Barbie Hits Mid-Life (Crisis?).

10Feb09

Fifty years ago, an icon was born. The ideal driven woman, who has overcome divorce from long time boyfriend Ken in 2004, a little under-the-knife-nip/tuck action in 1997, and 110 jobs since birth. Astronaught Barbie, Rock-Star Barbie, Pediatrician Barbie, Canidate for Presidency Barbie, Air-Force Fighter Pilot Barbie, plus 95 other types of Barbie that show off how truly accomplished she is.

Barbie, every little girls “pink princess”  is turning into “a resistance fighter in a cultural war of the 21st century” (137).  Who is she fighting? her parents, her parents’ parents, their extended family, every huge corporation that has played into Barbie’s “consumption programming” or laid eyes on those huge boobs and saw dollar signs, and the puppy-dog eyes of little girls everywhere pining away for their Barbie and constructing an impossible opinion of beauty (beauty? ha!) The beauty of Barbie really came with the Internet’s ability to reject Barbie’s plastic tits and legitimate jobs and give us something better.

Now we’ve got Transgender Barbie, Prison Barbie, Exotic Dancer Barbie, Porn Barbie, and Gangster-Bitch Barbie.

It’s kind of strange to me how we’re always comparing Barbie to how she would be in real life, an article that was written in the Ottawa Citizen devote to the almost-senior-citizen vixen was almost completely devoted to Barbie today, alive and breathing, not plastic and stiff. In Misty Harris’ article she consulted several ‘experts’ and discussed Barbie as though she was iterally a 50 year old woman, not a plastic doll that will look like she’s 16 until Mattel implodes. One of these experts was Barbara Mitchell, a sociologist who described Barbie as being ” relatively healthy and expected to live well into her 80s.” Really?

I am always confused with our online revolutions, as much as they please me, they puzzle me. In Empire of Mind Douglas’s theory of social order is discussed, which boils down to how Porn Barbie is “a symbolic deconstruction of Mattel’s plastic princess and a proposal for a new range of experiences” (146). So as much as I enjoy looking at these ‘new Barbie experiences’ I feel like I am still buying into Barbie, like no matter how many disturbing Barbie pictures I see, I’m still looking at Barbie and kind of yearning to be 10 again.

Either way, Happy Birthday!

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