by M. G. Lord
At first, Hanson would sneak off to friends' houses to play with their Barbies. But after about a year or so, when owning the dolls didn't appear to have any ill effects on her cousins, her mother caved in and gave her one.
"When I got Barbie, it was like my parents had given me heroin," Hanson said. 'The first thing I did was strip all her clothes off and marvel at her breasts and feel her breasts and look at her body and those tiny arched feet and the whorishly arched eyebrows and the solid thick eyelashes and the earrings that stuck straight into her head." She paused. "They were pins. It was very exciting to me to pull the earrings in and out. I did it to the point that they just fell out after a while."
Hanson usually played with Barbie in the company of her younger brother, who became a cross-dresser and committed suicide in his twenties. "I was supposed to play with my sister but we didn't get along. My brother was more appreciative of Barbie's sexuality . . . I had Barbie and Midge, and we used to parade them around naked in their high heels. We painted nipples on them one day to make them more realistic. And we were mortified that we couldn't get the paint off. So my parents were going to know that we had sexualized the dolls."
Nevertheless, because of the rituals of their religion, her parents' idea of "sexual repression" was not what everyone would consider repressive. Her father, a chiropractor and "naturopath," practiced nudism, and her mother gave birth to the children at home. "It was a sexually charged household," Hanson said.
"I lived out my own emerging sexual fantasies with Barbie," she continued. "I only wanted the sexy clothes, and my mother wouldn't give them to me. She bought me childish clothes—a blue corduroy jumper. We'd put Barbie in it without the blouse and the breasts would show. The two outfits that I coveted—and saved up money for, and had to fight with my mother over—were both strapless: the pink satin evening gown that fit real tight. It could barely go over her legs it was so tight. And you could pull her top down. The other one was the gold lame strapless sheath dress with a zipper up the back.
"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."
Hanson used Barbie to imagine her idealized future self, which in her case meant an object of male desire. "Barbie was an adult woman whom I could examine," she said. "And I wanted very much to be Barbie." 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 man, Barbie was mean." Likewise, Sharon Stone's thoughts in Vanity Fair suggested an autobiographical episode: "If you look at any little girl's Barbie, she's taken a ballpoint pen and she's drawn pubic hair on it."
Hanson left home at seventeen and became a respiratory therapist. After a bad first marriage, she found herself divorced in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where she met a man who was starting a sex magazine called Puritan. "I started working on that magazine and it was like a dream come true, to get to be a pornographer," she effused. "I wanted to be appreciated in that way. I used to be a provocative dresser. I was very promiscuous. I'd wear hot pants and see-through blouses and things like that. But as I've gotten older and more successful in my career, looking a certain way doesn't worry me anymore. And I'm grateful—because there's nothing worse than being forty-one years old and still needing that kind of attention."
What Hanson learned in her odyssey through the porn world was "traditional sexual power"; she internalized the visual coding of the early Barbies—a way of presenting herself so that, as she saw it, she was sexually in control. "I could make men love me—I could make men want to see me and be with me and stay with me because I was a great lay," she said. "Men really will stay with a woman and love a woman if she's very sexy. It's exactly the opposite of what my parents told me." Hanson has, in a way, realized the Barbie fantasy, the girl-version of the American Dream. She has a steady boyfriend, a place in the city, a getaway in the country, and a lucrative job that she loves.
Significantly, Hanson scorns the face of the current Barbie. Much of the original doll's "traditional sexual power" emanated from its heavy-lidded, almost vampiric gaze—the "aggressive eye of the gorgon," as Camille Paglia has put it, "that turns men into stone."
"That is the most powerful eye," Paglia told me. "It is far more powerful than the 'male gaze,' which, as defined by feminism, is simply a tool by which men maintain their power in society. A woman lying on a bed with her legs open is not in a subordinate position. She is in a position of total luxury, like an empress: 'Serve me and die'—essentially that. . . . That very sultry and seductive woman seems half asleep, but what is awake is her eye." And it is the eye that implicitly draws the male observer to the woman—at his peril. The eye "hypnotizes you; it paralyzes you; it puts you under a spell."
Some, however, feel that the characterization of women as vampires in art and myths has less to do with women's real nature and more to do with how the men who created the art and myths perceived them. Even when they are well into adulthood, boys still fear and dread Mom for the power that she once held over them—and they extend that fear to all women, demonizing them into a lethal army of femmes fatales. Men "create folk legends, beliefs and poems that ward off the dread by externalizing and objectifying women," Chodorow writes. Yet regardless of whether the vampiric female gaze is an objective fact or a metaphorical construct, it is a recurring theme in the history of male heterosexual desire. And it is as crucial as Barbie's breasts in understanding why straight men slaver over flesh-and-blood versions of the doll.
Male heterosexual desire, however, is not shaped by boyhood experiences alone. It is influenced by what the culture designates as "erotic"—not merely pornographic nudes, but artistic ones. A nude, by definition, should arouse in the viewer "some vestige of erotic feeling," Kenneth Clark writes.
