The Barbie Dolls

When I was five years old, my Aunt Marlene gave me my first Barbie Doll.  I don't know if I had ever seen one before, but this new toy was the most frustrating instrument of torture that a young child could possess.  While the Hippity-Hop and the Sit and Spin are more obviously bizarre, Barbie was coy.  She was unabashedly fashion-conscious and her spectacular array of clothing included thousands of evening gowns, tennis outfits, gardening ensembles, and swimming apparel.  Every event in her soap opera life called for different charming attire.  Ideally, you would like to change her clothes every six minutes.  The whole point of playing with her was to take her places, dress her up, but the dressing part of playing with Barbie brought me much discontent.  Only a young girl can know the work it took to drag a tight evening dress up Barbie's sticky plastic frame.  It was sheer misery yanking and tugging at a dress that simply would not go up.  Sometimes you would have to take a break, play with some Matchbox cars for awhile, which didn't need to wear dresses or tiny plastic heels, then go back to trying to jerk a dress up Barbie's legs.  But more times that not, it called for a trip to Mommy for the inevitable popping off of Barbie's head so the dress could be put on from above.

Even worse were the puny Barbie buttons and snaps that couldn't be assembled by the most agile fingers.  The feeling of discouragement was enormous when, after spending hours in the act of putting on an outfit, the thing went out of style seven minutes after play began.  More than once, Barbie appeared at the Prince's Ball clad in a day-glo orange bathing suit and white go-go boots.  Of course this was counter to the whole point of Barbie, which was to force materialistic values upon young girls by stressing that a person is nothing unless she has a new outfit for every hour of the day.  However, my attention could not be held through more than two costume changes, because that alone could mean a good ten hours of furious whipping and lashing about of my precious Barbie.

Alas, the clothing issues were the least of my problems when it came to this heinous doll.  At every special occasion which required a gift, a new Barbie, prettier, tanner, yet more successful!, than the one before, was presented.  By the time I was seven, I had five Barbies.  It may seem spoiled to complain, but it was a genuine tragedy when my mother refused to buy me Ken.  What is a child to do with five Barbies?  I didn't like dressing them up.  I had no Dream House, no plastic pink corvette, or pool with lounge and deck.  There was no camping equipment or beauty salon or ice-cream parlor.  My friends had all of these things, but at my house, it was just a shoe box of useless outfits, those five naked Barbies, and me.  The Barbies had to make out with someone, so I was stuck with five essentially lesbian Barbies until my brother solved my problem.

The Barbies never had clothes on, so they were kind of sitting ducks for a five-year-old looking for a chew toy.  I soon found that one of my Barbies (an unofficial, impostor Barbie made of thin plastic, and hollow) had been cruelly assaulted by my little brother's mouth.  When I found him, he had bitten off her feet and gotten started on her boobs.  It was then that I decided to turn this breast-less, foot-less, mutant Barbie into a man.  I cut her golden locks, leveled off her chest with a pair of scissors, and named her Bob.  Now, I miraculously had four Barbies and a Bob.

It wasn't long before I realized that Bob was a big mistake.  Besides having no feet, a Dutch Boy haircut, and two holes in his chest, I had no Ken clothing, so Bob's only prospect was to become a transvestite.  However, I was satisfied with my accomplishment, reasoning that a girlish Bob was as close to Ken as I was going to get.  [Later in my life, this kind of thinking led to many many many disappointments.]

I thought my problems were over, but my little brother had just begun.  As the days passed, I noticed a chewed-off nose, a snaggled ear, an arm completely missing.  I found myself playing with headless, legless, crippled and impaired Barbies that no longer possessed their acclaimed elegance and glamour.  They had become objects of oppression and grief.  They looked like soldiers coming back from Nam.  I tried to untangle the countless knots that plagued their tresses, but succeeded only in pulling large flaxen chunks right out of their heads.  Now they were bald!

Would there be no end to my affliction?  By the age of eight, I was appalled by just the sight of my Barbies and Bob, so I packed them into their shoe box coffin and bade them farewell.  I spent the rest of my childhood playing with my brother's giant Tonka trucks.  I haven't seen those dismal Barbies since, though I know that they haunt my parent's storage space on cold, stormy nights, and stalk in fury, my brother, the sadist, who robbed them of their dignity as Barbies.

I have babysat for girls in the Barbie stage, and I cringe with horror when they hand me that shapely body of shiny, artificial flesh, and whimper the words, "I can't get her dress on!"

[1991]