Barbie Doll Quotes

We're not freaks, Tally. We're normal. We may not be gorgeous, but at least we're not hyped-up Barbie dolls.

He liked women with little butts and big tits? Someone had played with one too many barbie dolls as a kid.

The doll, Dallas. You know, Barbie doll. Jeez, didn't you ever have dollies?" "Dolls are like small dead people. I have enough dead people, thanks.

She still felt like a punked-out, faux-leather-wearing, free-thinking Bratz doll in a sea of Pretty Princess of Preppyland Barbies.

Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a Barbie doll, a vacuum cleaner. We're all such products.

She hated their new nickname. It made them sound like deranged Barbie dolls.

How do I look?” She was wearing a pair of tiny jean shorts and a bright pink T-shirt. Her blond hair was matted on one side and there were dirt smudges all over her arms, legs, and face. Gabriel hesitated. “Like a Barbie doll that got run over by a garbage truck.” “Wow. Really, Gabriel?

Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a Book. Probably that goes for killing anybody in the world. We're all such products.

Oh, I know that. Or at least I think I know that,” she stammers. “I mean, you seem like a decent guy, but then again, lots of serial killers probably seem decent too when you first meet them. Did you know that Ted Bundy was actually really charming?” Her eyes widen. “How messed up is that? Imagine you’re walking along one day and you meet this really cute, charming guy, and you’re like, oh my God, he’s perfect, and then you’re over at his place and you find a trophy dungeon in the basement with skin suits and Barbie dolls with the eyes ripped out and—” “Jesus,” I cut in. “Did anyone ever tell you that you talk a lot?

Aside from being terrifying, it was totally humiliating. Rose Tyler, Barbie doll.

I knew it! I knew you'd hate my body!" She slammed her hands on her hips, marched over to the bed, and glared down at him. "Well, for your information, mister, all those cute little sex kittens in your past might have had perfect bodies, but they don't know a lepton from a proton,and if you think that I'm going to stand here and let you judge me by the size of my hips and because my belly's not flat, then you're in for a rude awakening." She jabbed her finger at him. "This is the way a grown woman looks, buster! This body was designed by God to be functional, not to be stared at by some hormonally imbalanced jock who can only get aroused by women who still own Barbie dolls" "Damn. Now I've got to gag you." With one swift motion, he pulled her down on the bed, rolled on top of her, and covered her lips with his own.

Your mouth says "No," but your eyes say, "Fuck me until your dick breaks off inside me and fuses into some kind of barbie doll crotch.

It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close…

She is the ocean crashing into me, tossing me, drowning me.

Time is funny, man. Life is funny. We all on this huge planet tryna figure shit out. What is the planet already got it figured out? What if the whole point is for us to mot figure it out? What is God playing with like...like dolls? Some diverse-ass Barbies

Lily asked Calvin to play dolls with her. He reluctantly joined her on the floor, but it soon became Chuck Norris meets Joy doll and she was going down repeatedly. Lily, scandalized, pouted, but began to retaliate. "Oh no you don't, Chuck! I'm Piper, psycho Barbie!

My boyfriend had been fucked over by Barbie and Ken. And I was more like the Bratz doll rebound. My

What did this mean for the ocean, the ecosystem, the future? All this plastic had appeared in barely more than 50 years. Would its chemical constituents or additives—for instance, colorants such as metallic copper— concentrate as they ascended the food chain, and alter evolution? Would it last long enough to enter the fossil record? Would geologists millions of years hence find Barbie doll parts embedded in conglomerates formed in seabed depositions? Would they be intact enough to be pieced together like dinosaur bones? Or would they decompose first, expelling hydrocarbons that would seep out of a vast plastic Neptune’s graveyard for eons to come, leaving fossilized imprints of Barbie and Ken hardened in stone for eons beyond?

My sex change operation got botched; my guardian angel fell asleep on the watch; now all I got is a Barbie doll crotch; I've got an angry inch!

He glanced at Megan’s mother, his gaze allowing for no argument. “This woman by my side is the woman I want to marry, exactly as she is right now. I don’t want her transformed into some cookie-cutter Barbie doll, so don’t you dare try to do it.

Look how healthy you are, and your skin, it's like a Barbie doll." "Why, thank you, Jenny." Christine graciously accepted the compliment, only to get side swiped when Jennifer moved to the door. "Tell me, will you melt if it gets too hot outside?

Once young girls used to play with baby dolls, seeing themselves in the role of the nurturing mother; now they can be seen playing with Barbie dolls, seeing themselves in the place of the doll. And of course, the doll is both pretty and stacked. The pressure is on and stays on.

Just give me a chance to show you what I mean, Holly. I don't want a docile little Barbie doll. I still want your spark and your fire. I don't want to tame it; I just want to guide it. And at the same time, I'll take every burden that 's been weighing you down, and make them mine.

He sent the trained dog that is his talent off in search of a fat glorious pheasant, and it brought back the lower half of a Barbie doll.

I just worry about you, Sally.” I gave her hand a squeeze. Mom had been saying that since my fifth birthday when I’d asked for a light saber instead of a Barbie doll.

So here we are, in the family planning aisle with a cart full of sports drinks and our hands full of . . . “Trojans, Ramses, Magnum . . . Jeez, these are worse than names for muscle cars,” Jase observes, sliding his finger along the display. “They do sound sorta, well, forceful.” I flip over the box I’m holding to read the instructions. Jase glances up to smile at me. “Don’t worry, Sam. It’s just us.” “I don’t get what half these descriptions mean . . . What’s a vibrating ring?” “Sounds like the part that breaks on the washing machine. What’s extra-sensitive? That sounds like how we describe George.” I’m giggling. “Okay, would that be better or worse than ‘ultimate feeling’—and look—there’s ‘shared pleasure’ condoms and ‘her pleasure’ condoms. But there’s no ‘his pleasure.’” “I’m pretty sure that comes with the territory,” Jase says dryly. “Put down those Technicolor ones. No freaking way.” “But blue’s my favorite color,” I say, batting my eyelashes at him. “Put them down. The glow-in-the-dark ones too. Jesus. Why do they even make those?” “For the visually impaired?” I ask, reshelving the boxes. We move to the checkout line. “Enjoy the rest of your evening,” the clerk calls as we leave. “Do you think he knew?” I ask. “You’re blushing again,” Jase mutters absently. “Did who know what?” “The sales guy. Why we were buying these?” A smile pulls at the corners of his mouth. “Of course not. I’m sure it never occurred to him that we were actually buying birth control for ourselves. I bet he thought it was a . . . a . . . housewarming gift.” Okay, I’m ridiculous. “Or party favors,” I laugh. “Or”—he scrutinized the receipt—“supplies for a really expensive water balloon fight.” “Visual aids for health class?” I slip my hand into the back pocket of Jase’s jeans. “Or little raincoats for . . .” He pauses, stumped. “Barbie dolls,” I suggest. “G.I. Joes,” he corrects, and slips his free hand into the back pocket of my jeans, bumping his hip against mine as we head back to the car.

I am dying. Every part of me is shattering; falling to the floor, a hole in my chest is ripped wide open for the world to see. The earth is set into motion again spinning faster than before, nothing makes sense, but everything makes sense. Heidi Acosta. Barbie Girl (Kindle Locations 3335-3336).

Uh… hi…” Yep, he totally forgot her name. His wide, icy eyes shot to me as if wanting me to step in and save him. Not a fucking chance in hell. He’d made his bed, had sex with the five-foot-nine Barbie Doll in it, he could very well lie in it. “You

External effects are everywhere. Almost every major transaction we make affects other people who are not a party to the transaction. When someone buys a Lexus, he sets a new standard for the street. When a firm advertises a Barbie doll, it creates a want that was not there before.

In the past few decades quite a few people have suggested -- citing most often the offence of impossible proportions -- that Barbie dolls teach young girls to hate themselves. But the opposite may be true. British researchers recently found that girls between the ages of seven and eleven harbor surprisingly strong feelings of dislike for their Barbie dolls, with no other toy or brand name inspiring such a negative response from the children. The dolls "provoked rejection, hatred, and violence" and many girls preferred Barbie torture -- by cutting, burning, decapitating, or microwaving -- over other ways of playing with the doll. Reasons that the girls hated their Barbies included, somewhat poetically, the fact that they were 'plastic.' The researchers also noted that the girls never spoke of one single, special Barbie, but tended to talk about having a box full of anonymous Barbies. 'On a deeper level Barbie has become inanimate,' one of the researchers remarked. 'She has lost any individual warmth that she might have possessed if she were perceived as a singular person. This may go some way towards explaining the violence and torture.

I was always cutting my Barbie and Pollyanna dolls' hair. I lined them all up and put a cloth around their necks, like they were at the beauty parlor. Barbie was a real heartbreaker, but then all of a sudden, Barbie was freakin' bald. That was a shocker.

They'd need to do some shopping. As he adjusted the shoulders of the last dress, their eyes met in the mirror. He raised his right hand solemnly. "I swear I never played with Barbie dolls." A grin flickered at the corner of her mouth, and she opened her mouth, then closed it again. He raised an eyebrow. "You might as well say it; go on." Her expression in the mirror was both sly and apprehensive. "Just thinking perhaps you were making up for lost time." He ran his hand up beneath the back of the dress and pinched her, making her yelp. "Yup, no question about it. Lego was never like this." He stroked her ass and the straps that demarcated ass from thigh. "Not like this.

The thing about being cloned from all those shampoo commercials, well, that goes for me and Brandy Alexander, too. Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anybody in the world. We're all such products.

She sank with an enormous sigh that carried all rigidity like a mythical fluid from her, down next to him; so weak she couldn't help him undress her; it took him 20 minutes, rolling, arranging her this way and that, as if she thought, he were some scaled-up, short-haired, poker-faced little girl with a Barbie doll. She may have fallen asleep once or twice. She awoke at last to find herself getting laid; she'd come in on a sexual crescendo in progress, like a cut to a scene where the camera's already moving. Outside a fugue of guitars had begun, and she counted each electronic voice as it came in, till she reached six or so and recalled only three of the Paranoids played guitars; so others must be plugging in.

Our sex need not primarily define who we are, what we are capable of, or what we can be expected to enjoy or engage in. In other words, the boy with the Barbie doll does not have a problem with identity. He simply has a Barbie doll. The full-time working mother and full-time stay-at-home father have not given up something essential to their identities by taking on those roles: they have negotiated their lives as it works for them. Likewise, a stay-at-home mum is not anti-feminist any more than a stay-at-home dad is. Other characteristics, such as individual ability, personal relationships, personal choice, past experience and education, are far more important than that box you tick defining yourself as M or F.

..she gave the girl a blond-haired Barbie doll from lost and found....The doll, dressed in ballroom gown and tiara, appeared surprisingly chipper given her emaciated waistline.

My little Barbie doll had dusted herself off and picked herself up and come back swinging.

he was obviously not meant for that soulless Barbie doll. Bayou Barbie, that’s her new name.

They all claimed to be religious men, but what kind of religion forces polygamous “marriages” on girls still playing with Barbie dolls?

