Malibu Barbie Quotes

And what was with Malibu Barbie?” Angie asked. “A girl could strain something looking that happy all the time.

This near-mediocrity carried its own special kind of boredom, an almost polished, plastic kind reminiscent of a Malibu Barbie dollhouse. It appears shiny and neat, but really you are trapped for eternity, looking out at a world with a smile that feels like someone else painted on you, rather than your own. I wasn’t Ken. But more like Ken’s decent looking friend, Bill.

One of the other firemen joined us. His damp T-shirt clung to a stomach that had required far too many sit-ups, but I enjoyed the view anyway. He was tall, broad-shouldered, blond, and looked like he should have been carrying a surfboard or visiting Barbie in her Malibu dream house. There was a smear of soot on his smiling face, and his eyes were red-rimmed. He offered his hand without being introduced. “I’m Wren.” No rank, just his name. Confident. He held my hand just a little longer than necessary. It wasn’t obnoxious, just interested. I dropped my eyes. Not out of shyness, but because some men mistake direct eye contact as a come-on. I had about as much beefcake on my plate as I could handle without adding amorous firemen. Captain

I’m guessing you didn’t choose Malibu Barbie

You were . . . Malibu Barbie. Now you’re Barbara Bush.” “Barbara Bush is an honorable woman. She did . . . good stuff.” “She was boring and dowdy. You are not that.

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.

He suddenly felt like he was a thousand miles from Berkeley, in some kind of alternate reality where beautiful people sat sipping martinis at sunset and went to art shows and jogged along the waterfront and had casual sex with other martini-drinking beautiful people. A world where there were no Malibu Barbie beach houses and plastic dinosaurs to bang into in the night, no mismatched shoes five minutes before school, no debates about how all the bath water wound up on the bathroom floor or who let the dog chew up the couch cushions.

I never learned to pretend to be Malibu Barbie I think I'd really rather be Malibu Barbie

I think she looks like a sunburned Malibu Barbie dipped in Cheetos dust.