Historically, society has eroticized particular female body types at particular times. In Seeing Through Clothes, Anne Hollander shows how from ancient statues to modern photographs, the look of the unclothed figure has been influenced by the fashions of its day. Today, artists sexualize the female breasts and buttocks, but from medieval times until the seventeenth century, bellies were all the rage: whether a painting's subject was a virgin or a courtesan, she could not have too big a tummy. Likewise, the mega-mammaries that men pant over in Bust Out! were in the 1500s considered abhorrent, and usually featured on witches and hags. It wasn't until the mid-nineteenth century, when women cinched in their waists with corsets, that commodious breasts became alluring, in, for instance, paintings by Gustave Courbet and Eugene Delacroix.
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. Just as G.I.'s pined over chesty pinups, they also thirsted for milk—and those on the front lines craved it more than those stationed near home. If one makes a link between the meanings of milk and its infantile source, the top-heavy, hourglass shape of postwar fashion that Dior introduced with his "New Look" wasn't solely about hobbling women so that they would retreat from the workplace. It was about meeting the returning troops' profound psychological needs.
Barbie's absent nipples also comment on the extent to which those body parts have been eroticized in American culture. As a clothes mannequin, Barbie has no functional need of nipples; yet their omission is critical to establishing her sexual "innocence" and suitability for children. "So long as only the upper parts of the breasts are exposed, and the balance hidden, no sexual excitement is produced and no shock is administered to modern morality," Lawrence Langer observes in The Importance of
Wearing Clothes. "But let the nipples fall out and panic ensues!"
Barbie's combination of voluptuous body and wholesome image was precisely what Hugh Hefner sought in models for Playboy, which he founded in 1953. Although such classic pinups as Jayne Mansfield and Bettie Page appeared in the magazine's earliest issues, Hefner's ideal Playmate was the girl next door—a member of a sorority house, not a house of ill repute. She was a girl who looked, as David Halberstam put it in The Fifties, as if she'd "stopped off to do a Playboy shoot on her way to cheerleading practice." But although Hef's paradigm was a "good girl," she was—like Barbie—not on the prowl for a husband. Before his recent reconversion to marriage, Hef's longtime girlfriend was Barbie Benton.
"Something I've thought about with Playboy and the Playmates is that they're women who are not really procreative females," Hanson observed. "They have very narrow hips, very boyish figures, big false breasts and they're Playmates, not wives. So a man can escape the reality of his childbearing wife. There's no possibility of her getting pregnant." The large breasts also encourage men to recall the scale of breasts in infancy. Hence, too, the look of infertility: Men dread fathering a rival.
Mattel claims Barbie's hair is long because of children's fascination with "hairplay." But ever since Milton's portrait of Eve in Paradise Lost, with her "golden tresses" falling "in wanton ringlets" to her waist, long hair has been part of the arsenal of seduction. Marian the Librarian must shake loose her spinsterish bun before she can be seen as enticing. "Long-haired models and messy-haired models are always more popular," Hanson explained. "If men want submissive women, they prefer them to be blond. If they want dominant women, they want them to be dark-haired. But in general they want lots and lots of hair.
"Sometimes I'll use women with very short hair in Leg Show because a lot of my readers feel so inferior and believe so much in female superiority that they don't think there should be any women who have sex with men," she continued. "They want them all to be lesbians." She handed me some photos. "Here's 'The Secret Sex Lives of Real Dykes'—a real lesbian couple in France who are posing. One of the women is older, non-made-up, rough-looking. And men can fantasize that they're lesbians, which a lot of them wish they were."
Body hair, however, is perceived as repellent, Hanson said, "except by the small groups of men who want them furry like apes." Like the nude female statues of ancient Greece, Barbie has no pubic fleece; but that's not, as in the case of the statues, a reflection of women's actual appearance. The average contemporary woman, unlike her archaic counterpart, does not depilate herself. Until recently, a nude rendered without pubic hair was considered arty, its opposite raunchy and obscene. But Playboy's love affair with the airbrush ended that. Its models may not be fully defoliated, but they are certainly pruned.
Because of the historical association of hair with sexual power and passion, John Berger thinks that the absence of body hair, particularly in pornographic female subjects, is a way of making the male viewer more comfortable. The viewer doesn't want to satisfy a symbolically voracious woman; he wants a woman to satisfy him. It's hard not to pity John Ruskin for having been born too soon. Had he come of age when women aped Barbie and, by extension, Greek sculptures, he might have managed to consummate his marriage, instead of being revolted by the sight of his wife's pubic hair.
Although the original Barbie's scarlet talons no longer connote wealth, they still mean power. "Nails are very erotic," Hanson said. "There are men who like ragged nails because that indicates a rough nature—a woman who might drag them off to her lair and devour them. Others prefer short nails because they represent youth."
