by M. G. Lord
Vaginal Davis, a poet, drag queen, and self-described "Blacktress," with the bearing of Norma Desmond and the seeming height (in heels) of Michael Jordan, also acknowledges a debt to the doll. As a child, Davis used Barbie and her friends to project herself beyond boundaries of gender and class, to invent the "woman" she is today. "Growing up in the inner city I wasn't a part of what you might call 'society,' " she told me. "And I always thought that I was born in the wrong social sphere—the wrong social class. I should have been a debutante. I should have been going to a Seven Sisters school. I should have been jet-setting to Milan and dining with heads of state and living a very Audrey Hepburn sort of life—far from my life in the projects, in Watts." Although she couldn't afford authentic Mattel outfits, she made clothes out of found objects and scrap materials—ball gowns and coronation dresses—inspired by her other childhood fascination: English royalty.
Some say drag queens perpetuate demeaning stereotypes of women; others argue that by caricaturing stereotypes of gender, they subvert them. What's interesting about both positions is the assumption that "femininity" is something quite different from actually being a woman, just as "masculinity" has little to do with actually being a man.
These days, for human beings, gender identity can be something of a morass. Nearly two decades ago, in an essay on "Primary Femininity," psychiatrist Robert Stoller used the term "core gender identity" to refer to a child's concrete sense of his or her sex. Stoller took into consideration the fact that the biological sex of a child and its gender were not always the same. Developmental geneticists had discovered that without some exposure to fetal androgens, anatomical maleness could not occur—even in a child with XY chromosomes. Likewise, with the wrong sort of exposure to fetal androgens, a fetus with XX chromosomes would develop as an anatomical male. Then there were the hermaphrodites for whom sex assignment at birth was completely arbitrary. For those of you who are counting, we are up to five sexes now. But because society only recognizes two, children who were not clearly boys or girls were nonetheless placed in one of those categories. And, ideally, their "core gender identity" developed in accordance with the decision that the attending physician made in the delivery room.
Today, the trendier gender theorists argue that the assignment of gender is by definition imprecise. Because of the limitations of the binary system, all gendering is "drag." "Drag constitutes the mundane way in which genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn, done," Judith Butler writes in "Imitation and Gender Insubordination." "Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original," she argues. What the so-called genders imitate is a "phantasmic ideal of heterosexual identity."
Regardless of whether this "ideal of heterosexual identity" is "phantasmic" in people, however, it seems pretty real in Barbie and Ken—or maybe Barbie and G.I. Joe, since Ken, in response to research showing that pronounced male secondary sex characteristics scare little girls, has lost his macho edge. 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.
Heterosexual men use pornographic renderings of the Barbie archetype for sexual fantasies, just as children use the actual doll for make-believe. Although Barbie looks like an adult, children wield power over her—in much the same way that a male viewer, through projected fantasy, wields power over the female object in a pornographic image. In her short story "A Real Doll," A. M. Homes picks the scab off this relationship and probes it through the musings of her narrator, a boy who is "dating" his sister's Barbie. This involves making the doll complicit in his autoerotic escapades—"the secret habits that seem normal enough to us, but which we know better than to mention out loud." Rape her, fondle her, feed her Valium. Masturbate into the hollow body of her boyfriend. Barbie will never squeal.
In writing the story, Homes was interested not only in the doll, but in "what it means to be a 'good girl' or 'good boy' at that really odd moment when no matter how hard you try, you can't," she told me. "Because you're coming into a sort of sexual life and it seems inescapably perverse—no matter what you do."
Although Homes was aware of the doll as a child in Chevy Chase, Maryland, it was not central to her life. "I grew up in one of those families where we didn't have guns or dolls or anything," she said. "My parents' idea of a good gift would be a blank piece of paper. If it could have been Marxist Barbie, it probably would have been fine. But Barbie symbolized all the wrong things."
