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Gilles Brougere, a French sociologist, has conducted an exhaustive study of French women and children to determine how different age groups perceive the doll.
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M.G. Lord |
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This underscores another pattern in Barbie's universe. People project fears and prejudices onto her; when a person talks at length about Barbie, one usually learns more about the speaker than about the doll.
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M.G. Lord |
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The company has no archive. This may help conceal its embarrassments, but it has also buried its achievements--such as subsidizing Shindana Toys in response to the 1965 Watts riots. The African-American-run, South Central Los Angeles--based company produced ethnically correct playthings long before they were fashionable.
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M.G. Lord |
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The second time, Michael Milken galloped to the rescue. "I believed in Barbie," Milken told Barbara Walters in 1993. "I called up the head of Mattel and I told him that I personally would be willing to invest two hundred million dollars in his company. There's more Barbie dolls in this country than there are people."
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M.G. Lord |
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Toys have always said a lot about the culture that produced them, and especially about how that culture viewed its children.
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M.G. Lord |
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It is with an eye toward using objects to understand ourselves that I beg Barbie's knee-jerk defenders and knee-jerk revilers to cease temporarily their defending and reviling. Barbie is too complicated for either an encomium or an indictment. But we will not refrain from looking under rocks.
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M.G. Lord |
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Through their play," Ruth said, Barbara and her friends "were imagining their lives as adults. They were using the dolls to reflect the adult world around them. They would sit and carry on conversations, making the dolls real people. I used to watch that over and over and think: If only we could take this play pattern and three-dimensionalize it, we would have something very special."
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M.G. Lord |
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AS STRATEGY SESSIONS BEGAN IN HAWTHORNE, THE Handlers made a brilliant tactical move. They commissioned a toy study from Ernest Dichter, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Motivational Research in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. The study cost a staggering $12,000 and took six months to complete, but when it was finished the charge seemed low. Dichter had masterminded a cunning campaign to peddle Barbie. Dichter was already a legend when the ..
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M.G. Lord |
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Convince Mom that Barbie will make a "poised little lady" out of her raffish, unkempt, possibly boyish child. Underscore the outfits' detailing, and the way it might teach a roughneck to accessorize. Remind Mom what she believes deep down but dares not express: Better her daughter should appeal in a sleazy way to a man than be unable to attract one at all."
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M.G. Lord |
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The positioning from the very first commercial was that she was a person," said Schneider. "We never mentioned the fact that she was a doll."
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M.G. Lord |
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Because neither Ruth nor Charlotte was a housewife. Barbie, from the outset, worked--at both dream and humdrum jobs. She served drinks to thankless travelers as an American Airlines stewardess and emptied bedpans as a registered nurse.
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M.G. Lord |
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Barbie Baby-Sits" appeared in 1963, a year after the publication of Helen Gurley Brown's best-selling Sex and the Single Girl. And whether it was Brown's influence or an effect of synchronicity, Barbie began to resemble Brown's happily unmarried woman."
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M.G. Lord |
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Barbie's similarity to Brown's brave, new, vaguely selfish and decidedly subversive heroine has more than whimsical ramifications. It
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M.G. Lord |
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But even with her record sales, the Barbie of the late eighties was not the vibrant virago of the early eighties. "We Girls Can Do Anything" gave way to "We're into Barbie," a slogan that suggests turning inward, away from active engagement with the world. "The viewpoint of people changed," Barbara Lui explained, "and the 'mommy track' came on, and women didn't believe anymore that they could do anything. We're in an era--perhaps we're leav..
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M.G. Lord |
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The reason, one suspects, for the gender-blurring was the increasing popularity of the birth control pill, which had been approved for sale in 1960. Once women had the option of turning off their fertility, they could behave as rakishly as men. In the age of the pill, sex did not automatically lead to marriage and babies; it generally led to more sex. So in 1966, the Barbie team made a decision. The times they were a-changin'. And Barbie, t..
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M.G. Lord |
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Barbie is a space-age fertility symbol: a narrow-hipped mother goddess for the epoch of cesarean sections. She is both relentlessly of her time and timeless. To such overripe totems as the Venus of Willendorf, the Venus of Lespugue, and the Venus of Dolni, we must add the Venus of Hawthorne, California.
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M.G. Lord |
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Like the kachinas, Barbie is both toy and mythic object--modern woman and Ur-woman--navelless, motherless, an incarnation of "the One Goddess with a Thousand Names." In the reservoir of communal memory that psychologist Carl Jung has termed the "collective unconscious," Barbie is an archetype of something ancient, matriarchal, and profound."