Barbie's firm, showgirl bottom was perhaps underappreciated when she first appeared. In the 1990s, however, with breast implants criticized as both life-threatening and fake-looking—attributes oddly cast as equal in their undesirability—"buns of steel" have been anointed by such arbiters as Allure and W as today's status symbol. As with the postwar breast boom, it was not ever thus. In the 1730s, the idealized female body curved at its sides but not at its front or back. "The figure was almost like roadkill, it was so flat," Richard Martin, director of the Costume Institute at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, told Allure. Next derrieres were veiled by layers of clothes. It wasn't until the advent of the miniskirt in the 1960s that the female hindquarters became an official object of desire. To achieve what Allure terms a "thumpable melon butt," a woman must not only firm her gluteus maximus, but (a la Barbie) wear high heels, which tilt the rear end as much as 20 percent. This tilt arouses a man's inner ape. When female chimpanzees are in heat, their genitals swell, and, as a seductive gesture, they angle their behinds in the direction of their mates.
"Older men and men who are looking for mates and for love relationships want bottom-heavy women," Hanson agreed. But Barbie-generation men prefer that effect to be achieved bionically. "Lip jobs, butt jobs, tummy tucks, and boob jobs" are no longer sufficient to qualify for a job in porn; the latest trend is "customized" genitalia. "I understand in L.A. it's fashionable among the young porn models to get collagen injections in their labia to make them look more swollen and excited," she said.
The fashion for exaggerated depictions of sex, however, is not confined to pornography. In mainstream movies, soulful lovemaking has given way to strenuous gymnastics—"iibersex," Walter Kirn calls it—the erotic act interpreted as a cartoon car chase. Ubersex is what occurs between human-Barbie Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct. It is rigorous, yet tidy—a mating of mannequins, "taking the basic Ken-and-Barbie poses familiar to naughty ten-year-olds and heaping on Playboy-approved perversions," Kirn writes in Mirabella. It is also utterly humorless.
Watching Stone and the other dolls in Basic Instinct, I thought of Jack Ryan and his R&D team in the 1960s, who eased some of their creative tension by playing pranks and shooting one another with water pistols. They also did what engineer Derek Gable and others have characterized as "a lot of racy stuff" with Barbie and Ken— modifying their anatomy and staging X-rated puppet shows. It's not surprising that imaginative grown men with senses of humor joked that way with the dolls. What is extraordinary, though, is that thirty years later their ribald gags would wind up in the movies, presented as everyday lovemaking.
One does not have to be female to affect Barbie's exaggerated "feminine" look, which may be part of its appeal. Before The Crying Game, a movie whose most beguiling "female" character isn't biologically female, one might have been hard pressed to argue that drag queens have a more profound understanding of "femininity" than do biological women. But merely possessing an XX chromosome does not guarantee a mastery of (or a desire to master) the stylized conventions of "femininity." The "feminine" signals that say come hither to heterosexual men can be affected by persons of any gender; they have also been in large part invented for women by gay men. "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. The doll is built like a transvestite, with broad shoulders, narrow hips, and huge breasts. Significantly, in the late eighties and early nineties—when Barbie sales rocketed—the fashion industry worked hard to make the idealized female body that of a drag queen. Designers like Jean-Paul Gaultier (whom we have to thank for the torpedo brassiere Madonna wore outside her clothes on her Blonde Ambition tour) and Stephen Sprouse were among the first to use male transvestites, such as Terri Toye, a Barbie-esque blonde, to model women's clothes. Other designers followed: Todd Oldham employed Billy Erb, Kalinka engaged Zaldy Soco, and Thierry Mugler brought out Connie Girl—a striking black "woman" who is also a Barbie collector. Race is no impediment to copying Barbie: between his platinum wig and steep heels, black transvestite recor
ding artist Ru-Paul—who, as a child, excised the breasts from his Barbie dolls and, more recently, reported on the introduction of Mattel's Shani doll for the BBC—does a good imitiation.
So does the Lady Bunny, the drag queen who organized "Wigstock," an annual transgender Woodstock-type festival that takes place in New York's East Village. She feels that the look of the early Barbies—the ones she knew as a little boy in Chattanooga, Tennessee—had a significant impact on her style. "I loved the shiny hair," she told me, "which is a kind of cheap wig hair. It's not meant to look natural, it's meant to look brassy and showbizzy. Which is a look I try to get—I love the wigs with the big bumps in the back." Size-twelve, Barbie-style mules also assist her trompe l'oeil; they lengthen her legs and curve their calves, making them appear more "feminine." If the shoes are a little small and the heel hangs over, that's okay, she explained. The overhang is called a "biscuit."
When she was a child, her parents were reluctant to buy her a Barbie; they feared it might affect her gender identification. When they eventually relented, she used the doll to puzzle out the components of "femininity," or "the tricks of the trade," as she calls them. She is still envious of the effortlessness with which the doll pulls off certain hard-to-achieve effects. "It's so easy for her to work those evening capes with the crinkled taffeta," she said. Had I only spoken to her while she was in drag, I might not have appreciated the extent to which her "look" was "worked," or been viscerally struck by how artificial the cues that telegraphed "feminine" were. When we made a date for tea, I had expected to interview her stage persona— a Barbie doll with a sweet southern drawl. But she met me as her offstage persona—a clean-cut young man wearing blue jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, the image of Ron Howard in American Graffiti.