Homes bought her first Barbie while a graduate student at the University of Iowa. When she displayed it above her fireplace, she found visitors could not resist undressing it. "These were adult people coming into my home, immediately going to my mantel and taking off the doll's clothing," she said. "Men, women, whatever came in the door. And I thought: Why are they doing this? And they would proceed to then tell me all the horrible things that they had done to Barbie as a child—sort of abusing her in my presence. People were telling me how they chewed her feet off, they took her head off. And I told them: You're maniacs."
But the anecdotes stayed with her, as did Barbie's powerlessness. In "A Real Doll," she contrasts the difference between a boy's perception of the doll and a girl's. The boy is comfortable with Barbie's foreignness and objectification; the girl, who compares Barbie unfavorably with herself, is not— and she retaliates by mutilating the doll. Not all little girls gravitate as naturally to Barbie's "feminine" affectations and "traditional sexual power" as did Dian Hanson or the Lady Bunny. "We live in a world where it's hard to be a person and a girl," Homes told me. "When I put on high heels— number one, I've actually broken my leg just trying to walk in the things. But I become a very different person. Because I can't even cross a room as Amy Homes. All of a sudden, I'm crossing as Amy Homes, Girl.
"Men think they would like a real-life Barbie, but if they met her, they wouldn't want to go near her," Homes elaborated. "She'd be seven feet tall and she'd be too scary." Playboy's 1991 photo spread on the "Barbi Twins," however, suggests otherwise. Photographed wallowing in wet sand on Maui, the pair—who call themselves Shane and Sia—are a bizarre assemblage of anatomical components, notably four gargantuan breasts that, proportionately, are even larger than the doll's. Former belly dancers with slim hips that would look right at home on a fourteen-year-old boy, the two actually described themselves to Newsday as "truckdrivers in drag." Although Playboy presents them with its characteristic earnestness, there is something almost laugh-aloud funny about their mismatched body parts. And, to their credit, they seem both to have understood and exploited the fact that they are walking errors in scale. First they named themselves after an eleven-and-a-half-inch doll; then, in 1989, posted giant photos of themselves on a billboard over Sunset Boulevard. It was as if Barbie, the ultimate controllable object, got her revenge by starring in Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman. Or perhaps I should say "Barbi"—their e disappeared after objections from Mattel.
Evidence suggests that the doll themes that excite heterosexual men are not of equal interest to lesbians. In 1989, when On Our Backs published photos of a Barbie-like doll used as a dildo, readers protested. "Is this what you call erotic?" one less-than-euphemistic reader began. "Barbie is the ugliest piece of shit to come out of Amerikan factories." Fantasies involving scale, power, and, well, brand penetration would appear to be principally male.
Grown men amusing themselves with adult female dolls is not new in the history of fetishism, which, as Louise J. Kaplan has explained, "involves using deadened and dehumanized objects as a substitute for living, excited persons." The German Lilli doll is part of an international tradition of pornographic miniatures. Mascot Models, an English firm, currently markets six-inch replicas of naked women with detailed genitalia in the sort of hobby shops that sell model trains, boats, and airplanes. The "girls," which often come with boots
or whips, can be assembled with "thick superglue or five-minute epoxy" and (oral fetishists beware!) are made of metal parts containing lead. Far safer to gnaw upon are the Japanese-made miniatures of Caucasian women in bondage that artist David Levinthal used in his 1991 series of photographs called Desire. Available by mail order only, they come in chains, ropes, and leather gags; their legs splayed or trussed up like a dead deer's. One even hangs on a cross. Like their English counterparts, the dolls must be glued together and painted.
There is even a historical interface between soft pornographic miniatures and the toy industry. When Louis Marx ran Marx Toys, he produced several limited editions of "American Beauties"—six-inch plastic nude or seminude female figures that he handed out as gag gifts to his friends. 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.
For subscribers to Dian Hanson's Leg Show, however, Barbie has lost none of the Lilli doll's fetishistic appeal. When Hanson invited her readers to comment on Barbie, many replied—the most eloquent of which was a rural New England foot fetishist who wished to be identified only as "Resident." Part Russ Meyer, part Jonathan Swift, his fantasy, if filmed, might be titled Barbie Does Brobdingnag.
