I Loved My Barbie (And My Parent's Didn't Get It)

NOTE: does not depict typical use (image: Mark Ryden)

I loved my barbies growing up.

Well, let me clarify that. I loved my army of mohawked, tattooed amazons created from the many Barbie dolls I received as gifts.

But there was always a sort of contention surrounding the doll. I didn't know what the problem was until I was much older, but it always seemed like my parent's would have been happier if I had never touched the things in the first place.

At first they worried that I would get the wrong message from playing with the dolls. That somehow, from being exposed to the doll, I would come to believe that I should make myself look like her. Then, when I started to modify my barbies, they worried that I was going to treat people as badly as I treated my dolls. As if a child breaking a toy was unusual.

But really what did they know? Was it simply because of her vaguely human shape? Rainbow Bright is human shaped, but no one worries that their child will grow up to be a raver. As a child I never viewed Barbie as an example of femine beauty. I didn't dress like her because none of the women in my life were like that and she was a toy. Who wants to dress like their toys?

What I liked about Barbie was I could edit the hell out of her. I was free to change her however I wanted because she was designed so badly that her head would pop off after only a few brushes. I would hardly call that abusive. Besides, how did my parents know that she didn't want that tattoo of a giant eagle on her chest?

Ask any girl out there what she did with her barbies and I bet you anything she'll talk about cutting her hair, giving her tattoos or making her clothes with scraps and pipe cleaners.
But that's not what adults and parents think of when they see Barbie. They see a child playing with a Barbie and they think either, "That child is buying in to cultural femine norms." or inversely, "that child hates the cultural femine norms Barbie represents."

We really don't give credit to children at all. Worse this is basically Evolutionary Psychology at it's worst. There is no actual proof in any of these articles that girls "mutilate" a barbie doll because they are rejecting a stereotype. They "mutilate" these dolls because they fall apart easily. An adult may look at a Barbie and object to her underlying message, but a child looks at a Barbie and sees a blank canvas.

That's not to say that Barbie dolls don't carry dangerous baggage about feminity. They do, but then so do a lot of things in our society. It's a toy people! It only carries damaging baggage when parents encourage their girls to act like Barbie. It's more important that children have healthy and living role models and that they are allowed to treat a Barbie for what it is, a toy. Too often I hear about parents worrying over what it means when their child rips up and "mutilates" a Barbie doll. They feel like they should punish their girls for treating the doll badly. Like the doll is an actual person and they fear that this means that their girls will be violent against real people.

It's outrageous. If your child knowingly harms an animal that is an indicator that they will probably harm people. If your child modifies a toy because it fell apart that is healthy creative play. You know, the thing that makes them more likely to work out tough problems in adulthood? It also means that they won't hold up Barbie as any sort of ideal or model. If they did they would probably have never taken the toy out of the box to begin with.

Children are destructive. They like to take things apart to see how they work. They like to put their personal stamp on the things they own. To demand that a girl not treat her barbies like the toys they are only reinforces the concept that the Barbie model is somehow important. Which as so many adults like to point out, it's not.