I think the best people, the ones who have reached the highest plateaus as human beings, are those who have known a great deal of adversity and have dealt with it and then moved ahead.

I only knew Nash. And I didn’t know him well. Just from the tour. He could collect Barbie dolls in his spare time and set them up in BDSM gear for shits and giggles for all I knew. . . .

The Squishy One says they found a cigarette butt, a wrapped Jolly Rancher candy and a red Barbie doll cape in my first poop here. #ThoseWereSouvenirsFromTheLastPlace #WhyAreTheyExaminingMyPoop

I'm not the first one to point out that George Lucas used plastic helmets to cover the faces of the storm troopers in Star Wars, in order to make them more inhuman, as their eyes and faces were not visible. In our times, we are getting a more modern version of Lucas's Stormtroopers, thanks to the popular nerve toxin Botox. This is something more and more people who are past their middle age are happily injecting into themselves - more specifically, into their faces. Botox causes local paralysis (it is a nerve toxin, after all), which smoothes out wrinkles. Unfortunately, it also means you can no longer use some of your facial muscles, as you are paralyzed. This means you're not only getting the skin of a Barbie doll, you're getting its range of facial expressions too.

Ed Lim’s daughter, Monique, was a junior now, but as she’d grown up, he and his wife had noted with dismay that there were no dolls that looked like her. At ten, Monique had begun poring over a mail-order doll catalog as if it were a book–expensive dolls, with n ames and stories and historical outfits, absurdly detailed and even more absurdly expensive. ‘Jenny Cohen has this one,’ she’d told them, her finger tracing the outline of a blond doll that did indeed resemble Jenny Cohen: sweet faced with heavy bangs, slightly stocky. 'And they just made a new one with red hair. Her mom’s getting it for her sister Sarah for Hannukkah.’ Sarah Cohen had flaming red hair, the color of a penny in the summer sun. But there was no doll with black hair, let alone a face that looked anything like Monique’s. Ed Lim had gone to four different toy stores searching for a Chinese doll; he would have bought it for his daughter, whatever the price, but no such thing existed. He’d gone so far as to write to Mattel, asking them if there was a Chinese Barbie doll, and they’d replied that yes, they offered 'Oriental Barbie’ and sent him a pamphlet. He had looked at that pamphlet for a long time, at the Barbie’s strange mishmash of a costume, all red and gold satin and like nothing he’d ever seen on a Chinese or Japanese or Korean woman, at her waist-length black hair and slanted eyes. I am from Hong Kong, the pamphlet ran. It is in the Orient, or Far East. Throughout the Orient, people shop at outdoor marketplaces where goods such as fish, vegetables, silk, and spices are openly displayed. The year before, he and his wife and Monique had gone on a trip to Hong Kong, which struck him, mostly, as a pincushion of gleaming skyscrapers. In a giant, glassed-in shopping mall, he’d bought a dove-gray cashmere sweater that he wore under his suit jacket on chilly days. Come visit the Orient. I know you will find it exotic and interesting. In the end he’d thrown the pamphlet away. He’d heard, from friends with younger children, that the expensive doll line now had one Asian doll for sale – and a few black ones, too – but he’d never seen it. Monique was seventeen now, and had long outgrown dolls.

He devoured morning shows, daytime shows, late-night talk shows, soaps, situation comedies, Lifetime Movies, hospital dramas, police series, vampire and zombie serials, the dramas of housewives from Atlanta, New Jersey, Beverly Hills and New York, the romances and quarrels of hotel-fortune princesses and self-styled shahs, the cavortings of individuals made famous by happy nudities, the fifteen minutes of fame accorded to young persons with large social media followings on account of their plastic-surgery acquisition of a third breast or their post-rib-removal figures that mimicked the impossible shape of the Mattel company’s Barbie doll, or even, more simply, their ability to catch giant carp in picturesque settings while wearing only the tiniest of string bikinis; as well as singing competitions, cooking competitions, competitions for business propositions, competitions for business apprenticeships, competitions between remote-controlled monster vehicles, fashion competitions, competitions for the affections of both bachelors and bachelorettes, baseball games, basketball games, football games, wrestling bouts, kickboxing bouts, extreme sports programming and, of course, beauty contests.

The world stops spinning. She is the ocean crashing into me, tossing me, drowning me. I can’t breathe. I do not care. I want to die right now. I want nothing more than to drown in her. My head is filled with a gray fog. I am being pulled toward heaven and my angel is kissing me. Heidi Acosta. Barbie Girl (Kindle Locations 3330-3332).

He said, I won't have one of those things in the house. It gives a young girl a false notion of beauty, not to mention anatomy. If a real woman was built like that she'd fall on her face. She said, If we don't let her have one like all the other girls she'll feel singled out. It'll become an issue. She'll long for one and she'll long to turn into one. Repression breeds sublimation. You know that. He said, It's not just the pointy plastic tits, it's the wardrobes. The wardrobes and that stupid male doll, what's his name, the one with the underwear glued on. She said, Better to get it over with when she's young. He said, All right but don't let me see it. She came whizzing down the stairs, thrown like a dart. She was stark naked. Her hair had been chopped off, her head was turned back to front, she was missing some toes and she'd been tattooed all over her body with purple ink, in a scrollwork design. She hit the potted azalea, trembled there for a moment like a botched angel, and fell. He said, I guess we're safe.

A girl, hardly ten, holding a Barbie doll by its hair, bent over the edge of the fountain, sprinkled her face and forearms, and stared to the side for a moment as Piccoletto, who was also seated on the edge of the fountain, his legs outspread, chewing at his silver crucifix, pulled off his socks. The girl stared long into his leg holes at his balls hanging from his baggy yellow underwear and at the creased foreskin draped over the head of his large member.

So what's your doll's name?" Boo asked me. "Barbie," I said. "All their names are Barbie." "I see," she said. "Well, I'd think that would get boring, everyone having the same name." I thought about this, then said, "Okay, then her name is Sabrina." "Well, that's a very nice name," Boo said. I remember she was baking bread, kneading the dough between her thick fingers. "What does she do?" "Do?" I said. "Yes." She flipped the dough over and started in on it from the other side. "What does she do?" "She goes out with Ken," I said. "And what else?" "She goes to parties," I said slowly. "And shopping." "Oh," Boo said, nodding. "She can't work?" "She doesn't have to work," I said. "Why not?" "Because she's Barbie." "I hate to tell you, Caitlin, but somebody has to make payments on that town house and the Corvette," Boo said cheerfully. "Unless Barbie has a lot of family money." I considered this while I put on Ken's pants. Boo started pushing the dough into a pan, smoothing it with her hand over the top. "You know what I think, Caitlin?" Her voice was soft and nice, the way she always spoke to me. "What?" "I think your Barbie can go shopping, and go out with Ken, and also have a productive and satisfying career of her own." She opened the oven and slid in the bread pan, adjusting its position on the rack. "But what can she do?" My mother didn't work and spent her time cleaning the house and going to PTA. I couldn't imagine Barbie, whose most casual outfit had sequins and go-go boots, doing s.uch things. Boo came over and plopped right down beside me. I always remember her being on my level; she'd sit on the edge of the sandbox, or lie across her bed with me and Cass as we listened to the radio. "Well," she said thoughtfully, picking up Ken and examining his perfect physique. "What do you want to do when you grow up?" I remember this moment so well; I can still see Boo sitting there on the floor, cross- legged, holding my Ken and watching my face as she tried to make me see that between my mother's PTA and Boo's strange ways there was a middle ground that began here with my Barbie, Sab-rina, and led right to me. "Well," I said abruptly, "I want to be in advertising." I have no idea where this came from. "Advertising," Boo repeated, nodding. "Okay. Advertising it is. So Sabrina has to go to work every day, coming up with ideas for commercials and things like that." "She works in an office," I went on. "Sometimes she has to work late." "Sure she does," Boo said. "It's hard to get ahead. Even if you're Barbie." "Because she wants to get promoted," I added. "So she can pay off the town house. And the Corvette." "Very responsible of her," Boo said. "Can she be divorced?" I asked. "And famous for her commercials and ideas?" "She can be anything," Boo told me, and this is what I remember most, her freckled face so solemn, as if she knew she was the first to tell me. "And so can you.

SHE WAS A KNOCKOUT. A stoned fox. I’d never seen her before. Not one of the cutesy Irish Barbie Dolls I normally fell for, this was something of a different class altogether. No disco glam or sparkles or fashionably trashy stripper chic. No make-up or slutty, revealing outfit. No desperate, tits-in-your-face “notice me” B.S. This was something pure and earthy -- fresh as newly cut grass. The smoking-hot girl next door, but yet completely of another world and time. A true classic.

At home, she toed the party line: “The greatest calling for a woman is to be a Catholic wife and mother.” But I sensed that she hated the 1960s convention of stay-at-home motherhood. In my thirties, when my father shipped me my old Barbie-doll cases that had been sealed in storage since my mother’s death, I found evidence of her unhappiness. My Barbie stuff was a mirror of her values. She never told me that marriage could be a trap, but she refused to buy my Barbie doll a wedding dress. She didn’t say, “I loathe housework,” but she refused to buy Barbie pots and pans. What she often said, however, was “Education is power.” And in case I was too thick to grasp this, she bought graduation robes for Barbie, Ken, and Midge.

The big guys who ran things didn't want you thinking or feeling. It slowed down production. They wanted you scared and working so you wouldn't bump up against the truth--life could be fun. Yup, they wanted you scared. They wanted you grim. They wanted you madly cranking out Barbie dolls or Post Toasties or Xerox, or they wanted you overworked and underpaid at teaching so you could at least feel smart, and they wanted you to keep having kids so you'd have to keep working at whatever job you were stuck in and not have time to think or feel or, if you did, you certainly wouldn't have time to do anything about it, or even get close to the big fun, the fun that belonged only to them. And then they wanted your kids to hop on the same treadmill.

It hurt me with its inevitability. They all find out sooner or later how unchic it is to pop your buttons at the Sadie Hawkins dance, or to crawl into the trunk so you can get into the drive-in for free. They stop eating pizza and plugging dimes into the juke down at Fat Sammy’s. They stop kissing boys in the blueberry patch. And they always seem to end up looking like Barbie doll cutouts in Jack and Jill magazine. Fold in at Slot A, Slot B, and Slot C. Watch Her Grow Old Before Your Very Eyes.

Sometimes standing for something is simply not enough......Espeacially when life blows you a mighty wind inwhich knocks you off of your feet or the very thing that kept you grounded is taken away,Convusion and Elusion can very well become your concrete.

Just give me a chance to show you what I mean, Holly. I don’t want a docile little Barbie doll. I still want your spark and your fire. I don’t want to tame it; I just want to guide it. And at the same time, I’ll take every burden that’s been weighing you down, and make them mine.

When the boys come, instead of buying Barbie dolls, all of a sudden you’re into trucks and remote controls, cars and tanks. You buy building blocks and build castles and locomotives. You get into knives and later take them shooting with pistols, shotguns, and rifles. All of which made me very happy.

Scion of a sex toy, Barbie, far more than any human, is equipped to withstand such toxic projections. Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite plasticity. "I think if you look at the silhouette of the Playboy Bunny, it looks like a Barbie doll," retired Mattel designer Joe Cannizzaro told me.

