by M. G. Lord
The controversy over Barbie's thinness heated up in 1991, when High Self Esteem Toys of Woodbury, Minnesota, introduced "Happy To Be Me," a doll whose measurements were alleged to be more "realistic" than you-know-who's. Abetted by a tenacious PR firm, Cathy Meredig, Happy's developer, took her crusade to the press. Two percent of girls in the United States become anorexic at some point in their lives, she explained to The New York Times, 15 percent become bulimic, and 70 percent view themselves as fat. "I honestly believe if we have enough children playing with a responsibly proportioned doll that we can raise a generation of girls that feels comfortable with the way they look," she told The Washington Post.
And the press embraced her. From Allure to People, pro-Happy pieces sprang up like dandelions in a summer lawn. The vice president of the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders in Highland Park, Illinois, called Happy "a much-needed development." Yet by 1994, Happy was virtually history. Mothers may have told reporters, "Wow! A doll with hips and a waist," but they bought Barbie.
Meredig blames Happy's poor showing on Mattel's "stranglehold on distribution channels," which, given the way it snuffed out competitors like Hasbro's Jem, may have some truth. But it strikes me that Meredig is fighting something far larger than a toy company—even one big enough to be listed among the Fortune 500. One of the clippings in Meredig's own press kit confirms that Barbie doesn't instigate but merely reflects society's notions of beauty. Photocopied alongside a Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune article on Happy is the giant ad printed next to it—for "Southlake Hypnosis," a weight-loss clinic in Edina, Minnesota. "I just lost 30 pounds and I feel terrific," the ad says in type larger than Happy's headline. "Now I can wear a two-piece swimsuit!"
Meredig claims to have based Happy on the Venus de Milo, but her classical allusion masks an ignorance of the historical relationship between the sculpted figure and its drapery. The Venus, as Hollander points out, may have ended up armless by chance, but she was "legless by design"—and without the heavy folds obscuring her stumpy legs, even her contemporaries would have thought her dowdy. By contrast, 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.
Because fabric of a proportionally diminished gauge could not be woven on existing looms, something else had to be pared down—and that something was Barbie's figure. One wonders how Meredig could have failed to notice the glaring incongruity between the scale of human-sized cloth and that of its miniature wearer. Or did Meredig so obsess on the naked doll that she forgot that girls were supposed to dress it?
Even in the raw, however, Happy leaves much to be desired. She is so cheaply manufactured that she makes Barbie look like an heirloom. When I handled an actual Happy doll, the first thing I noticed were not its measurements ("36-27-38" to a fashion doll's "36-18-33," Meredig's press materials said), but its receding hairline. Its hair sprang out of its head in widely scattered clumps, as if its balding pate, like that of a desperate middle-aged man, had been reforested with plugs. Then there was the hair's creepy texture. Whatever else one may say about Barbie, her hair feels like hair. It is made out of Kanekalon, a fiber used for human wigs, which Mattel designer Joe Cannizzaro arranged to have extruded in lengths long enough to meet the requirements of the sewing machines used on doll heads.
In appealing to educated, aesthetically minded parents concerned about body image, Meredig seemingly forgot how snobbish such parents can be about cheesy toys. Even Roland Barthes, who rhapsodized about plastic's versatility, turned up his nose at plastic playthings. Such toys, he said, lack "the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch" that their wooden counterparts possess—fancy words to express a plain old "prejudice" against them, suggests psychologist and Toys as Culture author Brian Sutton-Smith.
Nor is it as if Happy had no impact on Barbie. Ever watchful of its competitors, Mattel has included some very Happy-esque modifications on the dolls in its 1994 line. These include Gymnast Barbie, a doll with flat feet (like Happy's) that can stand without support, and Bedtime Barbie, a stuffed doll with a plastic head that I predict will be a favorite with mothers. Far from being a sexpot with a wardrobe from Victoria's Secret, Bedtime Barbie wears a frowzy flannel housecoat and fuzzy slippers. She is Slattern Barbie, Cellulite Barbie—a doll with thick ankles, sagging breasts, and squishy thighs—as unthreatening to Mom as Roseanne Arnold before her surgery.
But even if Meredig had produced an aesthetically pleasing doll—one that didn't wear chalk-colored, Dusty Springfield lipstick or require Rogaine—she still probably wouldn't have dethroned Barbie. For a kid, being stuck by Mom with a Happy is a lot like being stuck with a Skipper— or perhaps worse, since while Skipper may not be sexually mature, she at least conforms to societal norms of attractiveness. And those norms are, of course, at the center of this fuss: In a world where women's bodies are objectified and commodified, is it better for a girl to aspire to an arbitrary standard of "perfection" or to avoid disappointment by keeping her standards low?
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." Ken, by contrast, was not urged to starve. His pajamas came with a sweet roll and a glass of milk.
