One day the toy designers at Mattel decide to test a new
Barbie Jeep with their target audience. Three lucky girls get to play with the
plastic pink automobile at the company headquarters, plus Barbie and Ken and
some toy designers looking on. When one little girl puts Barbie in the driver’s
seat the other grabs her hand: “No!” she exclaims, “The Daddy drives the car!”
The designers look at each other and shrug. “And they
say we’re the problem.”
This anecdote, related by Sherry A. Inness in The Barbie Chronicles is the perfect
qualifier for what I’m about to tell you. Toys have an effect on how people see
the world. It was made clear in Part I of this study that Barbie is an
integrated, significant part of consumer culture, and yet every individual who
plays with her brings some of her own bias and experience into the fold.
Researchers across disciplines
agree that to a certain extent, toys socialize children and help to form their
conception of the social world around them. Because of Barbie’s cultural
prominence, she has become a feature of social organization. Many scholars
argue that Barbie may have negative effects on the self-images of the (mostly)
girls playing with her, and that she enforces gender stereotypes. Others note
that she was the first adult fashion doll on the market, whose character was
from the start oriented towards individual gratification rather than domestic
duties.
Toys canfacilitate or
complicate the social reactions between the people playing with them. In The
Cute and the Cool, Gary Cross explores the conflict which emerged when
Barbie and other “new” toys debuted in the 1950s, confounding parents whose own
playthings (and play) were drastically different, making it harder for them to
relate to their children’s play. Toys have a social function as a way for
people to interact with one another, which characterize their users in the eyes
of those around them (i.e. the woman who scolded my mother in the waiting room
all those years ago). Because of Barbie’s prominence as a commodity, she
fulfills both these social functions. Susan Stern was inspired to make the film
Barbie Nation when her daughter suggested they play the “jealousy game”
with Barbie—Stern was instructed to pretend her doll was jealous of everything
about her daughter’s Barbie, and the suggestion provided an eye-opening insight
into her daughter’s mind. The film itself features a couple who connected with
each other thanks to their shared passion for depicting Barbie and friends in
elaborate S&M scenarios, an example which illustrates how Barbie can facilitate
social relations among her owners.
More publicly, a variety of testimonials
express that the extent of a girl’s Barbie collection in the late 20th
century could ascribe or detract from her status among schoolmates. Sociologist
Brian Sutton-Smith claims that toys can become “an identity around which a
child organizes his or her actions and concepts of the world.” If this is true,
Barbie was a way for middle or lower
class people to identify vicariously with the upper class. One woman
remembers, “Barbie was affordable to the middle class, but seemed to have
everything materially – associating her subconsciously with the upper class.”
(Rogers, 65)
Outside of North America, Barbie
has become a totem of the American consumerist way of life. A woman growing up
in Nicaragua during wartime recalls, “Barbie was a symbol of status...What
having a Barbie meant was that the lucky owner’s parents had access to ‘the
exterior’... some little girls had access to the precious blonde doll; most
didn’t” (Rogers, 64). Thus the physical possession of the doll signalled its owner to her
neighbourhood as one of the “haves”. The doll also served a similar function
for her owner internally. The same Nicaraguan woman remembers: “the more our
Barbies had, the more we had.” Barbie allowed her owner to vicariously live a
life of glamourous consumption through her doll. These examples illustrate that
Barbie’s place in the culture at large gives her an immaterial social and
psychological function.
In contrast, Carol Ockerman
examined artistic appropriations of Barbie, and found that artists use defaced
or unconventional images of her to repudiate the social order. A simple
internet search reveals that Barbie has been used as a canvas on which to
depict a variety of social and personal problems, from domestic violence to impossible beauty standards. Outside of North America, where Barbie represents the dominance of consumer
culture, she has been appropriated to repudiate it. In 2004, “Alyona Pisklova”a
fifteen year old Russian girl swept her nations online voting for a Miss
Universe contestant on the platform that a vote for her was a vote against the “Barbification”
of society which she defined not only as promoting unnatural beauty standards,
but other Western imports coming in from faceless corporations. Pisklova was
far ahead of all competition when she was disqualified due to her age.