Poppy used to share the room with her older sister, and piles of he sister's outgrown clothes still remained spread out in drifts, along with a collection of used makeup and notebooks covered in stickers and scrawled with lyrics. A jumbled of her sister's old Barbies were on top of a bookshelf, waiting for Poppy to try and fix their melted arms and chopped hair. The bookshelves were overflowing with fantasy paperbacks and overdue library books, some of them on Greek myths, some on mermaids, and a few on local hauntings. The walls were covered in posters-Doctor Who, a cat in a bowler hat, and a giant map of Narnia.

You see this in the toy business. Some owners of hot toys want to put their hot toy name on everything. The result is that it becomes an enormous fad that is bound to collapse. When everybody has a Ninja turtle, nobody wants one anymore. The Ninja turtle is a good example of a fad that collapses in a hurry because the owner of the concept got greedy. The owner fans the fad rather than dampening it. On the other hand, the Barbie doll is a trend. When Barbie was invented years ago, the doll was never heavily merchandised into other areas. As a result, the Barbie doll has become a long-term trend in the toy business.

You know you're in the wrong century when you farble the poor young woman at the cosmetics counter thus: "Why do they put the mascara in little amphorae?!? We're not trying to transport it in Barbie doll merchant vessels - we just want it to stand up on the counter." If her face had been any blanker, her features would have disappeared.

Grandpa, as far as any child is concerned, their parents don't have any sort of genitals. It's all blank down there. Like Barbie and Ken dolls.

Barbie was based on the comic strip, and later doll, of a high-end prostitute.

I’ve always known I was gay, I think. Whenever I played with dolls, I’d make up romantic storylines about two girl Barbies. Before I even knew the word ‘gay,’ I knew I was gay.

If Mattel ever makes a Drag Queen Barbie, they damn well ought to pattern that doll’s proportions after Sister Rose. Those were legs that could crack a horse’s ribs, and they knew how to move.

We drove past the rail yards on Elliott Bay with the huge orange cranes that look like drinking ostriches standing sentry over thousands of stacked shipping containers. When I was little, I asked Mom what all those containers were. She said ostrich eggs filled with Barbie dolls. Even though I don’t play with Barbies anymore, it still gets me excited to think of that many Barbies. “I’m sorry I haven’t been around much.” It was Dad again. “You’re around.

Sometimes mothers blame Barbie for negative messages that they themselves convey, and that involve their own ambivalent feelings about femininity. When Mattel publicist Donna Gibbs invited me to sit in on a market research session, I realized just how often Barbie becomes a scapegoat for things mothers actually communicate. I was sitting in a dark room behind a one-way mirror with Gibbs and Alan Fine, Mattel's Brooklyn-born senior vice president for research. On the other side were four girls and an assortment of Barbie products. Three of the girls were cheery moppets who immediately lunged for the dolls; the fourth, a sullen, asocial girl, played alone with Barbie's horses. All went smoothly until Barbie decided to go for a drive with Ken, and two of the girls placed Barbie behind the wheel of her car. This enraged the third girl, who yanked Barbie out of the driver's seat and inserted Ken. "My mommy says men are supposed to drive!" she shouted.

She was still getting organized, trying to get the books she'd taken out to fit into the shelf under the stroller. She would shove a book in, and then something, a juice cup, a Binky, or one disturbing Barbie-doll head, would fall out the other side. She would shove that back in, and then something else would leak out the other side. Her stroller was like a poorly designed clown car. I went over and helped. It was a good thing spatial relations were a strength of mine, because it required the geometry skills of Newton to get everything slotted into place.

Picture this broad: 22 going on 18. Half the guys in my class would have given their left testicle to date her. This cupcake is the guidance counselor the principal has assigned me. Miss Boyle is her name. We all call her “Miss Bubbly Water.” Imagine the teasing I have to endure from my friends. Not to mention what it’s like, sitting across from this Barbie Doll every Thursday afternoon, watching her cross and uncross her legs, while she’s lecturing me about—get this: “staying focused.” Right! My pants are on fire, and she’s handing me a crash course in Psych 101!

Lina was flawlessly impassive. A living, breathing Barbie doll with no greater purpose than to be played with and admired. It was a shame, in a way. Like opening a meticulously wrapped Christmas present to find nothing inside, and her packaging was nothing short of perfection. She reminded me of a 1950s pinup model—Marilyn Monroe with the most vibrant blue eyes I’d ever seen. And that voice. Jesus Christ, that voice. The natural huskiness made every word sound like something whispered naked in the dark. All together, it was enough to make a man forget his own name.

Because Wade had thrown everything away - drawings, clothes, toys - each accidental remnant loomed in Ann's mind with unspeakable importance. Four moldy dolls buried in the sawdust of a rotten stump. A high-heeled Barbie shoe that fell from the drainpipe. A neon toothbrush in a doghouse. Then, finally, the half-finished drawing in a book. Artifacts heavy with importance they didn't deserve, but which they took on because of their frightening scarcity; they built up against her, making stories of themselves, memories inside her head that should have remained in Wade's.

really a rock dressed in clothes. All the dolls were seated around a doll-size blanket. Even the mushy baby dolls that couldn’t sit by themselves had been propped up with blocks. In the middle of the blanket lay a Barbie doll, wrapped up in toilet paper. All the other dolls were watching her. “Neat,” said Bean. “A mummy.” “Yeah,” said Ivy. “I’m going to build a pyramid to bury her in. As soon as I figure out how.” “I know how,” said Bean. “Nancy made one out of sugar cubes last year. I can’t believe your parents let you draw lines on your floor.” “It’s only chalk,” said Ivy.

A man walks into the toy store to get a Barbie doll for his daughter. So he asks the assistant, as you would, "How much is Barbie?"      "Well," she says, "we have Barbie Goes to the Gym for $19.95, Barbie Goes to the Ball for $19.95, Barbie Goes Shopping for $19.95, Barbie Goes to the Beach for $19.95, Barbie Goes Nightclubbing for $19.95, and Divorced Barbie for $265.00."       "Hey, hang on," the guy asks, "why is Divorced Barbie $265.00 when all the others are only $19.95?"        "Yeah, well, it's like this....Divorced Barbie comes with Ken's house, Ken's car, Ken's boat, Ken's furniture...

We were developing a principle with the music box that we tried to stick with for the rest of our toy career,” Ruth explained. “If you develop a basic mechanism or a basic concept, you develop one or two or three items around that concept at the initial introduction, and then year after year you add new products around the initial concept.

She hadn’t visited this spot in a few years, but when she was younger it had been a frequent hideout. She called it the Barbie Graveyard because it was where, one night when she was nine years old, she’d ceremoniously buried every single doll she had. She’d marked the site with a melted Barbie toaster. “They all died in an electrical fire,” she told her mother somberly. “I couldn’t save them.

My dad will win, I silently countered, even as I smiled sweetly. I couldn’t wait to spike the ball right through her block, no matter how tall she was. In health class we’d learned that if Barbie were human, she’d be six feet tall and weigh one hundred pounds, and Gisele seemed pretty close to those dimensions. By contrast, my doll representation would be more like Barbie’s Fat Mexican-American Republican sidekick.

Barbie" Through my many and long travels I’ve come across many who read books On planes, buses, and on trains… Over the years, three titles caught my attention of books in the hands of women who either looked like or tried to look like the Barbie doll… I don’t remember the exact titles of these books, But I remember that one of them was something along the lines of “how keep your husband or preserve your marriage.” The other was something about “signs that he is cheating on you.” And the third was something on how to get rid of him and move on! It was as if these titles summarized the lifecycle of every woman who lets herself to play the role of a Barbie… And I often wondered if reading books on “How to stop playing the Barbie role” in love and life is not just enough to solve all the problems the other three books are claiming to address… [Original poem published in Arabic on May 16, 2024 at ahewar.org]

Never play the princess when you can be the queen: rule the kingdom, swing a scepter, wear a crown of gold. Don’t dance in glass slippers, crystal carving up your toes -- be a barefoot Amazon instead, for those shoes will surely shatter on your feet. Never wear only pink when you can strut in crimson red, sweat in heather grey, and shimmer in sky blue, claim the golden sun upon your hair. Colors are for everyone, boys and girls, men and women -- be a verdant garden, the landscape of Versailles, not a pale primrose blindly pushed aside. Chase green dragons and one-eyed zombies, fierce and fiery toothy monsters, not merely lazy butterflies, sweet and slow on summer days. For you can tame the most brutish beasts with your wily wits and charm, and lizard scales feel just as smooth as gossamer insect wings. Tramp muddy through the house in a purple tutu and cowboy boots. Have a tea party in your overalls. Build a fort of birch branches, a zoo of Legos, a rocketship of Queen Anne chairs and coverlets, first stop on the moon. Dream of dinosaurs and baby dolls, bold brontosaurus and bookish Belle, not Barbie on the runway or Disney damsels in distress -- you are much too strong to play the simpering waif. Don a baseball cap, dance with Daddy, paint your toenails, climb a cottonwood. Learn to speak with both your mind and heart. For the ground beneath will hold you, dear -- know that you are free. And never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.

I am a person of binges. I have never understood the phrase “too much of a good thing.” Look: it’s irrational, impossible. See fig. 1: when I was a child, I became obsessed with horses. I know, I know, all little girls are obsessed with horses. But I lived for them. I gorged on them. I begged for them in any incarnation: films, toys, patterns, photographs, posters. Once, I cut the hair off a Barbie and superglued it to the base of my spine. I thrilled to wear my pony tail under my clothes, in secret, my parents knowing nothing, thinking me merely human, but it rubbed off after two days, leaving long blond doll hairs clotting in the corners of the house. My birthday came, and my parents, who were still together then, splurged on an afternoon of horseback riding lessons. When it was time to leave, they found that I had knotted my hair into the horse’s mane so elaborately that they had to cut me away from it with a pair of rusted barn shears. I still have the clump of matted girl-and-horse hair hidden in a drawer, though after all the times I put it in my mouth, I admit that it is somewhat the worse for wear.

The little girls who invited Poppy over had pink rooms and pink LEGOs and pink comforters over pink sheets on their pink beds. They had crates—actual crates!—of tutus and high heels and dress-up clothes, stuffed animals who themselves wore tutus and high heels and dress-up clothes, Barbies and clothes for the Barbies, jewelry, nail polish, fairies, and baby dolls. They liked to draw and trade stickers. They liked to put their stuffies in strollers and give them a bottle and push them around the block. They liked to have a lemonade stand. They liked to chase each other around the house but in tutus and high heels, and when they caught you at the end, they just hugged you and giggled and laughed together instead of making a big thing about who was a loser and sitting on your head and farting. Poppy could not understand why everyone in the whole world didn’t want to be a girl.

