My house is 3 stories tall. It has one bedroom, one bath, a pink sloped roof, and the ever present, iconic plastic elevator. Outside, is parked a pink jet, a convertible, and, occasionally, a horse or two. Inside, are my friends: princesses, a paralympian, the vampire Alice from the Twilight Saga, and yes, even a Ken or two- each meticulously dressed in the finest gown or sometimes, Luna Couture- outfits made from socks, gloves, and even tiny, removable duct tape dresses complete with snap-back closures. I am 7, 8, maybe 9 years old and this is my domain.
My Barbies lead full lives. They go zip lining, have fashion shows, parties, weddings, sometimes to Ken, and sometimes to each other. On one occasion, there is even a Miss America-style pageant complete with talent show. For me, only child of divorced parents, token weird kid, token fat kid, simultaneously enrolled in the gifted kid program and child therapy for rampant and seemingly untenable learning disabilities, this little world of perfect, plastic blondes is an oasis of predictability. Barbie is always perfect. She has perfect makeup, perfect hair, the right outfit for every occasion, and the magical power to enter any profession, without years of schooling or experience. She is a popstar, a politician, a pilot, a princess. She doesn’t have to pack on Tuesday nights, or remember her homework when she packs or remind her parents to sign that permission slip. In fact, Barbie doesn’t seem to have parents at all. She does not look different from her friends, she does not have to wear sports bras at age 10 and does not have to shop in the adult women’s section at Ross dress for less while her friends shop at the coveted Oakridge Mall Justice. Barbie can share clothes with her friends- they are all the exact same size.
The archetype Barbie represents holds a constancy for many of us raised female. The bubbly, feminine, some might say passive personality is is an easy punchline we see in all kinds of media from the time we are small, but also something we are unironically taught to emulate. It is a sort of feminine paradox, in which femininity is both the butt of the joke and the expectation for women and girls to both wholeheartedly embrace and reject all at once. Either, you are dumb and blonde and beautiful and a victim of the patriarchy, or you’re quirky, and independent, and not like other girls. Within this binary, it seems there no way to escape the bonds of the delegitimate status of girlhood without trodding upon your fellow prisoner. The bimbo cannot be feminist: there is too much fragility, and far too much pink. This contradiction was especially prevalent in the early 2000s, a time when conformity within the feminine ideal was the commercial angle for almost every product, service, and entertainment aimed at women.
For me, Barbie was the pinnacle of everything girls are supposed to want to be when they grow up. Everything I wanted to be when I grew up. Still, Barbie wasn’t me. I was…messier. I liked sparkles and frilly dresses and pink- still do, but I also had other interests: cars, and bikes, and comics. I spent hours catching bugs, digging in the dirt, watching Top Gear and Doctor Who, fixing bikes and studying the engine of my dad’s 1973 Super Beetle until I knew the names and functions of every part. This is not to say that girls cannot do, end enjoy, and excel at these things, but these were interests that were not generally popular among other girls my age. I was happier creating 3D sculptures from foraged pieces of plastic detritus than I was swapping silly bands and gossip. I did not quite fit in.
While I struggled within my own age group, I was lucky enough to still have an oddly enriched upbringing. I frequented set building days with my highschool theatre-teaching mom and local Zine conventions and maker spaces with my comic-drawing father. Among my mother’s students, I was an oddity: bridging the height gap more and more while the demographic of high-tech theatre kids stayed roughly the same. Barbie was there too, playing her role as a show prop, often bruised or modified by teenagers to match the specifications needed for the play, and then forgotton, pinned to the bulletin board post-show, turning over time into the weirdest of Weird Barbies, an incarnation of doll I weirdly never had. Serving as de facto assistant for my father at Zinefest every year, I was an anomaly extraordianare: a strange, unsupervised, furry-headed feral child climbing trees in the courtyard of the convention center, making my rounds of the showroom in delightfully unnacompanied minature. Barbie was here too, sometimes used as set dressing for an artist’s table, sometimes the subject of parody, ironically satirized or sexualized as the antithesis of small press culture, but she was there.
The older I got, the more problematic this incompatibility between my being and the narrow mold of womanhood set by the dolls of my childhood became. I was physically and metaphorically too big: too fat, too loud, too weird, too off putting. I tried, harder and harder, to hide my unset form behind the shell of hyperfemininity like Barbie , in layers of skirts, and makeup, and Spanx, every day, Spanx but I always seemed to spill out somewhere. I thought that if I was nice enough, talented enough, put together enough, cinched my waist in enough, sexy enough, girly enough, that, like Barbie, I could have it all; the boyfriend, the mansion, the paid off car, the respect. Pretty was a currency, and I wanted to be valuable.
I never quite pulled it off. Even in the sacred female space of the girl’s dressing room pre-spring musical the phrase “ugh, I feel so fat” uttered by a classmate, followed by a look in my direction took precedence over the costumes I had built with my bare hands and the two hour musical I was playing the lead in. It was not until the isolation of the pandemic followed by finding real community as a 20 something that I finally began to deconstruct the part I had tried so hard to play. I let my hair grow out of it’s signature bob, dramatically reduced my use of makeup, and experimented with they/them pronouns, a change that stuck when I realized that I no longer felt incredible dread every time someone referred to me in the third person.
I still feel feminine. Womanhood and femininity are forever a foundation to my lived experience, but not the sole one that defines me. I no longer feel that compulsion to melt myself down and press the softness of my body into a tiny, pink, rectangular box. I will never be that perfect, plastic blonde, thank God.
In fact, it seems to me, the mold is starting to break: today’s Barbies are radically more inclusive. They come in a variety of different heights, body types, races, presentations, and abilities. I wonder, what would little tiny Luna would have thought, if she had been able to see herself in the dolls she played with the way kids can today? Would she have still set herself on the hot radiator until her being warped and cracked, unrecognizable from factory condition? Would little me even see the box? I’m not sure, but I like to think that, maybe, just maybe, the pageant is still running in front of the dream house, just with winners of all kinds.