THERE IS NO WAY TO AVOID PLUNGING INTO THE EATING disorder wars here, because for some, Barbie is a symbol of them. I say "wars" because experts disagree on why many women succumb to destructive, diet-related behaviors and others don't. I should say up front that I never had an eating disorder. As a teen, I was neither fat nor thin. I saw skinny models in Vogue and Mademoiselle, but never once thought of missing a meal. This doesn't mean I can't empathize with the many women for whom eating involves more than the mere slaking of hunger. But in high school, I was too preoccupied with homework, swim-team practice, and the domestic responsibilities that fell to me after my mother's death to evolve rituals around food.
To puzzle out why I had escaped the dietary scourges that afflicted many of my contemporaries—and to determine whether Barbie might have had a small manicured hand in inducing such blights—I interviewed therapists who treat anorexics, bulimics, and compulsive eaters. I read Kim Chernin, Susie Orbach, Louise J. Kaplan, and Naomi Wolf. And what I found were contradictions. In Female Perversions, Kaplan interprets anorexia not as a movement toward an idealized Barbie body, but as a flight from it. The anorexic transforms herself through emaciation into a sort of "third sex," liberated from menstruation and covered with a downy, masculine fuzz. "Behind [the anorexic's] caricature of an obedient, virtuous, clean, submissive, good little girl is a most defiant, ambitious, driven, dominating, controlling virile caricature of masculinity," Kaplan writes.
There is no universal consensus on why women become obsessed with dieting. One group of theorists views the problem as the result of a conspiracy. Now more than ever, the evil media have enshrined freakishly thin models who make normal-sized women feel like hippopotami. Another camp says, "So what?" As long as people have lived in communities, there have been community "standards of beauty" which, by definition, have been both arbitrary and hard to meet. Yet another group says it isn't the standards of beauty, but the importance a young girl places on them, which is a reflection of how her family feels about them and the degree to which her family encourages nonconformity. If Mom is so threatened by her daughter's chubbiness that she ships the girl off to a kiddie fat farm, the daughter may develop a l
ifelong neurosis about food. Likewise, if Dad makes clear that only slender women are sexually desirable, his daughter may obsess on appearing slender.
One theme, however, recurs in much of the diet-disorder literature: Mothers are involved in how daughters view their bodies. "While it might be hard to imagine the subtle transactions that occur around feeding in infancy, they are obvious during adolescence when the young woman's body changes precipitate a whole range of reactions around the family dinner table," Susie Orbach explains in Hunger Strike: The Anorectic's Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age. Mothers frequently encourage their teenage daughters to eat differently, as a way of losing baby fat or clearing up their complexions. Thus food restraint "becomes the domain of the two females who may either cooperate or squabble over it."
Reading Orbach, I had a chilling thought about my own adolescence. I had owned Barbie dolls, studied fashion layouts, and done all the girl-things that were supposed to have made me a slave to the bathroom scale. Yet I couldn't have cared less. What was missing from my picture? Bluntly: Mom.
This is not to blame all mothers for infecting their daughters with an urge to compare their bodies unfavorably with the cultural ideal. But historically, through words and actions, mothers have interpreted and taught the looks and behaviors associated with "femininity" to their daughters. To place this in perspective, Chinese foot binding, a stunning cruelty in the service of "beauty," was not literally imposed by men upon women. Rather, it came about through "the shared complicity of mother and daughter," Susan Brownmiller explains in Femininity. "The anxious mother was the agent of will who crushed her suffering daughter's foot as she calmed her rebellion by holding up the promise of the dainty shoe, teaching her child at an early age that the feminine mission in life, at the cost of tears and pain, was to alter her body and amend her ways in the supreme effort to attract and please a man."
Nor is it as if mothers impart damage consciously. Given mothers' biological capacity to nourish their young, it is hardly surprising that tensions between them and their daughters might be played out through food. "Women are traditionally the primary feeders," explained psychotherapist Laura Kogel, a faculty member of the Women's Therapy Center Institute in Manhattan (founded by Susie Orbach, Luise Eichenbaum, and Carol Bloom) and a coauthor of Eating Problems: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Treatment Model. "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."
"My eating disorder had nothing to do with my Barbie dolls," said a forty-year-old novelist who prefers that her name not be used. "The year my mother took me out of boarding school, I was totally miserable. She was really punishing me for getting ahead of her—for going to this fancy school. She was horrible to me when I got home—really cold and cruel. And I decided to stop eating, but I was so afraid of her that I felt I had to disguise it. The one meal we all had together was dinner, and I became the family cook. I cooked these beautiful meals that I barely ate. It was my hunger strike to make her acknowledge what she'd done. I was going to starve myself until she was nice to me. It's amazing that I eat today." She laughed. "All my friends' mothers noticed that I was losing weight, but my mother said nothing—until the following year when I was on birth control pills and I gained a few pounds. Then she said I was getting fat."