Madison turns to me. “Do you wanna play?” “Of course,” I say, following her to her bedroom, figuring it best to give her mother some space, lest I push her too far and she punch me in the face. I’m secure in my manhood. I have no qualms playing with dolls. So when Madison shoves a Barbie at me, I don’t even balk. I’ll give her the best goddamn Barbie performance she ever saw, if that’s what she wants. I stare at the Barbie, though, as Madison digs through a toy box. It looks different than the ones my sister played with growing up. This Barbie looks more like a scientist than a stripper, fully clothed, her hair still intact. “Found it!” Madison says, holding up another doll. I freeze when I look at it, seeing the familiar white and blue suit and the head of blond hair. You’ve gotta be kidding me. They made me into a doll. Or him, rather. Breezeo. Not an action figure, no—a straight up collector’s edition Barbie doll. “I’ll be Breezeo and Barbie can be Maryanne for you,” she says, sitting down on the floor and patting the wood beside her. “Wait, shouldn’t I be Breezeo?” “You’re him all the time, so it’s my turn now.” Well, can’t argue with that logic. “Barbie’s got the wrong color hair,” I say. “Don’t you have a Maryanne doll?” “No, ‘cuz it costs too many dollars, but you can pretend, right?” “Right,” I say, although she suddenly looks skeptical, like she doubts my abilities. “Don’t worry, I’ve got this.” She starts things off. I don’t know what’s happening, and she doesn’t give me any direction, so I’m improvising. She switches things up on me, throwing in plot twists. We’re on the run from some bad guys before suddenly we’re in school. I graduate, we both become veterinarians to her stuffed animals, and next thing I know, I’m running for president of the world.

Between 1970 and 1971, the feminist movement made significant strides. In 1970, the Equal Rights Amendment was forced out of the House Judiciary Committee, where it had been stuck since 1948; the following year, it passed in the House of Representatives. In response to a sit-in led by Susan Brownmiller, Ladies' Home Journal published a feminist supplement on issues of concern to women. Time featured Sexual Politics author Kate Millett on its cover, and Ms., a feminist monthly, debuted as an insert in New York magazine. Even twelve members of a group with which Barbie had much in common—Transworld Airlines stewardesses—rose up, filing a multimillion-dollar sex discrimination suit against the airline. Surprisingly, Barbie didn't ignore these events as she had the Vietnam War; she responded. Her 1970 "Living" incarnation had jointed ankles, permitting her feet to flatten out. If one views the doll as a stylized fertility icon, Barbie's arched feet are a source of strength; but if one views her as a literal representation of a modern woman—an equally valid interpretation— her arched feet are a hindrance. Historically, men have hobbled women to prevent them from running away. Women of Old China had their feet bound in childhood; Arab women wore sandals on stilts; Palestinian women were secured at the ankles with chains to which bells were attached; Japanese women were wound up in heavy kimonos; and Western women were hampered by long, restrictive skirts and precarious heels. Given this precedent, Barbie's flattened feet were revolutionary. Mattel did not, however, promote them that way. Her feet were just one more "poseable" element of her "poseable" body. It was almost poignant. Barbie was at last able to march with her sisters; but her sisters misunderstood her and pushed her away.

Weave hung from every head, no matter what race, and it sat there in large bushels, hiding those caked-up faces. I’d seen Barbie dolls that looked more real than some of the women I’d bedded. Puffed-up, injected lips that stuck out of their faces. Tight, see-through clothes. Everything out and bared for any man to see.

I stood staring at Judy's door, which was adorned with photographs of automobile crashed, lurid headlines cut from the Weekly World News, and a nude Barbie doll hanging from the doorknob by a noose.

Sexism, and its expressions, are multi-layered and complex. Often, it comes in gender-neutral language, decorated with gendered accents. It comes in the form of pink walls for young girls and blue for young boys. Barbie dolls and G.I. Joe’s. Skirts and dresses and Bermuda shorts. Fairy tales that shamelessly teach that women need a Prince Charming and superheroes who are almost always men. That boys don’t cry. It comes in the form of ‘protective’ mothers and fathers who don’t allow their daughters to date, while the son has many girlfriends. Or in the idea that while a woman may be doing well for herself, she must marry a man who does better than her or marry at all! And the over-glorification of motherhood that carefully cloaks the sacrifices a woman makes to raise a child and systematically alienates the man — the father. There is sexism everywhere if you stop and pay attention.

My whole philosophy of Barbie was that, through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be. Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices.

Maya is a grown-up Barbie doll with the soul of Linda Hamilton in Terminator.

There was a Barbie doll with the pink hair, but she didn't wear any little replica outfits this time. Instead, down the length of her body, down her arms, legs, and even across her forehead, the same word was scribbled over and over. MINE. Then, just in case we didn't get the message, there was a box of matches and a pair of mud-crusted, black lace panties. The same pair I'd been wearing that day with Archer before we went to Wisteria. The same ones I'd kicked off on the side of the road and left behind in the rain and mud. No one spoke.

I was given dozens of baby dolls as a kid, which I insisted were my younger sisters. I never played house or dressed up as a bride. My Barbies, it is apparent in hindsight, lived in a very happy child-free lesbian commune with the occasional dramatic visit from Ken and my brother’s Mr. Kotter doll.

But the sheer relief I'd felt when my hairdresser stripped the pink dye from my hair and returned me to my natural blonde? It was staggering. Maybe because all those creepy barbie dolls had had pink hair. Or maybe because his captive slaves had been forced to dye their hair to match mine. Or maybe I just needed to feel like a truer version of me.

And you’ve always wanted love, something stable. Even before Mom and Dad died, you used to make all your dolls get married.” I huff a laugh at how disgusted he sounds. “Yeah, when the Barbie's weren’t throwing Ken to his grisly death from the top of the Barbie Dreamhouse, you mean.

This is how things appear, and it’s going to be necessary to face them: if I don’t accept defining myself as a transsexual, as someone with “gender dysphoria,” I must admit that I’m addicted to testosterone. As soon as a body abandons the practices that society deems masculine or feminine, it drifts gradually toward pathology. My biopolitical options are as follows: either I declare myself to be a transsexual, or I declare myself to be drugged and psychotic. Given the current state of things, it seems more prudent to me to label myself a transsexual and let the medical establishment believe that it can offer a satisfying cure for my “gender identity disorder.” In that case, I’ll have to accept having been born in a biobody with which I don’t identify (as if the body could be a material given that is there before linguistic or political action) and claim that I detest my body, my reproductive organs, and my way of getting an orgasm. I’ll have to rewrite my history, modify all the elements in it that belong under the narrative of being female. I’ll have to employ a series of extremely calculated falsehoods: I’ve always hated Barbie dolls, I’m repulsed by my breasts and my vagina, vaginal penetration makes me sick, and the only way I can have an orgasm is with a dildo. All this could be partly true and partly nonsense. In other words, I’ll have to declare myself mentally ill and conform to the criteria established by the DMS-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, of the American Psychiatric Association, in which, beginning in 1980, transsexuality was designated as a mental illness, just like exhibitionism, fetishism, frotteurism, masochism, sadism, transvestism, voyeurism . . . just like almost everything that isn’t straight reproductive sexuality and its binary gender system.

You may have seen the video of the psychological study in which young Black girls are given two Barbie dolls. With the exception of their skin tone—one is white, the other brown—the dolls are identical. The little girls are asked, “Which is pretty? Which is nice?” Over and over they choose the White doll. It is heartbreaking. They have been programmed, and the “real world” impact is this: if you’re a White girl, it gives you confidence. If you’re a Black girl, no confidence. But confidence is imperative. How do you do well on a school test without confidence? How do you handle relationships without confidence? How do you handle job interviews without confidence?

She looks like I’ve slapped her. I know how bad it looks, me and Bella dressed up like a fucking Ken and Barbie doll

She was better looking in real life. Her hair was shiner. Her lips were plumper. Her boobs were… boobier. She radiated sexy-farmgirl perfection in jean short-shorts and a gingham blouse tied just below her cleavage. She looked like a poster of herself—and, needless to say, also wildly out of place among all these lumpy, misshapen normal people. She was like a living Barbie doll. And as badly as I wanted that to be an insult… it just wasn’t.

Standing in my sports bra and pants, I couldn’t help but giggle at my five-foot-tall reflection. I looked like the prototype of what Mattel would cast as scientist Barbie. It was no wonder no one took me seriously. Skipper had been the cool doll anyway. Barbie only cared about her hair and fashion, not that I’d ever really played with dolls when I was a kid.

Ruth and Elliot’s unique partnership established many of its patterns in those early days. She had an optimistic view no matter the situation and kept Elliot’s spirits up. She had a boisterous adventurism that pulled him along, and he had a quiet, steady, unwavering love for her. At the end of their workdays, there was much to talk, share, and dream about.

that my obsession with Barbie © ended after I aged into the double digits, but it turns out that I just stopped collecting the dolls. My fascination with the glossy world of Barbie has continued, if not intensified as I got older, and I replaced my doll dresses with real dresses.However, it really took the Barbie Runway Show yesterday at the tents to remind me of the special place Barbie’s always occupied in my heart - and in those of little girls and grown up fashionistas everywhere. Everyone has a Barbie story. I fell in love with the doll after spotting it among its friends at a local supermarket at a very young age, and spent the next few years giving her haircuts and even making her clothes. The first pair of shoes I really loved were the pink heels Barbie wore. I was so disappointed that Barbie couldn’t actually stand up in them - though now years later I often face the same unfortunate results when I don on my most Barbie-esque of shoes, the Christian Louboutin Decollete. At any rate, during the show I realized that each girl’s fantasy of the Barbie world lives copyright

There is a new Barbie doll on the market. It’s called Marie Antoinette Barbie with removable head; guillotine included!

There is a new Barbie doll on the market. It’s called Crash Test Barbie… comes with car and brick wall.

This isn’t the future I’d expected. Even a glowing wasteland or Mad Max desolation would have been better. No God. No family. No country or patriotism. Just a bunch of Ken dolls without Barbies. The gays and their goddamn agenda won, or should I say transsexuals, or asexuals? Liberalism has run unchecked and ruined everything. You probably don’t even have guns anymore, do you?” “Of course not, we have no weapons of any kind,” Hex replied.

I get up and go to check on Friday and Hayley, but I stumble to a stop when I turn the corner into Hayley’s room. They’re both asleep on the bed on their stomachs with an open book in front of them. Friday has changed into her pajamas and it looks as though she was reading to Hayley when they both fell asleep. But what kills me is that their noses are turned toward one another, so close they’re sharing breaths, and my daughter’s hand is tucked into Friday’s. I take a mental picture, because I never, ever want to forget what this feels like. Click! Click! Click! I cement it in my head, because my heart is so happy it’s ready to burst, and I don’t want to let this moment go. I don’t wake them up. Instead, I pick up some of the toys Hayley has left lying around the room. I put her dolls on the top shelf, and her trucks and matchbox cars go in the bucket at the foot of her bed. I laugh when I see they built a big house out of building blocks and they put one of her male actions figures in there with Barbie. I look closer. Are their faces pressed together? It looks almost like they’re kissing. Leave it to Friday… Friday sat and played with my daughter for two hours, and then she read to her and she fell asleep on her bed. I want to see this every night for the rest of my life.

