May
3, 2002, 12:30 p.m. Thank
Barbie for Britney
She’s not
that innocent.
By Kay Hymowitz
uth
Handler, legendary founder of Mattel Toys and creator of Barbie, the company's
most successful product, died last week, thereby prompting the most urgent
cultural debate since Botox made the headlines. Was Barbie, as feminists
said, poisonous for young girls' self-image and the cause of an epidemic
of anorexia and bulimia? Or was she — as conservatives insisted,
taking the view that "the enemy of my feminist enemy is my friend"
— simply good childhood fun?
Actually, both sides
are wrong. Barbie may not have prompted a national crisis in female self-esteem,
but she's no innocent either. The vampy fashion doll helped to bring about
the sexualization of childhood, evidence of which is everywhere today.
In truth, Barbie is the not-so-spiritual godmother of Britney Spears.
To understand this
point, you need to consider Barbie's origins. Up until 1959, the year
of Barbie's birth, little girls spent a lot of their time burping and
feeding the pudgy baby dolls that were a mainstay of the toy market. But
sometime in the late 1950's, during a European trip with her daughter,
Ruth Handler stumbled across "Lilli," a popular German doll.
A hard-nosed businesswoman, Handler was not especially troubled that Lilli
was modeled on — and I'm not making this up — a cartoon prostitute.
Nor was she evidently perturbed by the fact that Lilli was sold in bars
and tobacco shops to grown-up men who evidently were taken with her tight
(removable) sweater and short (removable) skirt.
But even without
knowing the doll's scandalous past, many parents were less than thrilled
once Barbie hit American stores. In fact, marketing researchers found
that mothers hated Barbie. They thought she was too grown up for
their four- to twelve-year-old daughters, the doll's target market. Before
being redesigned with a sunnier California look, Barbie was sold in a
sultry leopard-skin bathing suit, sunglasses, and with what looked like
collagen-enhanced lips. Mothers had good reason to suspect she was meant
to be a swinger — a kind of Playboy for little girls. After all,
she had her own Playboy Mansion, called "Barbie's Dream House."
She had a flashy car and a sexy wardrobe. God knows what she was doing
on those make-believe dates their daughters quickly began arranging for
her.
Still, Mattel wasn't
overly worried about what mothers thought, because the company
had just developed a brilliant new advertising strategy that all but bypassed
parents. Previously, toy manufacturers, who rarely advertised anyway,
never hawked their wares directly to kids. But in the late 1950's, Ruth
and Eliot Handler gambled their company's entire net worth on an advertising
slot during The Mickey Mouse Club. The risk paid off big time:
The first product to be given its own TV ad, the "Burp Gun"
(don't ask), was a phenomenal success. Barbie came next; little girls
immediately grasped her faintly forbidden allure and went on a "Buy
me!" rampage.
Between her sexy
look and her TV appearances, Barbie, then, marked a big turning point
in American childhood. It's not that no one had ever tried to make a buck
off kids before. But up until Barbie, manufacturers and advertisers generally
respected the prevailing cultural view about both the vulnerability of
children and their subordination to their parents. Ruth Handler helped
to change all that. As those disapproving mothers well understood, Barbie
invited girls to identify not with mom but with their hormonal and independent
older teenaged sisters. Television further fueled the fantasy of teen
sophistication and independence by speaking directly to kids, and sometimes
trying to sell them things their parents might disapprove of. It didn't
happen right away, but over time children's television increasingly hyped
the teenager as the childhood ideal: Think of Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles, Blossom, and Sesame Street's rock-and-rolling
muppets. By the 1980s, bewildered parents began to see the emergence of
the tween — eight- to twelve-year-olds who look (and in some cases
act) like teenagers. Today's eight-year-old girls want their MTV, and
demand their belly shirts and lip gloss. Even six-year-olds are Britney
wannabes.
This herstory makes
moot the question of whether or not you should let your girls play with
Barbie. When they were little, my own daughters had so many dolls that
my living-room floor often looked like an Omaha Beach of half-naked Barbies
(and Barbie heads and arms). But that phase doesn't last very long. The
irony for Mattel is that, today, no self-respecting seven-year-old would
be caught dead playing with a Barbie. Who needs a doll when you can play
the teen vamp yourself?
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uth
Handler, legendary founder of Mattel Toys and creator of Barbie, the company's
most successful product, died last week, thereby prompting the most urgent
cultural debate since Botox made the headlines. Was Barbie, as feminists
said, poisonous for young girls' self-image and the cause of an epidemic
of anorexia and bulimia? Or was she — as conservatives insisted,
taking the view that "the enemy of my feminist enemy is my friend"
— simply good childhood fun? 
