Forever Barbie Quotes

“Sometimes mothers blame Barbie for negative messages that they themselves convey, and that involve their own ambivalent feelings about femininity. When Mattel publicist Donna Gibbs invited me to sit in on a market research session, I realized just how often Barbie becomes a scapegoat for things mothers actually communicate. I was sitting in a dark room behind a one-way mirror with Gibbs and Alan Fine, Mattel's Brooklyn-born senior vice president for research. On the other side were four girls and an assortment of Barbie products. Three of the girls were cheery moppets who immediately lunged for the dolls; the fourth, a sullen, asocial girl, played alone with Barbie's horses. All went smoothly until Barbie decided to go for a drive with Ken, and two of the girls placed Barbie behind the wheel of her car. This enraged the third girl, who yanked Barbie out of the driver's seat and inserted Ken. "My mommy says men are supposed to drive!" she shouted.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“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.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“Between 1970 and 1971, the feminist movement made significant strides. In 1970, the Equal Rights Amendment was forced out of the House Judiciary Committee, where it had been stuck since 1948; the following year, it passed in the House of Representatives. In response to a sit-in led by Susan Brownmiller, Ladies' Home Journal published a feminist supplement on issues of concern to women. Time featured Sexual Politics author Kate Millett on its cover, and Ms., a feminist monthly, debuted as an insert in New York magazine. Even twelve members of a group with which Barbie had much in common—Transworld Airlines stewardesses—rose up, filing a multimillion-dollar sex discrimination suit against the airline. Surprisingly, Barbie didn't ignore these events as she had the Vietnam War; she responded. Her 1970 "Living" incarnation had jointed ankles, permitting her feet to flatten out. If one views the doll as a stylized fertility icon, Barbie's arched feet are a source of strength; but if one views her as a literal representation of a modern woman—an equally valid interpretation— her arched feet are a hindrance. Historically, men have hobbled women to prevent them from running away. Women of Old China had their feet bound in childhood; Arab women wore sandals on stilts; Palestinian women were secured at the ankles with chains to which bells were attached; Japanese women were wound up in heavy kimonos; and Western women were hampered by long, restrictive skirts and precarious heels. Given this precedent, Barbie's flattened feet were revolutionary. Mattel did not, however, promote them that way. Her feet were just one more "poseable" element of her "poseable" body. It was almost poignant. Barbie was at last able to march with her sisters; but her sisters misunderstood her and pushed her away.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“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.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“It is a saga of mothers and daughters, men and women, hope, despair, passion, and the striving after an impossible "American" ideal. Barbie is an emblem of "femininity," a concept quite different from biological femaleness. Barbie was invented by women for women, and the wrath brought to bear upon Barbie by some women is perhaps wrath deflected from themselves.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“Barbie Bazaar,”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“In Barbie's early years, Mattel struggled to make its doll look like a real-life movie star. Today, however, real-life celebrities—as well as common folk—are emulating her. The postsurgical Dolly Parton looks like the post-surgical Ivana Trump looks like the postsurgical Michael Jackson looks like the postsurgical Joan Rivers looks like”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“the "cause" of an eating disorder seems to vary between individuals, and involves some combination of cultural and familial issues.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“So whether the woman is breast- or bottle-feeding, food and mother tend to be one." Abby, a thirty-two-year-old Vassar graduate and recovering anorexic, feels very strongly that family dynamics rather than idealized images of women contributed to her eating disorder. "I grew up in Greenwich Village," she explained. "I was the child of a single mother who was a devout feminist. I wasn't allowed to watch TV until I was thirteen because my mother believed that its patriarchal stereotypes would have a bad influence on the way I identified myself as a woman. Instead, I was given Sisterhood Is Powerful and Ms. magazine. My mother hated Barbie and what she represented. I wasn't allowed to have a Barbie, much less a Skipper or a Midge. And the irony is that I was severely anorexic as a teenager. When I was fifteen, I stopped eating. I'm five foot nine and at my lowest weight, I was just under a hundred pounds. I lost my period for three years. Today, I have come to realize that my anorexia was a reaction to a very controlled and crazy family situation. I became obsessed with being thin because it wasn't something my mother valued. I think overreacting to Barbie—setting her up as the ultimate negative example—can be just as damaging as positing her as an ideal.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“This is not, however, to let Barbie off the hook. In the doll's early years, before women spoke openly about anorexia, Barbie's props encouraged girls to obsess on their weight. In addition to pink plastic hair curlers, Barbie's 1965 "Slumber Party" outfit featured a bathroom scale permanently set at 110. Mattel also gave her bedtime reading—a book called How to Lose Weight that offered this advice: "Don't Eat.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“Charlotte Johnson, Barbie's first dress designer, understood the historical interdependence between the figure and its drapery. She also understood scale: When you put human-scale fabric on an object that is one-sixth human size, a multilayered cloth waistband is going to protrude like a truck tire around a human tummy. The effect would be the same as draping a human model in fabric made of threads that were the thickness of the model's fingers.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“Barbie doesn't instigate but merely reflects society's notions of beauty.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“This thinning down might be of greater alarm if it were without precedent, which it isn't. In the history of art, representations of the figure have often been distorted so that their drapery would fall in a pleasing fashion—and Barbie, like a clothing-store dummy, is a sculpture that exists to display garments.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“Only Ruth Handler dared blur the line between fetish and toy, taking an object familiar to readers of Krafft-Ebing and recasting it for readers of Mother Goose.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“Barbie is a space-age fertility archetype, Joe a space-age warrior. They are idealized opposites, templates of "femininity" and "masculinity" imposed on sexless effigies—which underscores the irrelevance of actual genitalia to perceptions of gender. What nature can only approximate, plastic makes perfect.