Question three: * When you were wearing pretty frocks and playing with dolls, did you feel less than a boy? How did you feel or react when you saw other boys playing with ‘boyish’ toys like miniature toy soldiers, train sets, etc.? Answers: a) No, I did not feel any less a boy when I was dressed in girls’ clothes. I thought girls’ garments were more creative and imaginative than boys’. In fact, I often wondered why boys’ clothes were so boring and mundane compared to what my mother dressed me in. b) Playing with dolls came naturally to me. It might be because, from the moment I opened my little eyes, I was surrounded by dolls. I did enjoy playing dress-up with my doll collection, especially the Barbies, which in later years I saved my own money to purchase. Round about ages 5 or 6, I began taking a keen interest in designing Barbie dolls’ clothes. There were times in the middle of the night, after I went to bed when the house lights were off, I would shine a light under the sheets to begin the process of making and dressing my dolls. I enjoyed doing that when there was nobody to bother me and I had all the time needed to craft these feminine creations. c) Train sets, toy soldiers or ‘toys for boys’ never interested me. They seemed too mechanical and bloodthirsty, fighting and killing each other all the time. These warlike sports were not to my liking. I don’t understand why boys take great pride in killing, beating each other. Is that what being manly is about?

I put a row of toys on the bed. A brown-haired Barbie doll, then a Lego ambulance...then a gray Buckbeak the Hippogriff.

I needed to be myself. As long as I kept up this game with Finn, being a Barbie doll he could dress and bend her legs into whatever position he wanted, I could never find the real me.

Looking stoic, she was sitting in the seat closest to the casket. Genevieve. My body went rigid, an unexpected surge of possessiveness running through me. Like Liam, Genevieve also had blonde hair. My boyfriend had been fucked over by Barbie and Ken. And I was more like the Bratz doll rebound.

I used to cringe when people said I looked like him—my father, because I was a girl and girls aren’t supposed to look like their fathers. Girls are supposed to look like their mothers, or fairy princesses, or Barbie dolls, or some crap like that. I

She tilts her head back, exposing her neck. Like a moth to a flame, I bring my mouth to that golden skin. She lets a moan escape as I explore the feel of her.

Pediophobia, as this fear is scientifically named, can range from modern Barbie and Bratz dolls all the way to porcelain and antique dolls. Some only have a fear of one kind of doll, others

To be beautiful you had to be willowy and tall. When you were as short as Clary was, just over five feet, you were cute. Not pretty or beautiful, but cute. Throw in carroty hair and a face full of freckles, and she was a Raggedy Ann to her mother’s Barbie doll.

That summer, Harrison Miller and Bezos butted heads in front of the board of directors over the size of the bet on toys. Bezos wanted Miller to plow $120 million into stocking every possible toy, from Barbie dolls to rare German-made wooden trains to cheap plastic beach pails, so that kids and parents would never be disappointed when they searched for an item on Amazon. But a prescient Miller, sensing disaster ahead, pushed to lower his own buy. “No! No! A hundred and twenty million!” Bezos yelled. “I want it all. If I have to, I will drive it to the landfill myself!” “Jeff, you drive a Honda Accord,” Joy Covey pointed out. “That’s going to be a lot of trips.” Bezos prevailed. And the company would make a sizable contribution to Toys for Tots after the holidays that year. “That first holiday season was the best of times and the worst of times,” Miller says. “The store was great for customers and we made our revenue goals, which were big, but other than that everything that could go wrong did. In the aftermath we were sitting on fifty million dollars of toy inventory. I had guys going down the back stairs with ‘Vinnie’ in New York, selling Digimons off to Mexico at twenty cents on the dollar. You just had to get rid of them, fast.” The electronics effort faced even greater challenges. To launch that category, David Risher tapped a Dartmouth alum named Chris Payne who had previously worked on Amazon’s DVD store. Like Miller, Payne had to plead with suppliers—in this case, Asian consumer-electronics companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung. He quickly hit a wall. The Japanese electronics

Giving a child a doll with breasts is projecting her out of her childhood into the teenage world. Barbie dolls and those with “attitude” like Bratz dolls form a multimillion-dollar enterprise that shortchanges the world of the young child.

I see us sort of as a modern day Fred and Barney.” Dylan answered in all seriousness. Bo must have made a face because Dylan reached over and squeezed his knee. “Okay no, Scooby and Shaggy? But I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with being either one. How about Ken and GI Joe. You’re my Ken doll. When Ken let his hair grow out long and played football and realized that cheerleader Barbie was all boobs and no dick.

if u give a barbie doll to a baby girl, she would dress her up..... if u give a barbie doll to a baby boy, he would strip offf her clothes, get her naked and play with it as if it were a gun.....

Emma felt like a Raggedy Ann doll accidentally mixed in with the Barbies.

CHAPTER 1   Mon, Jan. 18, 1993   I got back home from Grandpa's house yesterday.  It was a really long plane ride, but I slept a lot, so that's why I'm writing now and not yesterday.  Mom and Dad said I had to go back to school today, and I'm really mad about that.  I had to go to school at Grandpa's too, because I was there for so long. So when I went to school this morning and talked to the principal to get me back in, they told me something that really made me upset.  Remember how they moved me to 4th grade when I was at Grandpa's?  Well, they put me back in 3rd!  I did so good when I was in 4th grade, but now I have to go backwards!  I'm not stupid!  It's not fair!  I don't want to start over!  I think Dad was really mad about it, but I don't know why, he doesn't have to go back to 3rd grade. Well, I still went to school today, even though I was really mad.  It was the same teacher I had before I went to Grandpa's, Miss Florence.  She was happy to see me, and I was too, because she's really nice, but I felt sad that I wasn't still in 4th grade.  I missed the friends I had here, but I miss my friends at the other school too.  I don't know, I felt really weird today. But today something cool happened... I remembered that I've been writing in you for a whole year now!  It's like you're my friend... a secret friend!  I can tell you anything I want, and nobody tries to find out what I say! I want to give you a name.  I want to call you............. “Barbie.”  Is that okay?  I know there are Barbie dolls, but all I do is dress them up, they just like to play pretend. I'll talk to you tomorrow, Barbie!

We both had grown up all too fast; no time for tears, Barbie Dolls and Easy Bake ovens.

This underscores another pattern in Barbie's universe. People project fears and prejudices onto her; when a person talks at length about Barbie, one usually learns more about the speaker than about the doll.

In Barbie's early years, Mattel struggled to make its doll look like a real-life movie star. Today, however, real-life celebrities—as well as common folk—are emulating her. The postsurgical Dolly Parton looks like the post-surgical Ivana Trump looks like the postsurgical Michael Jackson looks like the postsurgical Joan Rivers looks like

Cults of beauty have been persistently homosexual from antiquity to today's hair salons and house of couture," Camille Paglia writes in Sexual Personae. "Professional beautification of women by homosexual men is a systematic reconceptualization of the brute facts of female nature." Barbie—who doesn't bleed, kvetch, or demand to choose her own outfits— may be, for some gay arbiters, the apotheosis of female beauty.

Barbie is a space-age fertility archetype, Joe a space-age warrior. They are idealized opposites, templates of "femininity" and "masculinity" imposed on sexless effigies—which underscores the irrelevance of actual genitalia to perceptions of gender. What nature can only approximate, plastic makes perfect.

Only Ruth Handler dared blur the line between fetish and toy, taking an object familiar to readers of Krafft-Ebing and recasting it for readers of Mother Goose.

This thinning down might be of greater alarm if it were without precedent, which it isn't. In the history of art, representations of the figure have often been distorted so that their drapery would fall in a pleasing fashion—and Barbie, like a clothing-store dummy, is a sculpture that exists to display garments.

Barbie doesn't instigate but merely reflects society's notions of beauty.

Charlotte Johnson, Barbie's first dress designer, understood the historical interdependence between the figure and its drapery. She also understood scale: When you put human-scale fabric on an object that is one-sixth human size, a multilayered cloth waistband is going to protrude like a truck tire around a human tummy. The effect would be the same as draping a human model in fabric made of threads that were the thickness of the model's fingers.

This is not, however, to let Barbie off the hook. In the doll's early years, before women spoke openly about anorexia, Barbie's props encouraged girls to obsess on their weight. In addition to pink plastic hair curlers, Barbie's 1965 "Slumber Party" outfit featured a bathroom scale permanently set at 110. Mattel also gave her bedtime reading—a book called How to Lose Weight that offered this advice: "Don't Eat.

So whether the woman is breast- or bottle-feeding, food and mother tend to be one." Abby, a thirty-two-year-old Vassar graduate and recovering anorexic, feels very strongly that family dynamics rather than idealized images of women contributed to her eating disorder. "I grew up in Greenwich Village," she explained. "I was the child of a single mother who was a devout feminist. I wasn't allowed to watch TV until I was thirteen because my mother believed that its patriarchal stereotypes would have a bad influence on the way I identified myself as a woman. Instead, I was given Sisterhood Is Powerful and Ms. magazine. My mother hated Barbie and what she represented. I wasn't allowed to have a Barbie, much less a Skipper or a Midge. And the irony is that I was severely anorexic as a teenager. When I was fifteen, I stopped eating. I'm five foot nine and at my lowest weight, I was just under a hundred pounds. I lost my period for three years. Today, I have come to realize that my anorexia was a reaction to a very controlled and crazy family situation. I became obsessed with being thin because it wasn't something my mother valued. I think overreacting to Barbie—setting her up as the ultimate negative example—can be just as damaging as positing her as an ideal.

the "cause" of an eating disorder seems to vary between individuals, and involves some combination of cultural and familial issues.

Barbie Bazaar,

It is a saga of mothers and daughters, men and women, hope, despair, passion, and the striving after an impossible "American" ideal. Barbie is an emblem of "femininity," a concept quite different from biological femaleness. Barbie was invented by women for women, and the wrath brought to bear upon Barbie by some women is perhaps wrath deflected from themselves.

By the time children play with Barbie, they have too many other factors in their environment to be able to link a specific behavior trait with a particular toy. But because Barbie has both shaped and responded to the marketplace, it's possible to study her as a reflection of American popular cultural values and notions about femininity. Her houses and friends and clothes provide a window onto the often contradictory demands that the culture has placed upon women.

After Ruth and her husband Elliot, with whom she founded Mattel, left the company in 1975, women have continued to be the key decision makers on the Barbie line; the company's current COO, a fortyish ex-cosmetics marketer given to wearing Chanel suits, has been so involved with the doll that the Los Angeles Times dubbed her "Barbie's Doting Sister.

Consequently, what could be more American than being an unimpeachable citizen with a sordid, embarrassing forebear in Europe?

TO FIRST-GENERATION BARBIE OWNERS, OF WHICH I WAS one, Barbie was a revelation. She didn't teach us to nurture, like our clinging, dependent Betsy Wetsys and Chatty Cathys. She taught us independence. Barbie was her own woman. She could invent herself with a costume change: sing a solo in the spotlight one minute, pilot a starship the next. She was Grace Slick and Sally Ride, Marie Osmond and Marie Curie. She was all that we could be and—if you calculate what at human scale would translate to a thirty-nine-inch bust—more than we could be. And certainly more than we were . . . at six and seven and eight when she appeared and sank her jungle-red

To study Barbie, one sometimes has to hold seemingly contradictory ideas in one's head at the same time—which, as F. Scott Fitzgerald has said, is "the test of a first-rate intelligence.