"Barbie's legs are the most noteworthy feature of her whole body," his letter begins. "I've spent hours caressing them and examining them, kissing them and sucking them. I've found that their form and shape closely resemble real women's legs. They are warm to the touch and bend in much the same manner as the human leg does, with the curvature of the calf becoming more round when the knee is bent." Barbie, he feels "lacks only three human features: 1) leg and foot scent, 2) a rounded heel and 3) digits for toes.
"I have an incredibly strong sex drive and realized long ago that most women either don't understand or take seriously my love of their legs and feet," he explains. "I ended up being left out in the cold all the time— lonely, depressed and frustrated. Thus the Barbie doll is important to me. I can play out my sexual fantasies with the kind of woman I want in real life. I can dress her and undress her any way I want. Her elegant legs can be posed in a variety of positions. My favorite is with her back leaning against a pillow, legs bent slightly at the knee with her two hands holding onto her thigh, which may be raised up as if she were massaging it. . . .
"If they made a life-size, realistic, fully functional Barbie doll I would probably marry it," he goes on. "I have grown to love Barbie as if she were a real woman and I envy 'Ken' with a passion. Why Mattel hooked her up with such a John Doe is beyond me. Hooking sweet and beautiful Barbie up with a guy ruins the magic.
"I don't buy any of the bad press that's attributed to the Barbie doll and her image," he concludes. "Jealous people always make false accusations about things that they feel inferior to."
While I would not have expressed it in a sentence ending in a preposition, I can understand "Resident"'s indignation. It must be burdensome, when you have an intense emotional relationship to a thing, to endure the callous, uncomprehending remarks of people. Or to yearn, as Bly puts it, for a "Woman with the Golden Hair," and end up stuck with . . . a woman.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
OUR BARBIES, OUR SELVES
Midway through my interview with Jan, a thirty-three-year-old business writer who lives in New York City, she asked me not to use her real name. For her, to talk about Barbie was to talk about her mother. It was to recall her disquietude on the eve of puberty. Jan had learned firsthand how a young woman's feelings about her changing body and awakening sexuality can be poisoned by a parent. And she had learned this wordlessly—through a doll.
In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir notes that in both French and English, a "doll" is a female adult, and "to doll up" means to don fussy, feminine clothes. This, she feels, is more than a linguistic coincidence. Not only men but also women objectify women, and they begin by objectifying themselves. A woman "is taught that to please she must try to please," Beauvoir writes. "She must make herself object; she should therefore renounce her autonomy. She is treated like a live doll and refused liberty. Thus a vicious circle is formed; for the less she exercises her freedom . . . the less she will dare to affirm herself as a subject." Clearly, this objectification existed long before Barbie, but it may have fresh meaning in the post-Barbie world.
It certainly does for Jan, an Asian American who was born in South Korea and adopted by a German-American mother and an Italian-American father. Jan spent her childhood in Orange County, California, and graduated from high school and college in Indiana, where she managed to be both "popular" and smart—a pom-pom girl who was an honor student and the editor of the school newspaper.
Jan's first encounter with "the whole Barbie phenomenon" took place in California in 1965. "I must have been five or six," she told me. "That year, for Christmas, I got a Skipper doll and a little forty-five of Gary Lewis and the Playboys' 'She's My Girl,' and all day I had Skipper bouncing around to this song. She was a dark-haired Skipper, and she very much had that sixties look—eyeliner and little bangs and long hair. I thought Skipper was the end-all and be-all of the earth, until I phoned one of my friends to compare gifts. She started talking about how she had gotten this Barbie, which was a much different kind of doll. And I immediately felt rooked—why had I gotten the little sister? Why hadn't I gotten the star of the show?"
