The Guide to Getting It On (139 page)

“She had kinky fantasies and a lot of BDSM. Barbie was a fun girl.”
female age 18

“Not Barbies but definitely with my Lego men. Don’t ask me why, but those spacemen certainly had interesting encounters when I sent them on missions. I was pretty inventive for a 7-year-old.”
female age 19

While these women’s experiences by no means represent that of most girls, it is likely they represent a significant number. (See more reader comments on their Barbie’s sex life at the end of the chapter.)

Eleven Inches of Attitude

The year was 1959. The place was the Toy Fair in New York that’s held every February. Mattel’s new toy named Barbie was falling flat on her face, or would have if such a thing had been anatomically possible.

Since the beginning of time, toy buyers in America have placed orders for their Christmas inventory at the annual Toy Fair. It is the moment that determines which toys make it to toy-store shelves the following Christmas, and Barbie was getting the cold shoulder.

This was nearly fifty years ago, and the radical new doll named Barbie was shattering everyone’s idea of what a child’s toy should be. The price she paid for her uniqueness was to be ignored by toy buyers. Buyers for toy stores in 1959 were placing orders for dolls that were soft and huggable, dolls whose souls were made from rags.

Believe it or not, Barbie was cloned from a mother doll named Lilli who was made in Germany. In the late 1950s, Lilli caught the eye of Ruth Handler, co-founder of the Mattel toy company. Lilli was a sexpot of a doll who was marketed to horny German males. She looked like a German streetwalker. Lilli had been adapted from an adult comic strip where she had been a comical gold-digger and barfly.

Both Barbie and Lilli were 11 inches tall. The apples did not fall far from the tree when it came to looks, but Ms. Handler made sure that Barbie was born into an entirely different social class. Lilli was more like Anna Nicole Smith, while Barbie was Jackie Kennedy. Interestingly, Barbie’s place of birth (at least the address of Mattel) was Hawthorne, California, the same city where America’s other sex idol, Marilyn Monroe, was born.

Large Breasts and No Panties

In 1959, toy-store buyers wanted what they knew—dolls that reflected our society’s idea of what a good girl should be and what she would hopefully become: a selfless mother, teacher, housewife, or nurse. They didn’t get it when they saw Barbie, a doll who has been described by author Christopher Varaste as:

“An 11½ inch glamour queen with exotic features in a striking black and white swimsuit. She was everyone and defiantly no one. She seemed ageless, though she was supposed to be a teenager. She was beguiling, mysterious, and yet innocent. She was a symbol of a culture struggling to find a suitable identity. As a toy for young girls, her rather severe look took some getting used to. Her Asian eyes, curly bangs, and big red lips could have belonged to a wide range of ethnic backgrounds. She was, in a word, peculiar.” (From Christopher Varaste’s incredible book of Barbie photographs
Face of the American Dream–Barbie Doll, 1959 - 1971.
)

If it hadn’t been for a stroke of marketing genius, Barbie would have gone down in flames. But Mattel’s strategy for selling Barbie to the American public was as unique as their product. They were one of the first companies in history to make TV commercials that were aimed at children viewers.

From the very first commercial, Barbie was portrayed as a human with a glamorous and adventurous life. She was never described as a doll and she was never burdened with trivial limitations such as parents or a husband.

Mattel aired their first Barbie commercial during the wildly popular
Mickey Mouse Club
TV show. If parents didn’t know what to make of Barbie, their American daughters certainly did. Once the summer of 1959 started, every Barbie in every toy store was bought as quickly as it arrived.

Barbie’s official name was Barbie Millicent Roberts. When Ken was created a few years later, his name was Ken Carson. It is fitting and telling that Barbie and Ken’s namesake was Carson/Roberts. Carson/Roberts was the advertising company that played such a dramatic role in Barbie’s success.

Not Your Normal Housewife

Barbie’s persona was created by two women who had both violated the housewife norm of the 1950s. One had co-founded a large corporation, the other was a tall, striking, unmarried veteran of the fashion industry. Unlike any doll before her, Barbie was created as a young woman whose life didn’t revolve around a husband and a family. Her limitations were as thin as her waist and her possibilities as large as her breasts.

Early in Barbie’s evolution, someone wanted to make a miniature vacuum cleaner that Barbie could use to vacuum the house. But Ruth Handler, Mattel’s co-founder, refused to allow this. During the era when Barbie was born, it was automatically assumed that a woman’s role was to be a housewife and raise babies. Keeping Barbie vacuum-cleaner-free was an important statement to little girls. It was a signal that they could exceed the boundaries that our culture had traditionally placed on them.

Barbie Is Nobody’s Wife

Islamic leaders in Iran have described Barbie as being Satanic. They have expressed concerns that “the unwholesome flexibility of these dolls, their destructive beauty, and their semi-nudity have an effect on the minds and morality of young children.” Plenty of American parents have felt the same.

However, if you read Mattel’s press releases for Barbie, you’ll see that when she dresses to the nines, it’s not to capture the gaze of a guy or even a girl. Mattel’s Barbie dresses for Barbie. She has no need to please anyone but herself. This is one of the many Barbie qualities that throws feminists for a loop: they detest the emphasis on glamour, yet no one can ever accuse Barbie of coddling to the whims of a man. The Barbie that Ruth Handler created doesn’t care if she goes home alone and she doesn’t need the approval of a male to make her feel good about herself. That’s been as much a part of her message to little girls as the big boobs and tiny waist.

