Forever Barbie (16 page)

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 is forced to play scullery maid to a painted-on pilot, the
1990 Flight Time Barbie, developed in 1989, is herself an aviatrix. But Flight Time Barbie is also a Day-to-Night doll, and
her after-hours outfit, vastly more girlish than what she wore in 1985, undercuts her authority. In five years, her homeovestite
behavior has intensified, suggesting that her achievements have left her fraught with anxiety.

What Flight Time Barbie wears at night is a Christian Lacroix-inspired "pouf" skirt that barely covers her plastic derriere.
Susan Faludi draws a convincing parallel between the juvenilizing bubble skirts that Lacroix introduced in 1987 ("for women
who like to 'dress up like little girls,' " he says) and the New Look that Christian Dior fobbed off on women forty years
earlier. Both were fussy, ruffly, waist-cinched fashions that exaggerated female curves to the point of caricature and looked
goofy on all but the adolescent and acutely svelte. Both came after a period of relative sartorial sanity: the dull but practical
"Dress for Success" formula John Molloy coded in the seventies, and the dress-for-comfort system women coded for themselves
during World War II. Both also followed a time when women had enjoyed opportunities for professional realization—when male
soldiers returned from the war, women who had taken the men's jobs gave them back; just as, when unemployment soared after
the 1987 stock market crash, women were urged through "mommy-track" propaganda to relinquish limited spots in the workforce
to men.

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. Mattel hangs on every prediction of such national surveys as the Yankelovich
Youth Monitor, as well as its own market research. And it is not alone in this: few major companies make a move without consulting
trained, high-tech prophets, even though futurists themselves acknowledge that the very act of anticipating the marketplace
can influence it.

"When I as a futurist share our assumptions with the wide bunch of CEOs who are our clients, it's halfway to a self-fulfilling
prophecy," explains Laurel Cutler, worldwide director of marketing planning for Foote Cone Belding, Inc., and vice chairman
of FCB Leber Katz, who has been spotting trends for corporations for the last twenty-five years. "Because if you get enough
people in enough different places thinking along the same lines, they start reinforcing each other and giving each other the
support to proceed along those lines. There's one company that makes a fortune from predicting what the 'in' colors will be—in
fashion, paint, wallpaper, and so on. But if you say, 'red, orange, and russet' to enough people in enough places early on—well,
you see what I mean by halfway to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Although women's sphere did contract in the late eighties, Barbie was not long bound by its constraints. Mattel had factories
and branches all over the world, and by 1989, the world was on the verge of a radical change. When the Berlin Wall fell on
November 9, Barbie, that coruscating cheerleader of consumption, gained a new mission. Capitalism had defeated its frumpy
totalitarian foe. Czechs and Magyars, Poles and Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Romanians, Ukrainians—all the citizens of
the former Soviet bloc—were starved for style. They craved a model of free-market femininity, and Mattel moved in 1991 to
provide them with one. As twilight fell on the Reagan decade, Barbie's star rose in the East.

Then there was the best-selling Barbie Game, which promoted a different agenda—exploiting men for financial gain and competing
for them based on physical appearance. To appreciate why the Barbie novels were, for many girls, windows onto a wider world,
one must reexperience the claustrophobia, cosseting, corseting, girdling, and cantilevering that underwired women in the late
fifties. One must, in other words, roll the dice and plunge oneself into the mindset of the Barbie Game.

My friend Helen—I am not so pitiless as to call her by her real name— claims to have been horribly scarred by the game. She
cannot forget the time that, in two hours of play, she was unable to get a boyfriend—not even Poindexter, the dud, the nerd,
the untouchable. Helen had achieved almost everything she needed to win. She was "popular"; the Drama Club had elected her
its president. She had a formal dress—indeed, the game's most expensive one, Enchanted Evening, a regal pink gown with a rabbit
fur wrap. She had earned more money than the other players. But without a boyfriend, Helen was a washout. She couldn't even
attend the prom, much less be crowned queen.

Careers, I discovered, had little impact. After the first bottle of champagne (and the first groans over such instructions
as "You are not ready when he calls. Miss 1 turn.") nearly everyone got a sort of crazed glint in her eye. An odd coincidence,
however, was that although success in the game relied primarily on luck, people's real-life achievements—or shortcomings—were
often reflected on the board. Helen, for instance, is a highly accomplished professional, but anguishes over her lack of a
beau. Consequently, she was shaken by the eerie playing out of this difficulty. "I'm not telling my mother about this," she
said. "But I am telling my therapist."

