Barbie — Sex Object or Blank Slate?

“Barbie” is a smash hit. The live-action movie based on the popular doll took in a record $155 million last weekend. Meanwhile, toymaker Mattel is cashing in on the hype with a whole new cast of Barbie toys based on the blockbuster movie.

According to journalist and filmmaker Susan Stern, however, a live-action Barbie movie is the last thing Barbie’s inventor at Mattel wanted for the beloved-by-some-disdained-by-others fashion doll.

During a recent interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Stern told of contacting Mattel for her 1998 documentary, “Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour.”

Stern was told that Mattel refused to make Barbie into a live-action movie because they didn’t want to limit the doll to a single persona.

Ruth Handler, the inventor of the Barbie Doll and a co-founder of Mattel, told Stern that Mattel wanted to keep Barbie’s personality vague “so that kids could project their own dreams on her.” That is something that Barbie critics have never understood, Stern told the Chronicle. Barbie was meant to be “a blank slate.”

I haven’t seen the Barbie movie yet. But I have a feeling I’m going to like the pink and fluffy romp from the Oscar-nominated director Greta Gerwig.

Fashion Doll Barbie — Sex Object or Blank Slate? 

Meanwhile, I’m holding fast to my disdain for Barbie as a wannabe sex object — a bias I’ve had ever since I wrote the piece below for the Oakland Tribune when my daughter was 6 years old and in possession of a clique of Barbies she didn’t know what to do with.

Christina, now in her thirties, tells me that, while I found Barbie dolls sexist, she found them uninspiring. “I liked to make up stories in my head,” she says. “And Barbie didn’t have magic, she wasn’t friends with dragons, she didn’t fight with a sword, or fly through space. She was just a modern teenager with a normal 20th-century life.”

Normal?

Sure, if you consider a bottle-blond sex pot with a top-heavy, 38-22-32 torso normal.

How to Play With a Barbie Doll

By Barbara Falconer Newhall, The Oakland Tribune, December 9, 1990

Christina has dolls. She has rag dolls, baby dolls and super heroine dolls. She also has a squad of Barbie dolls. A Hawaii Barbie. A bride Barbie. And a Barbie with a luscious ball gown that transforms into a thigh-high sexpot of a skirt — with just a flick of a 7-year-old finger.

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Christina has dolls, but for reasons I don’t understand, Christina does not play with dolls. Mostly, her dolls sit at attention on her bookcases and lie heaped in baskets on her shelves.

Christina’s idea of a good time is counting up her Halloween candy on Halloween night and making a bar graph of the totals — one Milky Way, three Snickers, seven Baby Ruths.

That done, she might count the licks it takes to get to the chewy part of a Tootsie Pop (just under 2,000).

This worries me. Shouldn’t Christina lighten up a bit? How is she to relate to other little girls if she’d rather design a bar graph than throw a tea party?

Indifferent to Her Sexy Barbie Dolls

Most of the time, Christina’s indifference to her dolls pleases me more than it worries me. This is a liberated woman I am rearing, apparently. No sex stereotypes here. No glitzy, showy sexuality. No pouty lipsticked lips. No top-heavy 38-22-32 torso.

Christina does not covet the Barbie bathtub or the Barbie brass bed with the comforter. She doesn’t even long for a Ken doll to call her own.

And I’m glad. I’m glad that Christina seems to have a mind of her own. On the other hand, I’d also like her to fit in, to have friends. I’d like her to feel at ease in a crowd. I’d like her to be one of the girls.

So, I let her have all the necessary girl stuff, just in case. The My Little Ponies. The She-Ra doll. The make-up case. The doll whose hair grows when you crank her arm. The play kitchen.

I was encouraged to find Christina in the den recently, her basket of fashion dolls emptied onto the floor.

“There’s a difference between a Barbie Doll and a Mr. Heart doll,” she announced.

“Oh?”

“Mr. Heart’s head comes off and Barbie’s doesn’t.”

“Oh.”

Toys for Boys, Toys for Girls

Mind you, I don’t want to adopt a male standard here. Just because baseball bats and dump trucks are boy paraphernalia doesn’t mean that they are superior in any way to girl paraphernalia.

But that is precisely what bothers me about so much girl stuff. It is so boy-conscious. The 38-22-24 Barbie figure, the mass of bleached-out hair, the pierced ears, the pretend wedding cake — all are things that relate to attracting and marrying a man.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to make a man happy, obviously. An adult woman ought to be beautiful and sexual.

But it does worry me to see a little girl evaluating herself, not on her own terms, but on someone else’s terms. On what she presumes are that someone else’s terms.

(How many men, I wonder, are truly attracted to a woman with legs like jousting lances and hair like furnace duct insulation?)

Meanwhile, Christina’s dolls sit there in their baskets until another little girl comes over to play — and usually it is a perfectly nice little girl who is the daughter of a perfectly nice woman — and wants to know, “Where are your dollies?”

Obligingly, Christina will lead her would-be friend to the doll basket where Barbie and Mr. Heart and Cinderella lie together, shoeless and half-clothed, pointy legs and frothy nylon hair shamelessly entangled.

But Christina’s heart isn’t in it. Soon, she is downstairs playing Nintendo with her brother, and her little visitor is left to make her way through the doll basket alone.

I worry. This is my fault. My daughter doesn’t know how to play with girls. I have been neglecting the little girl sub-culture. I have been letting Peter and his baseball cards and Jon and his Monday night football set the tone in our household.

Perhaps I should have played more Barbie with Christina when she was little. Perhaps I should be signing her up for pre-ballet this spring instead of tee-ball.

Barbie Lessons

It was time to give Christina Barbie lessons, I decided. We would get out the fashion dolls and, by golly, we would play with them.

We started with the ball-gown Barbie. “This can be a train or it can be a ball gown,” Christina explained, deftly adjusting the long, ruffled skirt.

“Hmmm. Pretty.”

“And this is a sleeve,” she went on, stretching a gossamer ruffle around Barbie’s shoulders.

We admired the doll together. It was pretty. It was clever.

But, that done, we just sat there. Christina didn’t know what to do next. And neither did I.

© 1990  The Oakland Tribune. Reprinted by permission.

I was a little kid in the 1940s, born too soon to covet or own a Barbie doll. Instead, for Christmas one year, I was the joyful recipient of a much sought-after Toni Doll. Designed as a promotion for Toni home permanents, Toni’s hair came in many shades. Unlike Christina’s Barbies, my Toni Doll had the healthy curves of a normal person.

Don’t Miss: At age 4, Christina was still into pretty. More on that at “Four-Year-Old Girls — The Last Bastion of Pretty.”   Touch base with Christina at age 26 at “When a Grown Daughter Doesn’t Call — Or, How to Overmother a Twenty-Something.”