Here’s another part of the Barbie mystique that upsets feminists: Barbie succeeds and succeeds well in traditional male professions. But whether she’s being a firefighter or a physician, an astronaut or a police detective, Barbie always pulls it off with her femininity fully intact. Some women have said this sets an impossible standard for little girls, but it also tells little girls that you don’t have to grow balls to have balls. Barbie has shown little girls that they don’t have to surrender the things that they like about their femininity to compete in a man’s world. Barbie has provided a way for little girls to experiment with the positive messages their parents and teachers are hopefully giving them. She also provides a way for little girls to be selfish and mean, as all children can be.

Mattel’s Barbie has come with so few of the traditional limitations that any little girl can make her do and be anything she wants.

Less Fighting, Better Play?

Researchers have studied what types of play lead to more bickering and what kinds lead to less. One thing they didn’t expect to find was that girls who are playing with Barbie dolls tend to fight less and display more advanced levels of play than girls who are playing with traditional dolls. The range of activities that Barbie play provides is much greater than a doll that you simply hold, feed, and change. Barbie has friends, activities, and a whole life that’s as expansive as her different outfits and hairstyles. In addition, Barbie’s presence invites the involvement of mothers, aunts, gay uncles, and even grandmothers who had their own Barbies when they were growing up.

Barbie was never intended to be the
Leap Frog
or
Hooked On Phonics
of children’s play. The fact that Barbie inspires a high quality of play and better language development was not Mattel’s goal. Mattel’s emphasis has been for people to buy more Barbies and especially more Barbie accessories, perhaps in the same way that companies who make computer printers hope to nail you for the cost of the pricey replacement ink cartridges. It is fascinating how Mattel has managed to achieve this goal without limiting the persona of Barbie.

For instance, Mattel has never married off Barbie. Yet Mattel has sold millions of Barbie wedding dresses and thousands of Dream-Bride Barbies or Wedding-Fantasy Barbies. The hitch has been that the wedding idea is all just a big Barbie dream or fantasy. Keeping Barbie from really being married allows little girls to marry and unmarry her as often as they desire. Being perpetually single keeps Barbie footloose and fancy-free.

Mattel never wanted Barbie to be pregnant, but plenty of children wanted her to have a baby. So they devised a “Barbie Baby-Sits” kit which contained an infant and other childcare objects.

As much as Barbie has been associated with fashion and glamour, she has never defined fashion nor been at the cutting edge. She has always been a year or two behind, like most women who can’t afford this year’s originals.

Keeping Barbie a Moving Target

Few people will dispute that Barbie has become an American icon. Given her iconic status, you would think she would appear the same today as she was in 1959. But since the very beginning, Mattel has made Barbie change and evolve. Some of these changes have been technological, like using different vinyls, skin tones, and hair. Other changes have been purely stylistic.

Barbie’s face has changed as well. The first Barbie’s face was a combination of her harsh-looking German mother and the Geishas of Japan, the country that first manufactured and helped to refine her. You can also see how the vinyl used in the #5 Ponytail Barbie of 1961 contained an oily compound that makes her look like she has a greasy face or is perspiring. Unfortunately, the more recent Barbies have been given a bubbly, wide-eyed generic smile rather than the more intriguing streetwalker-Geisha expression of the early years. The faces on the early Barbies were all hand-painted in Japan, while the latter ones are machine stenciled.

Barbie Torture Sessions

A study by Tara Kuther of Western Connecticut State titled “Early Adolescents’ experiences with, and Views of, Barbie” clearly echoes our own readers’ experiences with Barbie. When Kuther interviewed 10 to 13 year old children about Barbie, she found reports of frequent Barbie torture sessions. These included seeing if Barbie can successfully fly out of a second-story window, cutting Barbie’s hair off and burning her clothes because she talked too much, making her dress up as a GI Joe, tearing off her head, drowning her at sea, melting her in a microwave, burning her at the stake upside down and attaching explosives to her.

We welcome these enterprising middle schoolers as future readers of the
Guide To Getting It On!

A Cock-Ring Ken?

Ken was an afterthought to Barbie. He was released in answer to the demand for a Barbie boyfriend, but he was always expendable.

When Ken was being conceived, the two women who had created the persona of Barbie wanted him to have a bulge between his legs. The male executives at Mattel were horrified and embarrassed at the suggestion. They wanted Ken to have the same crotch as Barbie. The women held out and Ken got a compromise bulge, although no one would ever accuse him of holding a candle to a doll with the masculine persona of GI Joe.

In the mid-1960s, Mattel released a “Ken a Go Go” doll, where Ken played the ukulele. Not long after that, Ken was euthanized. He reappeared in 1969 with an extreme makeover that Mattel hoped would revive his dismal sales. Then, in 1993, Mattel released the truly amazing “Earring Magic Ken.” This Ken was literally swept off the shelves by a stampede of adult gay males.

“Earring Magic Ken,” also known as “Cock Ring Ken,” was dressed in a lavender vest and had a necklace around his neck with a cock ring on it. The cock ring was not only the spitting image of the cock rings that men at gay male rages were wearing around their necks, but it was scaled to the exact dimensions as well. (It seems that someone in the design department at Mattel got one by the corporate brass.)

The more recent Kens have actually appeared as if they might be straight and even have a bit of a hunk factor. If Ken really is up for servicing Barbie, Mattel should consider making a Viagra Ken. That’s because the average Ken has at least eight Barbies that he needs to put out for.