Think pink: Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie in the new Barbie movie the boy with the Great Shaped Skipper. I was standing in line at Woolworths, waiting to spend my pocket money on a doll: Barbie's little sister, dressed in a 1980s aerobics uniform. The boy noticed this and talked about how stupid it was, how stupid girls were spending money on their stupid dolls. So I threw it at him. I'm not proud of it.
I wasn't even a big fan of Barbie. When I lost my temper at Woolworth's, I didn't defend Skipper, who I only chose because she was the cheapest doll on sale. I defended myself and girls in general against the accusation that the things we want — pink things, feminine things — make us stupid. I took any attack on Barbie as a thinly veiled attack on us.
Barbie has always had a difficult relationship with girlhood. Mattel released the doll in 1959 after company co-founder Ruth Handler, watching her daughter Barbara play, came to the conclusion that little girls didn't want dolls or dolls their own age. They were less interested in practicing being mummies than in playing the modern women of the world, trying on different clothes, taking on different roles. They wanted to be glamorous with all the power that glamour seemed to give.
The design of the original Barbie was based on a 1950s German doll named Bild-Lilli and was controversial from the start, not least because of the size of her breasts. Mothers didn't like it, but little girls liked it: the tension was passed on from generation to generation. My own mother never approved of Barbie, considering her a «wench» (Cindy, a British rival created in 1963, was considered more respectable). Naturally, this led me to think of Barbie as a progressive woman, despite her size zero body and impossibly perfect smile.
The Barbie movie, co-produced with Mattel and destined to be the summer's blockbuster, is presented as a challenge to how we think not only about Barbie, but also about gender. However, there have always been ways to position Barbie as a feminist scourge and a feminist icon.
The case against Barbie is clear and compelling: she is a doll who, if she had the proportions of a grown woman, would be too thin to menstruate. She draws girls into a materialistic world that prepares them, in the words of American feminist Susan Brownmiller, «for nothing but a department store and a mall.»
Attempts to diversify her appearance have been superficial and limited — scaling down to life size, even a 2016 Curvy Barbie would be an UK size 6-8 — while the various controversies that have plagued her over the past 60 years are suggestive of women who remains deeply limited. For example, in 1965 there was a pajama barbie with pink scales fixed at 110 pounds and a diet book with one instruction: don't eat; while a 2014 Barbie book titled «I Can Be…a Computer Engineer» revealed that she needed «Stephen and Brian's help» to do real engineering jobs.
Barbie's resistance took many forms. In 1993, the activist group Barbie Liberation Organization swapped the voice boxes of talking Barbies for voice boxes of G.I. Joe figures. Teen Talk Barbies began declaring «Revenge is mine!», while Joe's Soldiers proclaimed that «The beach is the best place to be in summer!» Topless protests interrupted the opening of the Berlin Barbie Dreamhouse Experience in 2013 when one protester wrote on her chest that life in plastic is not fantastic. Numerous competing brands have released dolls with healthy proportions — Lammily, Happy To Be Me, Feral Cheryl, Emme — to knock Barbie off her height. No one came close to her popularity.
Which brings us to the defense arguments. There must be protection, otherwise it seems that the girls are their own worst enemies. Barbie's enduring popularity is not due to mothers, but to daughters who, like me, an eight-year-old, are unhappy about being shamed for what we want.
Progressive? Barbie President Doll, 2016 Photo: MATTHIE ALEXANDRE
If Barbie has irritated feminists, she has also irritated conservatives who believe that little girls should continue to play with dolls. Does this mean she is doing something right? Arriving on the scene four years before Betty Friedan published The Womanly Mystery, which chronicled the desperation of middle-class women forced to leave their jobs and return to their home lives, Barbie's own rejection of the «problem that has no name» was her feminist edge. . She has held over 200 positions and even ran for president a full 24 years before Hillary Clinton (although the Presidential Barbie was outsold by the Totally Hair Barbie released the same year).
Mattel regularly positions Barbie as a female careerist. In 1999, they supported Girls Inc's «Girls Rule» campaign by promoting science and sports education. Their Dream Gap project, which creates puppet versions of real women like scientist Sarah Gilbert and astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, purports to show girls that «you can be anything.» This influential feminism has fallen somewhat out of favor over the past decade due to its association with privilege. However, Barbie is connected to the history of feminism much deeper.