The widespread criticism of
Barbie’s influence on beauty standards reveals more about the people doing the
arguing than it does about the doll herself. Perhaps I am not qualified to join
this argument because I have always been thin, blonde, and leggy. But it seems to
me people pick and choose what parts of
Barbie’s body they ought to be angry about, and ignore everything that goes
against their viewpoint. We all know about the blonde hair, perfect complexion,
big boobs and legs-up-to-here. But how about those shoulders? The classic Barbie doll had shoulders twice
as broad as her waist. Her ribcage was twice the circumference of her rear end, which meant her breasts were actually pitiably small. These are not attractive
features on a human being. The whistleblowers that go to great pains to
elaborate on how unrealistic Barbie’s figure is never seemed to recognize that
no one wanted that figure to begin with. Broad shoulders and a barrel chest are
not something little girls dream of having, whether they played with Barbie or
not. The advertisements one sees on
every billboard, bus shelter and tv spot are the far more likely culprits in
adolescent girls’ lowered self
esteem, because we are actually made to believe those women exist in nature.
Those women have the legs, the hair, the rail thin bodies. But they don’t have
the broad shoulders or the freakishly long neck. If Barbie was such an
aspirational figure for little girls, wouldn’t they grow up wanting those
things too?
In an ironic turn of events,
Mattel responded to criticism by making their doll’s body more realistic in the
early twenty first century –not realistic enough to assuage young girls’ fears that they will never be
beautiful, but realistic enough that she
now looks like an idealized female figure, and not a well made drag queen,
as she had for decades.
In the American gay community, Barbie
has actually been referred to as “every drag queen’s dream.” With her broad
shoulders and lack of hips, the pre-millennial Barbie resembled a transsexual
more than anything else. Gay and trans-gendered people have embraced this
comparison, dressing as Barbie at pride parades and carrying signs that read,
“Barbie loves you” and “Got Barbie?” Essentially, Barbie helped them situate
themselves in a discriminatory culture.
These examples show the many ways
in which the Barbie doll has transcended its material status as a commodity.
Like most toys, Barbie is an agent of personal socialization and interpersonal
relations. However, aggressive marketing and integration into pop culture has
expanded her influence from that of a toy, to a form of social organization of
gender, and a symbol of American consumer culture. Because she represents a
cultural ideal, Barbie has been a focal point around which groups and
individuals have organized to alternately reject and co-opt the status quo.
This iconic status makes Barbie an atypical commodity, but one which provides
insight into the ways consumerism becomes culture.
Bibliography
Gary Cross, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and
Modern American Children’s Culture. New York: Oxford University Press,
2004.
Forman-Brunel, Miriam, “Barbie in ‘LIFE’: The Life of
Barbie.” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 2 (2009):
303-311.
Kolmar, Wendy, “Remembering Barbie Nation: An interview with
Susan Stern.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30: ½ (2002): 189-195.
Kuther, Tara L., and Erin McDonald, “Early Adolescents’
Experiences With, and Views of, Barbie.”Adolescence 39:153 (2004):
39-51.
M. G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of
a Real Doll. New York: Morrow and Co., 1994.
NBC. “Schoolgirl becomes unlikely feminist icon in
Russia:15-year-old sweeps online poll for Miss Universe spot in
‘anti-Barbie’protest vote.” Last modified April 15, 2004.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4749107/ns/world_news/.
Ockman, Carol,“Barbie Meets Bougereau,” in The Barbie
Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty, ed. Yona Zeldis McDonough, 75-90.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.
Paris, Leslie,“Teen Idol,” in The Barbie Chronicles: A
Living Doll Turns Forty, ed. Yona Zeldis McDonough, 65-74. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1999.
Mary F. Rogers, Barbie Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage Publications Ltd, 1999.
Stern, Susan. Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour.
DVD, 1998. San Francisco, CA: New Day Films, 2003.
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