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M.G. Lord |
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The whole idea of woman as temptress, or woman as subordinate to man, is absent from the Barbie cosmology. Ken is a gnat, a fly, a slave, an accessory of Barbie. Barbie was made perfect: her body has not evolved dramatically with time. Ken, by contrast, was a blunder: first scrawny, now pumped-up, his ever-changing body is neither eternal nor talismanic.
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M.G. Lord |
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Celebrities who in the sixties had led Barbie-esque lives now forswore them. Jane Fonda no longer vamped through the galaxy as "Barbarella," she flew to Hanoi. Gloria Steinem no longer wrote "The Passionate Shopper" column for New York, she edited Ms. And although McCalVs had described Steinem as "a life-size counter-culture Barbie doll" in a 1971 profile, Barbie was the enemy. NOW's formal assault on Mattel began in August 1971, when its N..
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M.G. Lord |
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Barbie has an advantage over all of them. She can never bloat. She has no children to betray her. Nor can she rot, wrinkle, 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..
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M.G. Lord |
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Not surprisingly, when Barbie achieved superstar status, her houses became more ostentatious. Yet even Barbie's three-story town house, with its Tara-like pillars and ersatz wrought-iron birdcage elevator, is an outsider's interpretation of upper-class life. Authentic valuables are to Barbie's possessions what a pungent slab of gorgonzola is to "cheese food"; her furniture and artwork would not look out of place in a Ramada Inn. For all her..
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M.G. Lord |
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In Latin America, where blond Barbie outsells all other dolls, Barbie leads a life that few of her young owners will ever replicate.
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M.G. Lord |
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Barbie's new face, fashioned by doll sculptor Joyce Clark, was the face of disco. The doll appears in the 1977 catalogue against a black background, as if on the edge of a cavernous dance floor. Light glints off her glossy magenta boa, her burnished gold hair, her luminous diamondlike ring. Gone is the haughty smirk of her early years. Seemingly stupefied by the disco beat, SuperStar Barbie's mouth is set in a broad smile. The revamped Barb..
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M.G. Lord |
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Styled by Kitty Black Perkins, an African-American designer whom Mattel hired in 1975, Black Barbie made her debut in 1980. Barbie had had black friends since the late sixties, but by 1979, Mattel determined that America was ready for the dream girl herself to be of color. Because the new doll was likely to be scrutinized, Mattel fashioned her with sensitivity: her hair is short and realistically textured; her face, if not aggressively non-..
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M.G. Lord |
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But even in their imperfect executions, the mere existence of Black Barbie and Hispanic Barbie in 1980 was a landmark. Like the coronation of Vanessa Williams as Miss America in 1983, the dolls commented on the evolution of popular taste. Slowly (with the speed of a glacier, critics might say), standards of so-called beauty were changing.
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M.G. Lord |
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Instead of reworking the doll, Shackelford implemented a market "segmentation strategy," which she thinks helped Barbie achieve record sales. She did this by "segmenting the market," introducing dolls with different themes and then "creating whole worlds around them." Beginning about 1980, Mattel issued separate dolls for each of the major play patterns. There was a "hairplay" doll that came with styling paraphernalia; a "lifestyle" doll th..
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M.G. Lord |
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To look at Mattel as a relative of the Hollywood studios is to make sense of some of its contradictions. The daughter of a Polish Jewish immigrant, Ruth Handler coded with her fashion dolls the same sort of phantasmic "America" that Louis B. Mayer had coded in his movies. Barbie was, in fact, better suited than a human actress to exemplify an impossible ideal. There was no tribal taint in her plastic flesh, no baggage to betray an immigrant..
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M.G. Lord |
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As early as the 1940s, Mattel integrated its assembly line and hired a black foreman. "It was unheard of in those days to put a black production worker next to a white production worker and have them all share toilet facilities," Ruth Handler told me. And in recognition of its policies, Mattel was honored by the Urban League. But Mattel's most startling project, little known outside the toy world, began in 1968, when, as a response to the W..
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M.G. Lord |
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The world of Shindana--of top Mattel brass working side by side with the founders of Operation Bootstrap, the Watts-based job training program under whose auspices the toy company was formed--was a far cry from the way the thirtieth-anniversary issue of Barbie magazine depicted Barbie's world in 1966. "Our inner cities burned but the pot roast couldn't," the caption says under a picture of Barbie at a Tupperware party. "Mom and Dad and the ..
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M.G. Lord |
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Traditionally, the needs of ethnically diverse consumers had been met by smaller companies--the equivalent, in movie terms, of independent filmmakers. In the seventies, Shindana introduced two Barbie-like fashion dolls: Malaika, taller and stouter than Barbie; and Career Girl Wanda, about three-quarters as tall as Barbie and as proportionately svelte. But in 1991, when Mattel brought out its "Shani" line--three Barbie-sized African-American..
