Barbie

My sisters and I used to decapitate and give bad haircuts to our barbies. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes not, sometimes unclear. But I had no brothers, so I don’t know how otherwise genetically similar males would react.

We were pretty set against Barbie (me more than me spouse) but surrended quick on the principle that having her around would make her seem less interesting. This was partly a prediction based on our intimate knowledge of our own kid, whom we (rightly) thought was interested in Barbie largely because she did not have intimate knowledge of her. Boy did we feel vindicated.

But none of you have said whether you think she does any harm. I sued to think so, but now (not just because of my daughter, but for more general reasons) suspect that she is an epiphenomenon — there are all these other damaging things going on and she is along for the ride as it were.

My sister didn’t have Barbie, but she did have similar dolls. I thought they were grotesque, and found the appeal completely mystifying as a boy. But I suspect my childhood was somewhat like Ophelia’s in its wierdness…

I was a tomboy, and had GI Joe instead of Barbie. My daughter wanted Barbies, and got them. Barbie tended to go on grand adventures where she would save all the stuffed animals from the evil villain. If the kiddo was supposed to be using Barbie to model stereotyped gender roles through play, she didn’t get the memo. ;)

Anyway, my main objection to Barbie was what my dad called “naked Barbie syndrome” — all those accessories to buy! Or, in our case, resist buying! But that’s what indulgent friends and family members are for.

We didn’t say whether we think there is harm because we were not asked. The question was not framed that way. If it had been, I would have said, because I always love to point out things that I think are harmful, and I think most things are.

Yes, I think there is harm. I sure don’t know, can’t prove it, could be wrong, etc. But I do. It’s not the gendered toys thing, it’s the hypersexualization thing. I don’t really mind all that much about gendered toys (oh how odd, an occasion for harm-pointing-out that I neglect) – I suppose because as my jokey but actually quite literal post indicates, I was so androgynous as a child. I did love a certain kind of doll (not the biggish, babylike ones, but smallish ones you could play with almost like puppets – dolls as actors rather than dolls as pretend offspring) but I also loved the other stuff.

No, it’s the hypersexualization thing and the weird premature adulthood thing that I think does harm. And even though I can’t prove it, I’m certainly very suspicious when I look at all the insanely adult-looking 12-year-old girls around. Where did they pick that up, I’d like to know! Yeah I know, Britney and all that. But I doubt that Barbie’s hands are entirely clean in the matter.

I’m not sure what is more harmful, letting your daughter play with Barbie or making a big thing about it, withholding the stupid doll, and letting her suffer socially because of it.

My parents let us play with Barbie, but only one, and then told us to get out of the house and play outside. They tried to prevent my brother from playing with guns until he started fashioning them out of sticks. They also really restricted TV consumption, and this led to all sorts of ridicule from other kids at school.

I think it’s hard enough being a kid, especially a kid with weirdo parents like us, that I’m willing to give my kids the toys (within reason) that they need to blend in.

At this point, my main j’accuse against Barbie is really just what a crap doll she is in purely mechanical, material terms, compared against not just action figures and suchlike, but even other dolls.

The other problems don’t worry me so much, because I’m firmly convinced–having argued at book length for the virtues of bad kids’ TV–that troubling hermeneutics can be defeated by a kid with pluck or intelligence any old time. Barbie, as ab_normal observes, can end up being a macho action hero or a brain surgeon in the right hands. It’s just that the better built and designed a toy is, the more things it can do.

Laura’s also right, by the way, on her own pages, that some boy toys are equally crap, and Hot Wheels in particular. It’s just that the ratio of mechanically and visually interesting toys favors boys–if nothing else because they get more colors than pink and lavender.

And I suspect Laura’s also right about another conjecture: making a big deal out of withholding a toy is a guaranteed quick route into turning into a favored fetish-worship object. I was talking to a famously puritan liberal academic who writes jeremiads about consumerism once and she talked about how she keeps all bad toys and all TV away from her son, and I could only think, “There goes a kid who is going to be watching ‘Survivor Moon Base’ in 2015 like an addict on his crack pipe”.

Here’s a joke from my 11-year-old niece (and god-daughter) Zelie, who collects Barbies:
A customer goes into a store and asks the owner if they have any Barbies. The owner says sure, we have (and here I’ll make up names) Beach Barbie, Office Barbie, Teacher Barbie, and Divorce Barbie. The customer asks how much they cost, and the owner says, they’re all $12.95 (I have no GBP symbol), except Divorce Barbie who’s $250. The customer says well, what’s the difference? And the owner says, well, they’re all exactly the same. But Divorce Barbie comes with Ken’s car, with Ken’s house, with Ken’s wardrobe…

I do not personally like Barbies, but I don’t regard them as a political issue. I’m slightly too old to have played with them as a child, though my younger sisters had them.

