My secret life with Barbie
At 7:20am I shove a lumpy gym bag into my locker before any other girls arrive to put their coats away. I pray that at pick up time, the bag looks like it has roller skates in it. That would make it lumpy, right? I do this once a week, usually on Wednesday.
When it’s raining, I have to take extra precautions not to grab a paper bag from home, as that could get WET and BREAK, and then Barbies go spilling down the steps in front of my elementary school. That happened just once. A nightmare of popular girls pointing and snort-laughing. To be seen as still playing with Barbies is far worse than getting your period at school while wearing white pants (you can tie a sweatshirt around your waist!) or admitting you still haven’t kissed a boy (make one up! For two years my friend Jessica insisted she had kissed a boy named Jamie, whom she “met on a ski trip” but never actually existed.)
I am almost twelve years old, and a pretty typical New York, white, private school girl in the late seventies, other than being on scholarship and having just one parent. I have never kissed anyone, I wear headbands with hearts on them and my bedroom is painted pink. It’s amusing to me that just five years later, I would be going to “Studio 54” and “Xenon” in headband-sized dresses and staying out until 3:00am, getting hit on by Wall Street traders high on cocaine. But right now, while my friends are asking their mom to buy their first bras, I am asking — no, begging — my mom to buy my first Barbie Dreamhouse.
I have one friend with the same secret obsession. Pam Eisen (not her real name) and I both haul our four or five favorite Barbies to school once or twice a week, complete with candy-colored cars, assorted combs and the occasional complete hair salon. THE BAG waits for us all day like an unwrapped Christmas (ok Hannukah) present in our lockers. We are always on the lookout, like Nancy Drew creeping around, fearful someone will find the Barbies, but also equally thrilled when we get to her apartment or mine and create elaborate mega-Barbie scenarios with our combined collection.
I don’t remember much of what those hours of make believe entailed but I know Barbie and Ken were married (unlike Pam’s recently divorced parents) and Barbie was a teacher like her dad (my father, a professor, had died three years earlier of a heart attack). When we played Barbies, suddenly Pam and I were both blond, lanky Waspy girls living the Malibu beach dream life, instead of two awkward pre-teen Jewish girls with frizzy brown hair and a little extra padding in the tush.
What was the impact of that, for us and for the millions of little girls just like us who lived a secret Barbie life?
Barbie and I had been a thing since I was about four. It went like this: obsessed with stuffed animals, obsessed with dolls, obsessed with Barbies. One of the first “conscious” thoughts I can remember was longing to have long blond hair and be named Susan, and feeling sad that neither was seemingly possible. My mother was a feminist and didn’t want me to have Barbies at all. She kept trying to push her Little Women dolls on me, but I wanted nothing to do with them. I pleaded, and she compromised by letting other people buy Barbies for me and insisting we make handmade outfits together on the sewing machine.
Now that Barbie has returned as a box office hit, I am thrown back to my Barbie days and thinking about the impact of eight years of my secret Barbie life. Here is what I came up with:
- Blonde is best. Also, my hair color and shape are not the ideal of femininity. White and straight is the only option. Dark hair, frizzy hair, jet black straight hair, girls with short hair, boys with long hair, anyone “other” is not the norm.
- If your mother doesn’t want you to play with this doll, it’s probably really cool and you should save every nickel to buy your own.
- “Math is hard.” (famously said by “Talking Barbie”)
But also…
- If you don’t like your profession, you can shed it with a wardrobe change, from teacher to astronaut to safari tour guide. Is it a coincidence I am on my fourth career?
- You and your friends can create an all female world (Ken doesn’t really count) where women have lots of stuff they maybe even paid for themselves. That part I took to heart, and become a business woman and coach.
Where did the Barbies go? Probably into a “give away” bin during one of our moves. I still have my mother’s Little Women dolls carefully packed away in a Container Store bin under my bed but all traces of my Barbie addiction have been erased. I probably secretly shed tears when it was time to give them up, and then didn’t think about Barbie again until I saw a disturbing and mesmerizing film in college, made entirely with modified Barbies about Karen Carpenter’s eating disorder and subsequent death (Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story).
There is some kind of poetic justice in Greta Gerwig making history with the Barbie movie as the highest grossing film by a woman director. As a feminist, former filmmaker and huge advocate of economic equality I like this ending to the story (although Mattel hopes it’s a new beginning for Barbie, who is now also Black, President and an occasional professional soccer player, just to name a few of her current incarnations). Even though part of me feels like Greta Gerwig got in bed with the enemy accepting to direct the movie, she pulled it off. This was a high wire act for any director: critique the thing while you celebrate the thing while you send up the thing. Brava.
The same weekend Barbie the movie came out, I flew to Chicago to see my 23 year old friend Audrey premiere as Belle in a Disney musical theater production of “Beauty and the Beast.” It was a beautiful, uplifting performance, and she was mesmerizing as Belle. In the theater I was watching another iconic figure I had known since childhood. The audience was dotted with girls in yellow “Belle” dresses, like a field of sunflowers… all giggling with excitement about seeing their favorite Disney princess. I thought of how it mirrors all the girls (and women) dressed in pink watching Barbie in movie theaters across America.
Belle, who has survived not the half century Barbie weathered but two actual centuries (the original “La Belle et la Bete” was written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in 1740), got me thinking about Barbie and Belle and the different messages each imparts to young girls.
BARBIE: Buy a lot of stuff. The more you have, the cooler you are. Be thin, leggy and curvy all at once. Recruit equally stylish friends you can drive around looking fly with. Date vapid guys. Change careers a lot.
BELLE: Read books! Learning is amazing. Ignore the popular girls, they suck. Don’t even think about accepting advances from the most handsome and buff guy in town. He is probably arrogant and conceited (yup! And violent!). Instead, go for the guy with the unusual looks and the big heart who gives you a library of books as your first present. And being French is cool.
We know that Mattel (Barbie & Company) and Disney (Belle & Company) still play an outsized role in shaping millions of young girls, and gender nonbinary kids’ ideas of femininity and their own self worth. I hope that this resurgence of Barbie will mean more of us of will unpack how this doll shaped who we thought of as “in” (well-dressed blond girls in perma high heels with the right accessories) and who is “out” (um, everyone else). Barbie mania is reminding me to look out for any young person with the equivalent of a suspiciously lumpy bag and help them to feel amazing about who they are, exactly as they are, so they can create their own d-mn Dreamhouse.