Jan's adoptive mother argued that the younger doll was closer in age to Jan. But, Jan recalled, "It made me feel in playing with other girls that I didn't have what it took. Because all I had was a Skipper, I could never really get into the whole dating thing. I could never have this rich fantasy life—meet a man, have romantic love. I was always relegated to being the little sister."
Nor did Jan's identification with Skipper end when she outgrew dolls. "I have never felt particularly pretty or attractive or sexually interesting. I have always thought that I was more like, not a little sister, but an androgynous person."
This was not the revelation I had expected from Jan—chic, downtown Jan in her stylish black suits and crimson lipstick—who had competed in beauty contests as a teenager. I had expected her to talk about racial identification: how it felt for an Asian American to play with a doll that coded Caucasian standards of beauty. But all Jan wanted to discuss was Barbie's voluptuousness.
"Barbie always looms," Jan said. "That sort of ideal looms—and other women have it. Other women possessed these dolls; other women learned the secret. Maybe this is taking this Barbie thing too far, but I feel like other women had a certain kind of girl experience that I didn't—that they understood something about being sort of seductive and perky that I didn't get. I was always kind of a gal-along-for-the-ride, never feeling I could identify with the Marilyn-Jayne Mansfield-Barbie character."
By withholding Barbie, Jan believes, her mother deliberately tried to stunt her sexual development. And it nearly worked: Despite her cheerleader looks, she projected so much standoffishness that she scared boys away. It wasn't until she was eighteen that she had her first date. Fortunately, her father, an engineer who wore Vargas Girl cuff links and joked about "va-va-va-voom actresses," projected a different message. "My mother was a very threatened person," Jan said. "Because she was very unattractive. And my father was quite handsome. I think she felt threatened by me sexually—by any woman who was attractive.
"You know what dolls my mother did give me?" Jan suddenly blurted. "Trolls! I never had a Barbie house but I had a troll house. I was thinking: Is this what she wants me to identify with—these horrible things with purple hair?"
Today, no one observing Jan and her handsome husband—"a cross between Jeff Bridges and Jeff Daniels," she says—would suspect that she had a Skipper Complex. Yet just as I will never quite shake the legacy of Midge, Jan has been forever burdened with Skipper. Jan, however, doesn't scapegoat the doll; in therapy, she learned to distinguish between the message and its messenger.
That distinction, however
, has increasingly begun to blur. The Barbie doll has become so synonymous with female sexuality that at Sierra Tucson, a trendy Arizona substance abuse clinic, women in treatment for "sex addiction" are required to carry one with them at all times. Lugging around Barbie, Alethea Savile explained in London's Daily Mail, forces them to reflect constantly on their objectified sexual selves.
Nor is it news that people connect Barbie's oddly proportioned body to adolescent eating disorders. According to a group of researchers at University Central Hospital in Helsinki, Finland, if Barbie were a real woman she'd be so lean she wouldn't be able to menstruate. Her narrow hips and concave stomach would lack the 17 to 22 percent body fat required for a woman to have regular periods—and a failure to menstruate is one of the symptoms of anorexia nervosa, a condition of self-starvation that principally afflicts young women. Significantly, though, Barbie isn't alone in her emaciation. The same researchers found that beginning in the fifties, when Barbie was introduced, life-size department-store clothes mannequins began to be made with the appearance of 10 percent body fat. Mannequins from the 1920s, by contrast, were stouter: Were they suddenly made flesh, they would have no trouble getting their periods.
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. "The body of the Ceres in the Vatican Sala Rotunda is visibly distorted in some dimensions for the sake of displaying the clothes to advantage, rather than the other way around," Anne Hollander notes in Seeing Through Clothes, and she doesn't exaggerate. The statue's giant breasts seem to sprout from its shoulders, and there is room for a breast and a half between them. Nor was such distortion unusual in classical sculpture. "The identical body without the dress would look somewhat awkward, whereas a perfectly proportioned body could not wear such a fully draped costume without looking swamped and bunchy," Hollander says of the Ceres. The same could be said of Barbie.