You’ve Come a Long Way, Barbie!

SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

BY KAREN DAY

Barbie is 64 years old today. Created in 1959, she is an authentic, American baby-boomer who qualifies for senior discounts when shopping for her tiny, age-inappropriate high heels with a reduced-carbon footprint in her 2024 pink plastic Tesla. Although her age is made nebulous by more incarnations than the Dalai Lama, her generational membership also explains the blockbuster popularity of the movie made modern in her honor and name by Director, Greta Gerwig. But what’s it all about, Barbie? Really.

Ruth Handler originally created Barbie in the Doris Day image of a hot-bodied German doll named Bild Lilli who was often topless. (Mattel, Handler’s toy company and God of all things Barbiedom, settled out of court, buying Lilli’s copyright in 1964.) Many parents steeped in America’s wholesome image in the 1950s considered the curvaceous plaything scandalous. Their children, however, especially the girls, were teetering on the edge of the 1960s and the first historic burning of bras at the Miss America protest. Considering the lurid social media content available to children today, the fact that Barbie remains fully dressed in the homes of 9 out of 10 American girls ages 3 to 10 years old should qualify her for a statue in the Smithsonian as the alpha icon of pop culture. Ken would be mentioned as a footnote in her climb to fame.

As a fellow boomer, I played with Barbies a plenty; the original teen fashion model, then Malibu, next the twist-and-turn double-jointed Live Action Barbie that danced far more in my bedroom than I ever did at a school dance. Her miniature perfection loomed large in my small world, mirroring the pin-up measurements and unattainable epitome of what appeared everywhere I looked on TV, movies, advertising and my own living room as an awkward, chubby child of a crowned Mrs. Indiana. The message was as hard and simple as the doll in my hand: you can never be what you see. Lucky for me and the female species, the 1970s proved beauty, as defined by others for women and dolls, is a barbed fantasy. Barbie learned this lesson too, suffering my revenge with some nasty haircuts and ceiling fan hangings and finding her market dominance infringed by preternaturally creepy and imperfect BRATZ. (If you don’t know about these sassy-sexy plastics, you don’t need to.) Finally, Hollywood and Barbie, at least as portrayed in Gerwig’s bubble-gum-pink world, have begun to also realize that little girls can’t be what they can’t see. Mattel got the message in $$ signs. Barbie is now an African American, U.S. President with 200 other occupations, including an astronaut and an Olympic, Hijab-wearing fencer. Who knows what’s next in her moldable future? A scientist in her DreamMobile RV sold as Breaking Bad Barbie?

So, has Barbie changed the world? My daughter, 36, deemed her Barbie too “old-looking,” and joined the American Girl doll childhood cult. Today, she is a pediatrician. My hairdresser, 25, said, “Barbie is just a doll to me. The movie was kind of tedious and preachy. I felt sorry for Ken.” My haircut was taking place in her new salon. I could remind these young ladies that many have come a long way on the paths they now tread with the luxury of not looking back. Instead, I’ll wait, knowing one day, if they have a daughter, she too will ask for a Barbie.