Touted on its box as "A fun game with real-life appeal for all girls," Queen of the Prom is set not in "real life" but in
a precursor of She-Ra's state of nature—with a few Potemkin tract houses scattered about to create the illusion of a middle-class
suburb. Or, more accurately, an upper-middle-class suburb. At a time when gum was ten cents and two could dine in a fashionable
Manhattan restaurant for under twenty-five dollars, I doubt many youngsters from blue-collar families could afford to drop
thirty-five to sixty-five dollars on a prom dress, as players are required to do. In the game, Dad does not sully his manicured
nails on an assembly line. He plays the market; one "Surprise" card entitles a player to a ten-dollar present in celebration
of Dad's "extra large stock dividend." Like Nancy Drew, who solved cases with her widower father, players of the Barbie Game
have a close relationship with Dad; he turns up often in the "Surprise" cards as a source of cash. Having no money of her
own, Mom, however, is virtually invisible.

The box promises competition in three areas—Shopping, Dating, and School Activities—evidently the only races that matter.
The message is: Don't waste your time on academic, athletic, or artistic achievement—and especially, don't look inside yourself.
Be outer-directed.

In the game, the greatest rewards come not from skill or learning but from physical appearance. The largest sum of money a
player can earn at one time is ten dollars for a modeling job, as opposed to, say, one dollar for washing dishes. Players
are taught not to expect to profit from brainwork. One space in the "Earning Money" section invites the player to write a
story for a magazine, only to jeer at the player's presumption: "Sorry—no sale."

It isn't as if looks alone are commodified; so are men. A player rolls the dice, lands on a potential boyfriend's face, and
if she wants to win, she grabs him—even if he disgusts her. In the abridged version, boyfriend cards are predealt to players
along with their allowance. It's easy to come away thinking: A boyfriend is a dress is a dollar.

If a player lands on a space with two arrows, she can move in either direction, except at the "School Entrance." School is
neither optional nor pleasant; all but one square inside it promises misery. The lone desirable square grants straight A's
to the player who lands on it—then, as a reward, instructs the player to hasten to any "Stop and Shop" space on the board.
The subtext here: Achievement is never for its own sake; it is only meaningful as a stepping-stone to acquiring objects, particularly
those that will enhance one's looks.

Nearly every square on the board is a land mine, especially for women who have grown up with feminist assumptions. Yet the
game is strikingly efficient at reinforcing behavior—the way repeated electric shocks can persuade a laboratory rat to perform
tricks against its will. Frequent landings at the "soda fountain," for instance, a square where players without boyfriends
must surrender a dollar, have, in my observation, caused even committed lesbian feminists to stalk men—at least for the duration
of the game.

To be fair, Mattel at almost the same time introduced a "Keys to Fame" game that encouraged little girls to try their hands
at careers. But Queen of the Prom was the game that took off; it is the one boomers remember—especially for the splashy, eye-catching
fifties graphics that belied its grim economic message. While playing it recently, I often brooded on the invisibility of
the mother. Did little girls perceive Mom's absence as a victory in the war for Dad? Did they associate it with her status
as a non-wage-earning entity? Or did they realize that they, too, could be headed in Mom's direction—a glistening prom queen
one minute, a shadow the next?

I also thought of Ernest Dichter's market research on Barbie—the way he urged Mattel to exploit mothers' dark, unarticulatable
fear that without a stern tug in the right direction, their boyish daughters would grow up into unmarriageable brutes. In
Queen of the Prom, as in the card game Old Maid, to be ugly, frowzy, or manless is to be shut out forever from success.

Barbie's mother welcomes Foxx—even though Foxx's mode of existence implicitly calls Mrs. Roberts's into question. Instead
of seeking self-validation by creating Barbie in her image, she goes the stage mother route. She admires Foxx for recognizing
"what a pretty and talented daughter I have," where "I have" is a significant detail. Barbie is her possession—like the living-room
furniture—and she enjoys having its quality discerned.

Significantly, Barbie cannot bear family conflict—in her own or anybody else's. Wherever she goes, she hatches plots to reconcile
parents with their estranged children, and she is not above resorting to deception to patch up domestic rifts. Were Barbie
neither fetching enough to model nor deft enough to design clothes, she could have a big future in family therapy.