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M.G. Lord |
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began. A chief element in positioning the new Barbie was her promotion. In 1984, after a campaign that featured "Hey There, Barbie Girl" sung to the tune of "Georgy Girl," Mattel launched a startling series of ads that toyed with female empowerment. Its slogan was "We Girls Can Do Anything," and its launch commercial, driven by an irresistibly upbeat soundtrack, was a sort of feminist Chariots of Fire. Responding to the increased number of ..
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M.G. Lord |
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Barbie Bazaar,
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M.G. Lord |
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Lui did not get that idea out of the air; though whether it was true or not remains a subject of debate. "The supermom is fading fast--doomed by anger, guilt, and exhaustion," Newsweek reported in 1988. "A growing number of mothers" believe "that they can't have it all." Yet in her book Backlash, Susan Faludi points out that the survey on which Newsweek based the article revealed nothing of the sort. It found that 71 percent of mothers at h..
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M.G. Lord |
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This is not to cast Barbie as a New Traditionalist. Even in retrograde times, she has never stayed at home against her will. The jobs on her 1989 resume--physician, astronaut, veterinarian, fashion designer, executive, Olympic athlete--are impressive; a little girl could do worse than identify with such a doll. Her move away from demeaning stereotypes can also be documented. Compared with, say, the 1973 Barbie Friend Ship, in which Barbie i..
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M.G. Lord |
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The magazine has always existed to promote Barbie as a commercial product; but kids look to her as an oracle-- a vivid, godlike presence in the landscape of childhood. And sometimes, with aching candor, they'd beg Barbie to help stabilize their parents' rocky marriages or mitigate tragedies in their lives.
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M.G. Lord |
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After interviewing numerous upper-middle-class, Eastern Establishment women, I can say with certainty that most do not interpret the doll as an updated Neolithic fertility icon. They view her as a literal representation of a modern woman. Many object to her on feminist grounds--one hears the familiar "that body is not found in nature" refrain. Then the word bimbo arises. But let a woman talk longer--reassuring her that she's not speaking fo..
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M.G. Lord |
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On a recent HBO special, Roseanne Arnold, who, incidentally, collects Barbies, excoriated what she considered to be Barbie's middle-class-ness. Why didn't Mattel make, say, "trailer-park Barbie"? But to many upper-middle-class women, all post-1977 Barbies are Trailer Park Barbie. Ironically, given the knee-jerk antagonism to Barbie's body, it is one of her few attributes that doesn't scream "prole." Her thinness--indicative of an expensive ..
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M.G. Lord |
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To be sure, Barbie is a toy, and in market research sessions, as Barbie's first advertising copywriter Cy Schneider has pointed out, children, presented with choices that can be characterized as "tasteful, gaudy, gaudier, or gaudiest," invariably choose "gaudiest." But Barbie is also a reflection of her times--or a reflection of how market researchers and professional prognosticators interpret them. And perhaps therein lies the paradox."
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M.G. Lord |
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In An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, Neal Gabler tells how the studio moguls--all immigrants and outsiders--created an "America" that was more "American" than the country ever could be. They formed a "cluster of images and ideas--so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination." And Americans, aping those images, ultimately became them. "As a result, the paradox--that the movies were quintessenti..
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M.G. Lord |
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When it comes to parental ill will toward Barbie, I believe femininity is the toxin; Barbie is the scapegoat.
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M.G. Lord |
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But if feminists had embraced Barbie when she stepped down from her high heels, her seventies persona might have been dramatically different. She was on the brink of a conversion. If they hadn't spurned, slapped, and mocked her, she might have canvassed for George McGovern or worked for the ERA. She might have spearheaded a consciousness-raising group with Francie and Christie, or Dawn and Bizzie Lizzie. But Barbie could not go where she wa..
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M.G. Lord |
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Scion of a sex toy, Barbie, far more than any human, is equipped to withstand such toxic projections. Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite plasticity. "I think if you look at the silhouette of the Playboy Bunny, it looks like a Barbie doll," retired Mattel designer Joe Cannizzaro told me."
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M.G. Lord |
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I didn't like Midge because she didn't have a sexy face," Hanson said. "The old Barbie looked dominant: sharp nose, sharp eyelashes--she was a dangerous-looking woman. And of course she had those symbols of power on her feet. . . . I don't consider Barbie sexual anymore. I looked at new Barbies a year or so ago, and their faces were infantile--more rounded and childlike."
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M.G. Lord |
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Nor was Hanson the only budding sex maven to fixate on the dolls. "I definitely lived out my fantasies with them," Madonna told an interviewer. "I rubbed her and Ken together a lot. And"
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M.G. Lord |