Barbie, too, has changed her look more than once through the years, though her body has remained essentially unaltered. From an art history standpoint—and Barbie, significantly, has been copyrighted as a work of art—her most radical change came in 1971, and was a direct reflection of the sexual revolution. Until then, Barbie's eyes had been cast down and to one side—the averted, submissive gaze that characterized female nudes, particularly those of a pornographic nature, from the Renaissance until the nineteenth century. What had been so shocking about Manet's Olympia (1865) was that the model was both naked and unabashedly staring at the viewer. By 1971, however, when America had begun to accept the idea that a woman could be both sexual and unashamed, Barbie, in her "Malibu" incarnation, was allowed to have that body and look straight ahead.

Fans of conspiracy theories will be disappointed to learn that Barbie's proportions were not the result of some misogynistic plot. They were dictated by the mechanics of clothing construction. The doll is one-sixth the size of a person, but the fabrics she wears are scaled for people. Barbie's middle, her first designer explained, had to be disproportionately narrow to look proportional in clothes. The inner seam on the waistband of a skirt involves four layers of cloth—and four thicknesses of human-scale fabric on a one-sixth-human-scale doll would cause the doll's waist to appear dramatically larger than her hips.

When Ella King Torrey, a friend of mine and consultant on this book, began researching Barbie at Yale University in 1979, her work was considered cutting-edge and controversial.

Gilles Brougere, a French sociologist, has conducted an exhaustive study of French women and children to determine how different age groups perceive the doll.

The company has no archive. This may help conceal its embarrassments, but it has also buried its achievements—such as subsidizing Shindana Toys in response to the 1965 Watts riots. The African-American-run, South Central Los Angeles—based company produced ethnically correct playthings long before they were fashionable.

The second time, Michael Milken galloped to the rescue. "I believed in Barbie," Milken told Barbara Walters in 1993. "I called up the head of Mattel and I told him that I personally would be willing to invest two hundred million dollars in his company. There's more Barbie dolls in this country than there are people.

Toys have always said a lot about the culture that produced them, and especially about how that culture viewed its children.

It is with an eye toward using objects to understand ourselves that I beg Barbie's knee-jerk defenders and knee-jerk revilers to cease temporarily their defending and reviling. Barbie is too complicated for either an encomium or an indictment. But we will not refrain from looking under rocks.

Through their play," Ruth said, Barbara and her friends "were imagining their lives as adults. They were using the dolls to reflect the adult world around them. They would sit and carry on conversations, making the dolls real people. I used to watch that over and over and think: If only we could take this play pattern and three-dimensionalize it, we would have something very special.

AS STRATEGY SESSIONS BEGAN IN HAWTHORNE, THE Handlers made a brilliant tactical move. They commissioned a toy study from Ernest Dichter, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Motivational Research in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. The study cost a staggering $12,000 and took six months to complete, but when it was finished the charge seemed low. Dichter had masterminded a cunning campaign to peddle Barbie. Dichter was already a legend when the Handlers approached him. Quoted on nearly every page of Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, a bestseller in 1957, Dichter was hailed as a marketing Einstein—an evil Einstein, but an Einstein nonetheless. He pioneered what he called "motivational research," advertising's newest, hippest, and, in Packard's view, scariest trend—the manipulation of deep-seated psychological cravings to sell merchandise.

Convince Mom that Barbie will make a "poised little lady" out of her raffish, unkempt, possibly boyish child. Underscore the outfits' detailing, and the way it might teach a roughneck to accessorize. Remind Mom what she believes deep down but dares not express: Better her daughter should appeal in a sleazy way to a man than be unable to attract one at all.

The positioning from the very first commercial was that she was a person," said Schneider. "We never mentioned the fact that she was a doll.

Because neither Ruth nor Charlotte was a housewife. Barbie, from the outset, worked—at both dream and humdrum jobs. She served drinks to thankless travelers as an American Airlines stewardess and emptied bedpans as a registered nurse.

Barbie Baby-Sits" appeared in 1963, a year after the publication of Helen Gurley Brown's best-selling Sex and the Single Girl. And whether it was Brown's influence or an effect of synchronicity, Barbie began to resemble Brown's happily unmarried woman.

Barbie's similarity to Brown's brave, new, vaguely selfish and decidedly subversive heroine has more than whimsical ramifications. It

The reason, one suspects, for the gender-blurring was the increasing popularity of the birth control pill, which had been approved for sale in 1960. Once women had the option of turning off their fertility, they could behave as rakishly as men. In the age of the pill, sex did not automatically lead to marriage and babies; it generally led to more sex. So in 1966, the Barbie team made a decision. The times they were a-changin'. And Barbie, to some degree, would have to change with them.

Barbie is a space-age fertility symbol: a narrow-hipped mother goddess for the epoch of cesarean sections. She is both relentlessly of her time and timeless. To such overripe totems as the Venus of Willendorf, the Venus of Lespugue, and the Venus of Dolni, we must add the Venus of Hawthorne, California.

Like the kachinas, Barbie is both toy and mythic object—modern woman and Ur-woman—navelless, motherless, an incarnation of "the One Goddess with a Thousand Names." In the reservoir of communal memory that psychologist Carl Jung has termed the "collective unconscious," Barbie is an archetype of something ancient, matriarchal, and profound.

The whole idea of woman as temptress, or woman as subordinate to man, is absent from the Barbie cosmology. Ken is a gnat, a fly, a slave, an accessory of Barbie. Barbie was made perfect: her body has not evolved dramatically with time. Ken, by contrast, was a blunder: first scrawny, now pumped-up, his ever-changing body is neither eternal nor talismanic.

Swicord is not a New Age nut; she's a writer. And even after mega-wrangles with Mattel's management—the musical was sketched out but never produced—she is still a fan of the doll. "Barbie," she said, "is bigger than all those executives. She has lasted through many regimes. She's lasted through neglect. She's survived the feminist backlash. In countries where they don't even sell makeup or have anything like our dating rituals, they play with Barbie. Barbie embodies not a cultural view of femininity but the essence of woman." Over the course of two interviews with Swicord, her young daughters played with their Barbies. I watched one wrap her tiny fist around the doll's legs and move it forward by hopping. It looked as if she were plunging the doll into the earth—or, in any event, into the bedroom floor. And while I handle words like "empowering" with tongs, it's a good description of her daughters' Barbie play. The girls do not live in a matriarchal household. Their father, Swicord's husband, Nicholas Kazan, who wrote the screenplay for Reversal of Fortune, is very much a presence in their lives. Still, the girls play in a female-run universe, where women are queens and men are drones. The ratio of Barbies to Kens is about eight to one. Barbie works, drives, owns the house, and occasionally exploits Ken for sex. But even that is infrequent: In one scenario, Ken was so inconsequential that the girls made him a valet parking attendant. His entire role was to bring the cars around for the Barbies.

But if feminists had embraced Barbie when she stepped down from her high heels, her seventies persona might have been dramatically different. She was on the brink of a conversion. If they hadn't spurned, slapped, and mocked her, she might have canvassed for George McGovern or worked for the ERA. She might have spearheaded a consciousness-raising group with Francie and Christie, or Dawn and Bizzie Lizzie. But Barbie could not go where she was not wanted. "Living" Barbie lasted only a year. She went back on tiptoe and stayed there. Perhaps because of this bitter legacy, "feminist" seems to be an obscene word at Mattel. "If you asked me to give you fifty words that describe me, it wouldn't be on the list," said Rita Rao, executive vice president of marketing on the Barbie line.

Lui did not get that idea out of the air; though whether it was true or not remains a subject of debate. "The supermom is fading fast—doomed by anger, guilt, and exhaustion," Newsweek reported in 1988. "A growing number of mothers" believe "that they can't have it all." Yet in her book Backlash, Susan Faludi points out that the survey on which Newsweek based the article revealed nothing of the sort. It found that 71 percent of mothers at home would prefer to work and 75 percent of the working mothers would go on working even if their financial needs could be otherwise met. Faludi also reports that Good Housekeeping's 1988 "New Traditionalist" ad campaign, which featured born-again housewives happily recovering from the horrors of the workplace, was based on neither hard facts nor even opinion polls. The two opinion studies by the Yankelovich organization, which had allegedly buttressed Good Housekeeping's position, had, in fact, showed no evidence that women were either leaving work or wanted to leave.

This is not to cast Barbie as a New Traditionalist. Even in retrograde times, she has never stayed at home against her will. The jobs on her 1989 resume—physician, astronaut, veterinarian, fashion designer, executive, Olympic athlete—are impressive; a little girl could do worse than identify with such a doll. Her move away from demeaning stereotypes can also be documented. Compared with, say, the 1973 Barbie Friend Ship, in which Barbie is forced to play scullery maid to a painted-on pilot, the 1990 Flight Time Barbie, developed in 1989, is herself an aviatrix. But Flight Time Barbie is also a Day-to-Night doll, and her after-hours outfit, vastly more girlish than what she wore in 1985, undercuts her authority. In five years, her homeovestite behavior has intensified, suggesting that her achievements have left her fraught with anxiety.

The magazine has always existed to promote Barbie as a commercial product; but kids look to her as an oracle— a vivid, godlike presence in the landscape of childhood. And sometimes, with aching candor, they'd beg Barbie to help stabilize their parents' rocky marriages or mitigate tragedies in their lives.

When it comes to parental ill will toward Barbie, I believe femininity is the toxin; Barbie is the scapegoat.

Barbie has an advantage over all of them. She can never bloat. She has no children to betray her. Nor can she rot, wrinkle, overdose, or go out of style. Mattel has hundreds of people—designers, marketers, market researchers—whose full-time job it is continually to reinvent her. In 1993, fresh versions of the doll did a billion dollars' worth of business. Based on its unit sales, Mattel calculates that every second, somewhere in the world, two Barbies are sold.

Not surprisingly, when Barbie achieved superstar status, her houses became more ostentatious. Yet even Barbie's three-story town house, with its Tara-like pillars and ersatz wrought-iron birdcage elevator, is an outsider's interpretation of upper-class life. Authentic valuables are to Barbie's possessions what a pungent slab of gorgonzola is to "cheese food"; her furniture and artwork would not look out of place in a Ramada Inn. For all her implicit disposable income, her tastes remain doggedly middle- to lower-middle-class. As pictured in the catalogue, the town house also reflects Dynasty thinking. Both Ken and Barbie are absurdly overdressed—he in a parodic "tuxedo," she in a flouncy confection that barely fits into the elevator.

In Latin America, where blond Barbie outsells all other dolls, Barbie leads a life that few of her young owners will ever replicate.

I didn't like Midge because she didn't have a sexy face," Hanson said. "The old Barbie looked dominant: sharp nose, sharp eyelashes—she was a dangerous-looking woman. And of course she had those symbols of power on her feet. . . . I don't consider Barbie sexual anymore. I looked at new Barbies a year or so ago, and their faces were infantile—more rounded and childlike.

