Let the Truth be Known
Around the same period girls become interested in sex, a time which conveniently coincides with a growing impatience with pulling clothes on and off her svelte body and swallowing her little shoes, Barbie becomes a prop in our adolescent explorations.
We imitate what we see on the daytime soaps. We act out what we believe should occur in Barbies' glamourous Dream House or her beautiful RV.
Usually, this consists of smacking a Barbie and a Ken together horizontally and smooshing their hips together in a most bizarre and unseemly fashion, making "uh-uh, ooh-ooh" noises. My circle of friends hadn't yet discovered same-sex loving: I don't seem to recall a single instance of Lesbian Barbie.
At first, one would ask one's friend "d'you wanna play dirty barbies?". Eventually, however, all Barbies were dirty - to play Barbies was to get Barbie to go down. We'd take her clothes off, not in order to dress her in something else, but so that she could do unspeakable things to Ken.
When I was a child, my mother uttered the Steinemesque declaration that she would not buy her daughters any Barbie- or Barbie-related merchandise, duly missing the chance to blame Mattel for our body-image problems, our inherent, inborn materialism, or as has been my habit, to perceive myself as the chattel of various men. The result of her very public declaration (an editorial in a national newspaper) was to watch her daughters receive nothing but birthday gifts of Barbies from friends and relatives throughout our childhoods. I, the youngest, accumulated twenty-seven Barbies and three Kens (yes, the Kens were very busy).
If I ever have daughters, I too will forbid barbies, not by the grounds of feminist ethics, but because they're too darn hot to be innocent childrens' toys.