"When I deal with a family and with mothers," Kogel told me, "because I don't like mother-blaming and because I am a mother, I try to see the fullness of the mother—as a three-dimensional person with her own insecurities, anxieties, and strengths." Yet to understand is not always to exculpate. For one of Kogel's clients' mothers, "appearance was everything. She just shamed her daughter at every moment. She said, 'You're fat; you're ugly.' The daughter has recently looked at pictures of herself as a child and she was actually adorable. There were no gross deformities. But the mother took all the badness inside herself and projected it onto her daughter."
Because of my own experience, I have a hard time attributing eating disorders to a cultural conspiracy—an idea that is easy to discredit through caricature, as Elizabeth Kaye did in Esquire. Kaye quotes Naomi Wolf's description of the alleged fashion cabal in The Beauty Myth: "It has grown stronger to take over the work of social coercion. . . . It is seeking right now to undo . . . all the good things that feminism did for women." Then Kaye adds, "This is the language of a science-fiction writer describing the Blob."
Yet because there are profits to be made off women with negative body images, people do fan the members of negativity. In 1992, columnist Ann Landers, a citadel of nonparanoid thinking, published some words of caution for "those who are borderline nutty on the subject of weight loss." They included statistics showing that the diet industry had expanded to $33 billion a year and that women spent $300 million each year on plastic surgery. By age thirteen, 53 percent of American high-school girls were unhappy with their bodies. And even I began to half-believe the conspiracy theorists in January 1993, when Columbia Pictures announced that it had winnowed about thirty pounds off the woman in its logo, transforming her into a torch-bearing skeleton.
Sadly, in the eating disorder wars, the conspiracy camp is about as likely to shake hands with the family pathology crowd as Queen Elizabeth is to host a fund-raiser for the IRA. Which is too bad, because the "cause" of an eating disorder seems to vary between individuals, and involves some combination of cultural and familial issues.
One of the most sensitive dramatizations of an eating disorder and its conflicting causes is Todd Haynes's 1987 movie Superstar, a forty-three-minute documentary written with Cynthia Schneider that uses mutilated fashion dolls to enact the death of seventies pop singer Karen Carpenter from anorexia nervosa. Although the concept sounds like a campy bad joke, the movie is profoundly affecting. "In Superstar, Haynes vindicates Karen from the junkyard of popular culture, forcing us to rethink her achievements," Joel Siegel wrote in Washington's City Paper when the film came out. "I had ignorantly dismissed anorexia as a uniquely capitalistic affliction, a self-induced neurosis that ironically compels the over-privileged to mimic the physical deprivations of the starving poor. Haynes and Schneider convincingly argue that anorexia is a manifestation of a specifically female oppression, a terrifyingly logical response to the demands imposed upon women by a sexist culture."
In Art Forum, artist Barbara Kruger observed: "It is this small film's triumph that it can so economically sketch, with both laughter and chilling acuity, the conflation of patriotism, familial control and bodily self-revulsion that drove Karen Carpenter and so many like her to strive for perfection and end up simply doing away with themselves." The only people, it seems, who didn't like Superstar were Karen's family and executives at A&M Records. They denied Haynes permission to use her songs and sent cease-and-desist letters so threatening that Haynes withdrew the film from circulation.
By dramatizing the story with Barbie-like dolls, Haynes recalls Beauvoir's thoughts on how society pressur
es women to be "live dolls," who slowly lose a sense of themselves as people. But society is not the only culprit. Anorexia, the film explains, "is often the result of highly controlled familial environments." And the parent dolls in Haynes's movie are nothing if not controlling.
The film opens with the voice of the doll portraying Mrs. Carpenter. "Nearly quarter-after and Saks is jammed by eleven," she chirps. When Karen doesn't respond, she walks to Karen's bedroom and finds Karen in a closet, sprawled dead—a victim, we later learn, of an overdose of ipecac, a drug that induces vomiting.
The Mom doll's face, modified by Haynes, is almost as scary as the Mom doll's behavior. Mom makes Karen wear hip-huggers that Karen believes make her look fat. Mom won't let Karen or her brother Richard move out."No matter how famous you all get," Mom says ominously, "you're going to keep living at home."
Home is Downey, California—a grid of houses that resemble the Barbie doll's fold-up dwellings. As poignantly tacky as Karen's songs, Downey's matchbox mansions are an emblem of the postwar prosperity that changed the relationship of middle-class consumers to their food. After Haynes's camera has panned down a suburban block, it sweeps down a supermarket aisle—visually equating prefab houses with packaged foods—while a voiceover explains how, after World War II, food became more convenient, varied, and plentiful. But in defiance of this bounty, teenage girls began, in increasing numbers, to starve themselves.