My two daughters received many Barbies as gifts from far-away relatives and at birthday parties from their friends. They didn’t play with them very much, except for a period of giving them all Sinead O’Connor haircuts. A family friend’s daughter, however, wasn’t allowed Barbies. So every time she came over to play, all the Barbies were dug out and played with incessantly till she left. This child is now a teenager who is perfectly well adjusted, but somewhat obsessed with fashion magazines, clothes and make-up.

Why the hostility to Britney?

I played with Barbie until about age 10. Minimal harm done, in my estimation. We didn’t buy a lot of outfits, because my aunt, an incredibly talented seamstress, made Barbie outfits. I was going to ban Barbie on politico-feminist grounds, but since you can’t dictate birthday and Christmas presents from friends and relatives, the ban was short-lived. It’s one thing not to buy a toy. It’s quite another to “lose” Grandma’s Christmas present. I did buy my daughter a Playmobil surgeon set, and one day I found naked Barbie lying on the surgical table so the Playmobil doctors could operate. I decided Barbie probably wasn’t going to do any harm.

Sure. Thinking Barbie causes harm is one thing, but the question of what if anything to do about that is quite another. I stuck to the first half and ignored the second, because It All Depends, and I Don’t Know.

It’s much like the hijab issue, as a matter of fact. I do think the hijab does a lot of harm, but it doesn’t follow from that that I’m confident I know what to do about it. I’m not.

(Mind you. Having said that – I also think there is something to be said for not worrying too much about suffering socially. People who are misfits as children often go on to great things, while their more conformist peers go on to what conformists go on to. Of course, misfits may also go on to be Unabombers, so it’s all rather tricky.)

That’s the nicest thing I’ve eveer heard about Britney. Daniel, you were joking right? (though, as I say, I don’t feel any hostility).

Ophelia, that’s a typical case of me thinking I’d asked a question that I hadn’t. But my observation is that people on this site don’t always restrict themselves to answering the question asked.

I agree with you, too, about the premature sexualisation of children. But I also accept that children are sexual. But its not, exactly, Keith, that adolescents and adults are more sexual, its that childhood sexuality is somehow different in kind. I resent (as Ophelia seems to) corporate efforts to shape children’s sexuality in the image of adult sexuality, and I resent it even more because I know that it does not flow from any view about what might be good for the children, solely from a profit motive. Of course, they are not solely to blame — adults who play into it, buy the stuff, etc. collude. But the corporate interests here are despicable.

All that said, Barbie doesn’t seem play into this the same way that, say, Britney does. She (Barbie) is remarkable partly because she seems so weirdly asexual, despite all the clothes, the shape, etc.

Exactly. That’s the phrase I was looking for – ‘an in-house acting troupe.’

There could be a good popular culture or ludic history or something monograph there – doll play as pseudo-maternity versus doll play as theatre or story-telling or playwrighting or directing or all those.

I can’t buy Barbie as hypersexualizing children. For one thing, Barbie is well over 50 years old, and 12 year olds weren’t nearly as sexualized when I was 12 (30 years ago) as they are today.

I can understand hating barbie because it’s expensive & fragile, but the feminist critique has always left me scratching my head.

Here’s damaging (or at least, kinda upsetting) for you. My sister finally put her foot down about Barbie because my 4-year-old niece, who had been Barbie-obsessed, started saying that she herself was ugly and fat (she’s the most beautiful 4-year-old you’ve EVER seen, in my completely unbiased adoring Auntie’s opinion, with perfect 4-year-old proportions) because she didn’t look like Barbie.

See, I think Katie’s post supports Harry’s argument, that Barbie is an epiphenomenon. Because Barbies have been around for a while, but 4-year-old girls thinking of themselves as fat is a more recent phenomenon, surely. Right? I just can’t go on if I believe there’s a longstanding tradition of 4-year-old girls thinking they’re fat. I think Barbie’s just one of many expressions of the female-body-scrutinizing media assault that’s our current reality.

I’m another who played with Barbies when I was little and I don’t think I was too damaged. The “ethnic” Barbies make me sort of sad, but that’s a whole ‘nother thread.

I hasten to add that it’s certainly pure conjecture on my part too. I just do tend to think that little drip-drip things like that have an effect, and that we brush them off and assume they don’t ‘really’ make any difference, too quickly or easily.