Barbie, that is!

Has there ever before or ever since been a doll so beloved by little girls, yet so controversial in adult circles?  Barbie is, after all, based on a German sex doll named Lilli.  Her biologically-impossible measurements are often pointed to as planting the seeds of future eating disorders in little girls.  Even her facial features have come under fire for everything from maintaining impossible standards of beauty (whose eyes are bigger than their lips?  Really?) to racial discrimination/insensitivity (the white dolls share the exact same features as those of other ethnicities).

Even with all of these controversies, parents are helpless in the face of Barbie marketing. She’s more than iconic – Mickey Mouse is iconic.  Barbie is … synonymous with female childhood.  I can’t think of growing up without thinking of that plastic doll.

But the one thing little girls rarely did with Barbie?  Play with her like she was supposed to be played with.

We cut her hair, threw her in dirt and undressed her.  My little sister regularly decapitated her own Barbies (and, much to my chagrin, my Barbies).  We tried to figure out how the pregnant Barbie – anyone remember her?  God, WHAT were they thinking when they ok’d that model? -  had become pregnant by whacking the doll and anatomically-incorrect Ken together.

So I was not at all surprised by a recent study from the University of Bath detailing how little girls play with Barbie: they mutilate her (really, is any woman surprised?  The researchers must have been men).  One of the researchers notes:

“The types of mutilation are varied and creative, and range from removing the hair to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving,” writes Dr. Agnes Nairn. “The girls we spoke to see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity, and see the torture as a ‘cool’ activity in contrast to other forms of play with the doll.”

I’d argue that it’s not torture, and little girls are certainly not acting out some self hatred (or, even worse, a warped Freudian Oedipal complex where they act out hatred on the only grown woman available: Barbie).  And 7 year olds are not making a political statement.

Rather, this is the most accessible human figure these girls have at a time when they have a lot of questions about their body.  They don’t understand that Barbie’s hair doesn’t grow like their own, and they need to see the arms reversed to know that the human body doesn’t work that way.

Or maybe they’re experimenting with self expression at a time when clothes are controlled by their parents, like one of the women quoted:

Ginny Voedisch, who works for the Art Institute of Chicago, did put her Barbie in an oven, but not out of spite–she thought the heat would turn her early 1960s bouffant hairdo into a then-hip late 1960s afro (it didn’t). Marj Halperin, a media consultant, stuck straight pins into her Barbie’s head, true, but she was attaching sequin earrings.

Finally, they just might not see it as mutilation:

“Oooh! I loved Barbie and would never ever have mutilated her!” said Amy Latreille, a customer service manager. “However, cutting her hair, reversing her arms and even changing their heads was totally okay.” (Several women said that swapping heads on the identically bodied dolls was far easier for a girl to do than changing their elaborate outfits.)

The moral of the story seems to be that adults shouldn’t look too deeply into their daughters’ Barbie-cide.  And that sounds about right.

Strangely, though, I now have the urge to buy a Barbie and give her a haircut.  I bet my sister would like to chop off a few limbs when I’m done …

Tags: Barbie

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Et alia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.