controversy as breastfeeding. This time, the daddies are weighing in just as often as mommies.

And yet, I find I don’t really have anything new to say about Barbie, no clever quips or feminist gripe with the little plastic lady. If I were more on top of things, I would have beaten Courtney Martin, author of "Barbie’s no threat to little girls," to the punch. In her essay for the Christian Science Monitor, Martin just about nails my view on Barbie. If I didn’t know better, I might even think Martin and I had played Barbies together in my bedroom. She describes the very antics, plot twists and relationships my own Barbie’s experience. Except I have a feeling that my Barbie’s were probably involved in a lot more "sexiness" than hers.

Most important, Martin recognizes that for all the debate surrounding Barbie and her influence on the American female psyche, she is after all, just a harmless plastic doll - "an empty vessel that we could fill up with all of our confusion and excitement concerning femaleness." Barbie, Martin implies, is simply a tool with which generations of girls have played out their fantasies, their visions of adulthood.

Even though Barbie is ridiculously thin and impossibly endowed (and incapable of walking on flat feet), she is not as detrimental as popular feminist rhetoric would have us believe. For most women I know, playing with Barbie did not result in an eating disorder or in an unshakable desire for a boob job and blonde hair. Most girls that spent afternoons driving Barbie and her friends around in her pink convertible (a LeBaron or a Corvette?), grew up to drive a sensible sedan - maybe an Accord - or more likely, a minivan. Nobody I know named their daughter Skipper (that’s B.’s little sister) or their son Ken. Most of us didn’t grow up and head to the mall and then to Malibu to toss around a beach ball. We did not quit taking math classes in high school because Barbie told us "Math was hard" (we already knew that anyway) and so we suffered through Calculus and either got out or moved onto Linear Algebra because we wanted to.

As a mother of two girls, I am terrified that my daughters will grow up to find that familiar self-loathing so many women I know endure. I am acutely aware that they may succumb to cultural notions of female perfection and tear themselves apart in pursuit of that body, that job, that family. I get that. But I don’t think that will happen to them if they play Barbies (or Polly Pockets or even Bratz). In fact, I know I have a far better chance of fucking them up all on my own, without the help of a doll.

When the party is over, and Barbie’s sparkly birthday gown is put away (we won’t know exactly what she’s wearing until March 9th), we’ll stop debating the impact Barbie has had on the lives of American girls. And hopefully we’ll come to recognize that for all her popularity, her common cultural clout, Barbie didn’t really matter all that much in the formation of our adult identities. Instead, we jumped through the hoops of childhood and adolescence and young adulthood and ended up here, as adult women who think of Barbie fondly, as a doll with kick-ass hair and shoes, rather than as an impossible role model. And we can do that, not because we somehow overcame the terrible cultural message of a doll, but because with the help of our mothers, our sisters, our girlfriends, we never needed to look to a doll for self-definition - we could however try a couple of outfits out on that doll first to see if they really did work…