As Handler watched her daughter play, she saw something a more traditional mother wouldn't want to see: a daughter who doesn't aspire to be «just a mother.» There is a version of feminism that focuses on not being in the same place as the women before you, and Barbie, in all her glorious artifice, calls for that. The American poet Adrienne Rich described the mother as «a victim in herself, an unfree woman, a martyr.» Barbie is everything she isn't.
Barbie is getting ready: a still from the new movie. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
The femininity that Barbie represents can be incredibly attractive to girls, not because they crave objectivity, but because they crave independence. Even though this form of feminism ultimately revolves around two limited roles — the domestic worker or the sexy, starving career woman — I think this explains a lot of Barbie's allure, which goes much deeper than her love of dream houses, pretty dresses, and pink color. It may also explain our willingness to protect her, even when relationships deteriorate.
Ironically, turning Barbie into a feminist might seem like a task we've all been assigned. It's because of how we struggled to reckon with the femininity that she represents. The attacks on femininity come from two directions. Radical feminists see femininity as unnatural, imposed on women by men, reducing us to a caricature. Misogynists also associate femininity with superficiality, but consider it innate in women and proof of their inferiority. Because many of us are drawn to femininity without feeling inferior, liberal feminists tend to defend femininity as if they were defending women themselves.
We see this in films like Legally Blonde (2001) and books like The Whipping Girl by Julia Serano, the gender theorist (2007), which argues that «no form of gender equality can be truly achieved until we first work on empowering femininity itself.” . We also see this in the recent popularity of «bimbo feminism» which claims that if a stereotype is accepted to the point where it exaggerates, it loses its power to disenfranchise. A recent post on the Binarythis blog states that “a Barbie movie will do the trick… It will take femininity seriously. Judging by the trailers, I'm fully expecting a bizarre critique of capitalism and heteronormativity dressed in pink sequins. It's banal feminism.» While I'm sure the movie will use Barbie's inherent unpretentiousness to poke fun at old-style conservatives, I wonder how subversive that really is. Is it an attack on oppressive ideas, or is it just a laundering of the association of femininity with them?
Legally pink: the interior of Barbie's dream house, Germany. Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
And in general, does femininity need our help at all? When we take into account the rate of eating disorders and the rise in invasive cosmetic procedures, it can be argued that we are doing well, tearing pieces off us women and girls with our real, non-doll bodies. Femininity is like an abusive partner whom we will defend against all odds on the grounds that we have invested so much. Leave Barbie alone! You just don't understand her the way I do!
This is reinforced by the claim that the old-fashioned feminist criticism of Barbie (i.e. the criticism of your mother) was intellectually unsophisticated and came from a time when women had no way of separating the gender stereotypes imposed on us from those that we might accept in ordinary life. in a playful, perhaps even ironic manner.
That's what worries me about the upcoming film. According to Time, «the film's existence is an exercise in controversy,» which sounds like the code «if you still find it sexist, it's out of your head.» Trailer message: «If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you,” bathes in his own slipperiness. Margot Robbie looks like a Barbie in the title role, but insists that the film, which has other actresses with different looks play different Barbies, makes it clear that there is not just «one version of what Barbie is». If you're under the impression that Barbie is actually a super skinny doll, you'll be more mistaken.
' An exercise in contradictions: the new Barbie movie explores the complexity of the doll. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
In their 2022 book A Culture of Confidence, sociologists Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad argue that when institutions accused of promoting female insecurity position themselves as helping women overcome it, the failures are passed on to women themselves. The beauty industry's «love your body» campaigns can lead women to be ashamed not only of their bodies but also of their negative thoughts. I'm afraid that if I judge a Barbie movie to be unfeminist, I'll only expose my inexperience. It feels like Barbie's detractors are accused by her supporters of ever taking the doll at face value.
It also seems that Barbie is more interesting to protect than little girls who want her, stupid girls spending their money on stupid dolls. Feminism is for them, not for her. Barbie's rehab will not change their world.
Barbie will hit theaters on July 21st. Victoria Smith is the author of The Witches (Navy, £20)
Readers. Memories of Barbie.
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