Nor was Hanson the only budding sex maven to fixate on the dolls. "I definitely lived out my fantasies with them," Madonna told an interviewer. "I rubbed her and Ken together a lot. And

Barbie's large breasts make sense as a function of her time—postwar America. Breasts are emblematic of the home; they produce milk and provide security and comfort. Some of the strangest market research in Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders dealt with what milk meant to soldiers in World War II.

Barbie's combination of voluptuous body and wholesome image was precisely what Hugh Hefner sought in models for Playboy, which he founded in 1953.

In An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, Neal Gabler tells how the studio moguls—all immigrants and outsiders—created an "America" that was more "American" than the country ever could be. They formed a "cluster of images and ideas—so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination." And Americans, aping those images, ultimately became them. "As a result, the paradox—that the movies were quintessentially American while the men who made them were not— doubled back on itself," Gabler writes. "By creating their idealized America on the screen, the Jews reinvented the country in the image of their fiction.

To look at Mattel as a relative of the Hollywood studios is to make sense of some of its contradictions. The daughter of a Polish Jewish immigrant, Ruth Handler coded with her fashion dolls the same sort of phantasmic "America" that Louis B. Mayer had coded in his movies. Barbie was, in fact, better suited than a human actress to exemplify an impossible ideal. There was no tribal taint in her plastic flesh, no baggage to betray an immigrant past. She had no navel; no parents; no heritage.

As early as the 1940s, Mattel integrated its assembly line and hired a black foreman. "It was unheard of in those days to put a black production worker next to a white production worker and have them all share toilet facilities," Ruth Handler told me. And in recognition of its policies, Mattel was honored by the Urban League. But Mattel's most startling project, little known outside the toy world, began in 1968, when, as a response to the Watts riots, it helped set up Shindana Toys—the name means "competitor" in Swahili—a black-run, South Central Los Angeles-based company that manufactured multicultural playthings before they wrere trendy.

The world of Shindana—of top Mattel brass working side by side with the founders of Operation Bootstrap, the Watts-based job training program under whose auspices the toy company was formed—was a far cry from the way the thirtieth-anniversary issue of Barbie magazine depicted Barbie's world in 1966. "Our inner cities burned but the pot roast couldn't," the caption says under a picture of Barbie at a Tupperware party. "Mom and Dad and the leaders they elected tried to keep a lid on things." As I said in this book's opening chapter, studying Barbie sometimes requires the ability to hold contradictory ideas in one's head at the same time. When it comes to Mattel and representations of racial diversity, this is especially true. Although the Handlers have not been part of Mattel for twenty years, the company can still be viewed as a cousin to the Hollywood studios. Mattel actually did get into the movie business in the seventies, when its Radnitz Productions produced the Academy Award-winning Sounder, another multicultural product that predated the multicultural vogue.

Traditionally, the needs of ethnically diverse consumers had been met by smaller companies—the equivalent, in movie terms, of independent filmmakers. In the seventies, Shindana introduced two Barbie-like fashion dolls: Malaika, taller and stouter than Barbie; and Career Girl Wanda, about three-quarters as tall as Barbie and as proportionately svelte. But in 1991, when Mattel brought out its "Shani" line—three Barbie-sized African-American dolls available with mahogany, tawny, or beige complexions— there could be no doubt that "politically correct" was profitable. "For six years, I had been preaching these demographics—showing pie charts of black kids under ten representing eighteen percent of the under-ten population and Hispanic kids representing sixteen percent—and nobody was interested," said Yla Eason, an African-American graduate of Harvard Business School who in 1985 founded Olmec Corporation, which makes dolls and action figures of color. "But when Mattel came out with those same demographics and said, 'Ethnically correct is the way,' it legitimatized our business." Some say that the toy industry's idea of "ethnically correct" doesn't go far enough, however. Ann duCille, chairman of the African-American Studies Program and an associate professor of English at Wesleyan University, is a severe critic. After studying representations of race in fashion dolls for over a year, she feels that the dolls reflect a sort of "easy pluralism." "I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say I'd rather see no black dolls than see something like Shani or Black Barbie," she told me, "but I would hope for something more—which is not about to happen." Nor is she wholly enamored of Imani and Melenik, Olmec's equivalent of Barbie and Ken. "Supposedly these are dolls for black kids to play with that look like them, when in fact they don't look like them. That's a problematic statement, of course, because there's no 'generic black kid.' But those dolls look too like Barbie for me. They have the same body type, the same long, straight hair—and I think it sends a problematic message to kids. It's about marketing, about business—so don't try to pass it off as being about the welfare of black children." Lisa Jones, an African-American writer who chronicled the introduction of Mattel's Shani dolls for the Village Voice, is less harsh. Too old to have played with Christie—Barbie's black friend, born in 1968—Jones recalls as a child having expressed annoyance with her white classmates by ripping the heads and arms off her two white Barbie dolls. Any fashion doll of color, she thinks, would have been better for her than those blondes. "Having been a little girl who grew up without the images," she told me, "I realize that however they fail to reach the Utopian mark, they're still useful.

In Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things, Stephen Bayley tells us that "nothing is as crass and vulgar as instant classification according to hairstyle, clothing and footwear, yet it is . . . a cruelly accurate analytical form." Because Barbie is a construct of class—as well as a construct of gender— this crass, vulgar, and accurate investigation cannot be avoided. "When it comes to the meaning of things, there are no more powerful transmitters than clothes, those quasi-functional devices which, like an inverted fig, put the heart of the matter in front of the skin," Bayley writes. Yet powerful though the transmissions may be, many Americans deliberately ignore them.

Barbie as a class role model, far more than Barbie as a gender role model, may, in fact, be the linchpin of many mothers' continued misgivings about her.

Barbie's new face, fashioned by doll sculptor Joyce Clark, was the face of disco. The doll appears in the 1977 catalogue against a black background, as if on the edge of a cavernous dance floor. Light glints off her glossy magenta boa, her burnished gold hair, her luminous diamondlike ring. Gone is the haughty smirk of her early years. Seemingly stupefied by the disco beat, SuperStar Barbie's mouth is set in a broad smile. The revamped Barbie changed the relationship between the doll and the little girl who owned it. Barbie could still function as an object onto which the child projected her future self; but because the doll had the trappings of celebrity, the girl's imagined future had to involve being rich and famous.

Styled by Kitty Black Perkins, an African-American designer whom Mattel hired in 1975, Black Barbie made her debut in 1980. Barbie had had black friends since the late sixties, but by 1979, Mattel determined that America was ready for the dream girl herself to be of color. Because the new doll was likely to be scrutinized, Mattel fashioned her with sensitivity: her hair is short and realistically textured; her face, if not aggressively non-Caucasian, is at least different from blond Barbie's; and her dress, while corporate, is livened up with jewelry evocative of African sculpture. Hispanic Barbie, who appeared the same year, is another story. Decked out in a peasant blouse, a two-tiered skirt, and a mantilla, the doll looks like a refugee from an amateur production of Carmen; she even has a rose pinned at her neck. Mattel's designers could hardly be unacquainted with Hispanics:

Celebrities who in the sixties had led Barbie-esque lives now forswore them. Jane Fonda no longer vamped through the galaxy as "Barbarella," she flew to Hanoi. Gloria Steinem no longer wrote "The Passionate Shopper" column for New York, she edited Ms. And although McCalVs had described Steinem as "a life-size counter-culture Barbie doll" in a 1971 profile, Barbie was the enemy. NOW's formal assault on Mattel began in August 1971, when its New York chapter issued a press release condemning ten companies for sexist advertising. Mattel's ad, which showed boys playing with educational toys and girls with dolls, seems tame when compared with those of the other transgressors. Crisco, for instance, sold its oil by depicting a woman quaking in fear because her husband hated her salad dressing. Chrysler showed a marriage-minded mom urging her daughter to conceal from the boys how much she knew about cars. And Amelia Earhart Luggage—if ever a product was misnamed—ran a print ad of a naked woman painted with stripes to match her suitcases.

But even in their imperfect executions, the mere existence of Black Barbie and Hispanic Barbie in 1980 was a landmark. Like the coronation of Vanessa Williams as Miss America in 1983, the dolls commented on the evolution of popular taste. Slowly (with the speed of a glacier, critics might say), standards of so-called beauty were changing.

Instead of reworking the doll, Shackelford implemented a market "segmentation strategy," which she thinks helped Barbie achieve record sales. She did this by "segmenting the market," introducing dolls with different themes and then "creating whole worlds around them." Beginning about 1980, Mattel issued separate dolls for each of the major play patterns. There was a "hairplay" doll that came with styling paraphernalia; a "lifestyle" doll that came with sporting equipment; and a "glamour" doll that came with a gaudy dress. The strategy benefited Mattel in two major ways: because the costumes were sold on dolls, Mattel could charge more for them, and the variety encouraged girls to own more than one doll.

began. A chief element in positioning the new Barbie was her promotion. In 1984, after a campaign that featured "Hey There, Barbie Girl" sung to the tune of "Georgy Girl," Mattel launched a startling series of ads that toyed with female empowerment. Its slogan was "We Girls Can Do Anything," and its launch commercial, driven by an irresistibly upbeat soundtrack, was a sort of feminist Chariots of Fire. Responding to the increased number of women with jobs, the ad opens at the end of a workday with a little girl rushing to meet her business-suited mother and carrying her mother's briefcase into the house. A female voice says, "You know it, and so does your little girl." Then a chorus sings, "We girls can do anything." The ad plays with the possibility of unconventional gender roles. A rough-looking Little Leaguer of uncertain gender swaggers onscreen. She yanks off her baseball cap, her long hair tumbles down, and—sigh of relief—she grabs a particularly frilly Barbie doll. (The message: Barbie is an amulet to prevent athletic girls from growing up into hulking, masculine women.) There are images of gymnasts executing complicated stunts and a toddler learning to tie her shoelaces. (The message: Even seemingly minor achievements are still achievements.) But the shot with the most radical message takes place in a laboratory where a frizzy-haired, myopic brunette peers into a microscope. Since the seventies, Barbie commercials had featured little girls of different races and hair colors, but they were always pretty. Of her days in acting school, Tracy Ullman remarked in TV Guide that she was the "ugly kid with the brown hair and the big nose who didn't get [cast in] the Barbie commercials." With "We Girls," however, Barbie extends her tiny hand to bookish ugly ducklings; no longer a snooty sorority rush chairman, she is "big-tent" Barbie.

One factor was the Barbie group at Ogilvy & Mather, the ad agency that had, in the seventies, acquired Carson/Roberts. By 1984—a year after Sally Ride's landmark space flight, the same year as Geraldine Ferraro's historic bid for the U.S. vice presidency—Mattel urged O&M creative director Elaine Haller and writer Barbara Lui to, in Lui's words, "express where women were and where they wanted their daughters to be at the time." Upon hearing that, Lui told me last year, she remembered her own childhood on Manhattan's Upper West Side. "My mother's words came to me," she said. "My name is Barbara—I was called Bobbie at home—and my mother used to say, 'Bobbie, you can do anything,' " which, with a few revisions, became the doll's new slogan: "We girls can do anything, right, Barbie?