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“Cults of beauty have been persistently homosexual from antiquity to today's hair salons and house of couture," Camille Paglia writes in Sexual Personae. "Professional beautification of women by homosexual men is a systematic reconceptualization of the brute facts of female nature." Barbie—who doesn't bleed, kvetch, or demand to choose her own outfits— may be, for some gay arbiters, the apotheosis of female beauty.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“Barbie's combination of voluptuous body and wholesome image was precisely what Hugh Hefner sought in models for Playboy, which he founded in 1953.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“Barbie's large breasts make sense as a function of her time—postwar America. Breasts are emblematic of the home; they produce milk and provide security and comfort. Some of the strangest market research in Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders dealt with what milk meant to soldiers in World War II.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“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”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“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.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“In Latin America, where blond Barbie outsells all other dolls, Barbie leads a life that few of her young owners will ever replicate.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“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 implicit disposable income, her tastes remain doggedly middle- to lower-middle-class. As pictured in the catalogue, the town house also reflects Dynasty thinking. Both Ken and Barbie are absurdly overdressed—he in a parodic "tuxedo," she in a flouncy confection that barely fits into the elevator.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“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 gym membership and possibly a personal trainer—definitely codes her as middle- or upper-middle-class. In Distinction, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes that "working class women . . . are less aware of the 'market' value of beauty and less inclined to invest . . . sacrifices and money in cultivating their bodies." Likewise, Barbie's swanlike neck elevates her status. A stumpy neck is a lower-class attribute, Fussell says.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“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 for attribution—and she'll express her deepest reservation: that "Barbie is cheap," where the whole idea of "cheap" is rooted in social hierarchies and economics.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“Barbie as a class role model, far more than Barbie as a gender role model, may, in fact, be the linchpin of many mothers' continued misgivings about her.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“In Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things, Stephen Bayley tells us that "nothing is as crass and vulgar as instant classification according to hairstyle, clothing and footwear, yet it is . . . a cruelly accurate analytical form." Because Barbie is a construct of class—as well as a construct of gender— this crass, vulgar, and accurate investigation cannot be avoided. "When it comes to the meaning of things, there are no more powerful transmitters than clothes, those quasi-functional devices which, like an inverted fig, put the heart of the matter in front of the skin," Bayley writes. Yet powerful though the transmissions may be, many Americans deliberately ignore them.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“In 1985, Dr. Darlene Powell Hopson and Dr. Derek S. Hopson, two married psychologists, duplicated Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark's experiments using dolls to explore black children's self-esteem. Their results were shocking: they suggested that in the forty years since the Clarks did their research—despite landmark legal decisions, acts of Congress, and the civil rights movement—little had changed. Sixty-five percent of the black children they interviewed preferred white dolls, and 76 percent said the black dolls "looked bad" to them.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“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 dolls available with mahogany, tawny, or beige complexions— there could be no doubt that "politically correct" was profitable. "For six years, I had been preaching these demographics—showing pie charts of black kids under ten representing eighteen percent of the under-ten population and Hispanic kids representing sixteen percent—and nobody was interested," said Yla Eason, an African-American graduate of Harvard Business School who in 1985 founded Olmec Corporation, which makes dolls and action figures of color. "But when Mattel came out with those same demographics and said, 'Ethnically correct is the way,' it legitimatized our business." Some say that the toy industry's idea of "ethnically correct" doesn't go far enough, however. Ann duCille, chairman of the African-American Studies Program and an associate professor of English at Wesleyan University, is a severe critic. After studying representations of race in fashion dolls for over a year, she feels that the dolls reflect a sort of "easy pluralism." "I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say I'd rather see no black dolls than see something like Shani or Black Barbie," she told me, "but I would hope for something more—which is not about to happen." Nor is she wholly enamored of Imani and Melenik, Olmec's equivalent of Barbie and Ken. "Supposedly these are dolls for black kids to play with that look like them, when in fact they don't look like them. That's a problematic statement, of course, because there's no 'generic black kid.' But those dolls look too like Barbie for me. They have the same body type, the same long, straight hair—and I think it sends a problematic message to kids. It's about marketing, about business—so don't try to pass it off as being about the welfare of black children." Lisa Jones, an African-American writer who chronicled the introduction of Mattel's Shani dolls for the Village Voice, is less harsh. Too old to have played with Christie—Barbie's black friend, born in 1968—Jones recalls as a child having expressed annoyance with her white classmates by ripping the heads and arms off her two white Barbie dolls. Any fashion doll of color, she thinks, would have been better for her than those blondes. "Having been a little girl who grew up without the images," she told me, "I realize that however they fail to reach the Utopian mark, they're still useful.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“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 leaders they elected tried to keep a lid on things." As I said in this book's opening chapter, studying Barbie sometimes requires the ability to hold contradictory ideas in one's head at the same time. When it comes to Mattel and representations of racial diversity, this is especially true. Although the Handlers have not been part of Mattel for twenty years, the company can still be viewed as a cousin to the Hollywood studios. Mattel actually did get into the movie business in the seventies, when its Radnitz Productions produced the Academy Award-winning Sounder, another multicultural product that predated the multicultural vogue.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“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 Watts riots, it helped set up Shindana Toys—the name means "competitor" in Swahili—a black-run, South Central Los Angeles-based company that manufactured multicultural playthings before they wrere trendy.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll