Forever Barbie Read Free Page A

overdose, or go out of style. Mattel has hundreds of people—designers, marketers, market researchers—whose full-time job it
     is continually to reinvent her. In 1993, fresh versions of the doll did a billion dollars' worth of business. Based on its
     unit sales, Mattel calculates that every second, somewhere in the world, two Barbies are sold.
    Given the emergence of the doll as a symbol in literature and art—not to mention as a merchandising phenomenon—it's time to
     take a closer look at how Barbie developed and what her ascendancy might signify, even though it's impossible to calculate
     the doll's influence in any sort of clinical study. By the time children play with Barbie, they have too many other factors
     in their environment to be able to link a specific behavior trait with a particular toy. But because Barbie has both shaped
     and responded to the marketplace, it's possible to study her as a reflection of American popular cultural values and notions
     about femininity. Her houses and friends and clothes provide a window onto the often contradictory demands that the culture
     has placed upon women.
    Barbie was knocked off from the "Bild Lilli" doll, a lascivious plaything for adult men that was based on a postwar comic character in the Bild Zeitung, a downscale German newspaper similar to America's National Enquirer. The doll, sold principally in tobacco shops, was marketed as a sort of three-dimensional pinup. In her cartoon incarnation,
     Lilli was not merely a doxie, she was a German doxie—an ice-blond, pixie-nosed specimen of an Aryan ideal—who may have known hardship during the war, but as long as there
     were men with checkbooks, was not going to suffer again.
    Significantly, the Barbie doll was invented by a woman, Mattel cofounder Ruth Handler, who later established and ran "Nearly
     Me," a firm that designed and marketed mastectomy prostheses. (As she herself has put it, "My life has been spent going from
     breasts to breasts.") After Ruth and her husband Elliot, with whom she founded Mattel, left the company in 1975, women have
     continued to be the key decision makers on the Barbie line; the company's current COO, a fortyish ex-cosmetics marketer given
     to wearing Chanel suits, has been so involved with the doll that the Los Angeles Times dubbed her "Barbie's Doting Sister." In many ways, this makes Barbie a toy designed by women for women to teach women what—for
     better or worse— is expected of them by society.
    Through the efforts of an overzealous publicist, Mattel engineer Jack Ryan, a former husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor, received credit
     for Barbie in his obituary. Actually, he merely held patents on the waist and knee joints in a later version of the doll;
     he had little to do with the original. If anyone should share recognition for inventing Barbie it is Charlotte Johnson, Barbie's
     first dress designer, whom Handler plucked from a teaching job and installed in Tokyo for a year to supervise the production
     of the doll's original twenty-two outfits.
    Handler tries to downplay Barbie's resemblance to Lilli, but I think she should flaunt it. Physically the two are virtually
     identical; in terms of ethos, they couldn't be more dissimilar. In creating Barbie, Handler credits herself with having fleshed
     out a two-dimensional paper doll. This does not, however, do justice to her genius. She took Lilli, whom Ryan described as
     a "hooker or an actress between performances," and recast her as the whole-some all-American girl. Handler knew her market;
     if any one character trait distinguishes the American middle class, both today and in 1959, it is an obsession with respectability.
     This is not to say the middle class is indifferent to sex, but that it defines itself in contrast to the classes below it
     by its display of public propriety. Pornography targeted to the middle class, for example, must have a vaneer of artistic
     or literary pretense--hence Playboy , the picture book men