But even with her record sales, the Barbie of the late eighties was not the vibrant virago of the early eighties. "We Girls Can Do Anything" gave way to "We're into Barbie," a slogan that suggests turning inward, away from active engagement with the world. "The viewpoint of people changed," Barbara Lui explained, "and the 'mommy track' came on, and women didn't believe anymore that they could do anything. We're in an era—perhaps we're leaving it now—where people did not give themselves goals that were as tough.

To be sure, Barbie is a toy, and in market research sessions, as Barbie's first advertising copywriter Cy Schneider has pointed out, children, presented with choices that can be characterized as "tasteful, gaudy, gaudier, or gaudiest," invariably choose "gaudiest." But Barbie is also a reflection of her times—or a reflection of how market researchers and professional prognosticators interpret them. And perhaps therein lies the paradox.

After interviewing numerous upper-middle-class, Eastern Establishment women, I can say with certainty that most do not interpret the doll as an updated Neolithic fertility icon. They view her as a literal representation of a modern woman. Many object to her on feminist grounds—one hears the familiar "that body is not found in nature" refrain. Then the word bimbo arises. But let a woman talk longer—reassuring her that she's not speaking for attribution—and she'll express her deepest reservation: that "Barbie is cheap," where the whole idea of "cheap" is rooted in social hierarchies and economics.

On a recent HBO special, Roseanne Arnold, who, incidentally, collects Barbies, excoriated what she considered to be Barbie's middle-class-ness. Why didn't Mattel make, say, "trailer-park Barbie"? But to many upper-middle-class women, all post-1977 Barbies are Trailer Park Barbie. Ironically, given the knee-jerk antagonism to Barbie's body, it is one of her few attributes that doesn't scream "prole." Her thinness—indicative of an expensive gym membership and possibly a personal trainer—definitely codes her as middle- or upper-middle-class. In Distinction, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes that "working class women . . . are less aware of the 'market' value of beauty and less inclined to invest . . . sacrifices and money in cultivating their bodies." Likewise, Barbie's swanlike neck elevates her status. A stumpy neck is a lower-class attribute, Fussell says.

In 1985, Dr. Darlene Powell Hopson and Dr. Derek S. Hopson, two married psychologists, duplicated Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark's experiments using dolls to explore black children's self-esteem. Their results were shocking: they suggested that in the forty years since the Clarks did their research—despite landmark legal decisions, acts of Congress, and the civil rights movement—little had changed. Sixty-five percent of the black children they interviewed preferred white dolls, and 76 percent said the black dolls "looked bad" to them.

It’s one thing to battle oppression from the outside, but what do you do when the ideas that are attacking you are your own? As with all forms of oppression, sizeism doesn't exist in a vacuum. It interacts with and impacts other forms of oppression, including ableism. For those of us with disabilities where extra weight can make moving around that much harder, the threat of losing what mobility we have can loom over our heads. Ableism tells us that we must walk and become as “independent” as possible; sizeism blackmails us into making sure we stay that way. They both reinforce the man-made idea of an ideal body, one that everyone should aspire to have. Both feed into the capitalist idea that we must pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, that we must fend for ourselves, that we must not be a burden on anyone else. The two work in tandem with sexism as well – a female body should be Barbie doll skinny, sleek and sophisticated, and anything else is just gross. Our culture's standard definition of beautiful depends on preconceived notions about how the perfect body should be, notions that rely on various forms of oppression to legitimize them. A model body should ideally be white or white-passing, slim and nondisabled. Is it any wonder we don’t see fat, visibly disabled people of color posing on the covers of fashion magazines?" -Cara Liebowitz, "Palsy Skinny: A Mixed Up, Muddled Journey into Size and Disability," Criptiques, 2014.

am ten years old and dress my Barbie doll in Daisy Duke shorts and a halter top, and do the best I can to position her and Ken’s straight and stiff joints to hug and make out with each other. My mother sees

Founded in 2011, ToyTalk already produces popular animated conversational apps — among them the Winston Show and SpeakaZoo — that encourage young children to engage in complex dialogue with a menagerie of make-believe characters. Now the company’s technology, originally designed for two-dimensional characters on-screen, is poised to power tangible playthings that children hold in their hands. This fall, Mattel plans to introduce Hello Barbie, a Wi-Fi enabled version of the iconic doll, which uses ToyTalk’s system to analyze a child’s speech and produce relevant responses. “She’s a huge character with an enormous back story,” Mr. Jacob says of Barbie. “We hope that when she’s ready, she will have thousands and thousands of things to say and you can speak to her for hours and hours.” [Video: Hello Barbie is World's First Interactive Barbie Doll Watch on YouTube.] It was probably inevitable that the so-called Internet of Things — those Web-connected thermostats and bathroom scales and coffee makers and whatnot — would beget the Internet of Toys. And just like Web-connected consumer gizmos that can amass details about their owners and transmit that data for remote analysis, Internet-connected toys hold out the tantalizing promise of personalized services and the risk of privacy perils.

Grandpa, as far as any child is concerned, their parents don’t have any sort of genitals. It’s all blank down there. Like Barbie and Ken dolls.

John laughed as he saw the scolding look on Roger’s face. “What?” The big man just shook his head, arms crossed. “You’re in for it now. What if you have two girls?” John scowled. That had occurred to him as well. Two boys would be ideal. He could deal with boys. What the hell would he do with girls? Chad punched Roger in the shoulder. “Hey, now. Girls are fine. Mercy is amazing.” He looked at John. “Don’t give in to all that stereotypical bullshit. She plays with cars and stuffed animals. Give her a Barbie doll and she turns her nose up at it. I can’t wait to take her shooting at the ranch. I found this awesome little .22 caliber rifle called a Cricket. Shorter barrel, shorter stock. Totally made for a little girl.” John looked at the picture Chad had saved on his phone of the little pink gun. Huh…okay. That was pretty cute. “Besides,” Chad continued, “I doubt Shannon will let you avoid them. Twins are a lot of work, my friend. I used to babysit my niece Grace when she was a baby, and just one kid is a handful. I can’t imagine two.” “Thanks for the pep talk, Lowell,” John growled. They

You were way too busy drinking to help your brother with the business, much less to deal with the fact that he was obviously not meant for that soulless Barbie doll. Bayou Barbie, that’s her new name. You didn’t save him from Bayou Barbie and it cost him years of his life.” She reached over and held up the hair extension. “You want to know how to handle her? You take her down. I already got one trophy, Zep. Don’t make me take yours.

I knew early on that children weren’t in my plans. I never once played with baby dolls. I preferred Barbies because it would have been illegal to dress up a baby for her Studio 54 date with Ken. I never felt a biological tug looking at children. It’s not that I’m missing maternal feelings, it’s more like they apply only to cats and dogs, possibly small monkeys. While I’m happy for everyone who wants a family, I look at the notion of having kids the same way I look at people who get tattoos on their faces, like, “Hoo-boy, that’s permanent.

In so many respects, the Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament, representing 62 countries and nearly every ethnic group and religion in the world. There was an ex-hippie stock broker, the gay Catholic chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, a Japanese hockey player, an Ecuadorian sous chef, a Barbie doll collector, a vegetarian calligrapher, a Palestinian accountant. The manifold ways in which they attached to life testified to the Quranic injunction: that the taking of a single life destroys a universe.

Biddy’s sister, Clare, was another story. She’d once snapped the head off Biddy’s Barbie doll and whipped her Tickle Me Elmo against the wall in anger. Besides losing an eye, Elmo couldn’t stop giggling, sounding like he’d gone completely mad.

A black-veiled nun, holding plastic bags full of cucumbers, apricots, and onions in one hand and pressing two tall blonde Barbie dolls wrapped in plastic to her breast with the other, stopped before the tomato vendor, whose vegetable knife hung from a lanyard around his neck, laid the dolls on a wooden crate, and asked for a few kilos of tomatoes on the vine.

That’s right!” said Dr. Nicholas. “So in 1959, Ruth and Elliot decided to make the first Barbie doll. It was eleven and a half inches tall, and it sold for three dollars. It became the most popular doll in the world. Two years later, they came out with Barbie’s boyfriend, Ken, and he was named after their son.

The most portentous tidings delivered by a collector of My Little Pony figurines and Barbie dolls.

Bizarre and Surprising Insights—Consumer Behavior Insight Organization Suggested Explanation7 Guys literally drool over sports cars. Male college student subjects produce measurably more saliva when presented with images of sports cars or money. Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management Consumer impulses are physiological cousins of hunger. If you buy diapers, you are more likely to also buy beer. A pharmacy chain found this across 90 days of evening shopping across dozens of outlets (urban myth to some, but based on reported results). Osco Drug Daddy needs a beer. Dolls and candy bars. Sixty percent of customers who buy a Barbie doll buy one of three types of candy bars. Walmart Kids come along for errands. Pop-Tarts before a hurricane. Prehurricane, Strawberry Pop-Tart sales increased about sevenfold. Walmart In preparation before an act of nature, people stock up on comfort or nonperishable foods. Staplers reveal hires. The purchase of a stapler often accompanies the purchase of paper, waste baskets, scissors, paper clips, folders, and so on. A large retailer Stapler purchases are often a part of a complete office kit for a new employee. Higher crime, more Uber rides. In San Francisco, the areas with the most prostitution, alcohol, theft, and burglary are most positively correlated with Uber trips. Uber “We hypothesized that crime should be a proxy for nonresidential population.…Uber riders are not causing more crime. Right, guys?” Mac users book more expensive hotels. Orbitz users on an Apple Mac spend up to 30 percent more than Windows users when booking a hotel reservation. Orbitz applies this insight, altering displayed options according to your operating system. Orbitz Macs are often more expensive than Windows computers, so Mac users may on average have greater financial resources. Your inclination to buy varies by time of day. For retail websites, the peak is 8:00 PM; for dating, late at night; for finance, around 1:00 PM; for travel, just after 10:00 AM. This is not the amount of website traffic, but the propensity to buy of those who are already on the website. Survey of websites The impetus to complete certain kinds of transactions is higher during certain times of day. Your e-mail address reveals your level of commitment. Customers who register for a free account with an Earthlink.com e-mail address are almost five times more likely to convert to a paid, premium-level membership than those with a Hotmail.com e-mail address. An online dating website Disclosing permanent or primary e-mail accounts reveals a longer-term intention. Banner ads affect you more than you think. Although you may feel you've learned to ignore them, people who see a merchant's banner ad are 61 percent more likely to subsequently perform a related search, and this drives a 249 percent increase in clicks on the merchant's paid textual ads in the search results. Yahoo! Advertising exerts a subconscious effect. Companies win by not prompting customers to think. Contacting actively engaged customers can backfire—direct mailing financial service customers who have already opened several accounts decreases the chances they will open more accounts (more details in Chapter 7).

Fucking politicians, my daughter’s Barbie doll has more balls.

This story is dedicated to brains: the forgotten victims in all zombie tales.     This story is not for normal children.  If you have any intention of raising a well adjusted child, this is not the right tale for you.  This story is written for children who giggle madly while ripping the heads off of Barbie dolls.