The Problem with Barbie

Millions of girls grow up with an ideal of what they should be when they grow up. They play with her, brush her hair, develop stories around her love interests and her friendships, and hope one day to have her do-anything-look-perfect kind of life.

Of course, I'm talking about Barbie.

She of the impossible waist, the feet bound and shrunk for high heels, and the flowing golden locks. She's one of the first toys girls get and the one they hold onto for the longest time.

Many play with her by putting her in her dream Corvette, drive her to her Dream House (tm), and arrange perfect dates with her dream man Ken. They pay attention to her dresses, the accessories they can buy, the many different personalities they can try on with a new outfit and new friends.

Me? I built her a cardboard box and sent her down the waterfall in the creek in my backyard. And when that cardboard melted and sank, I realized I'd have to rethink my engineering.

I built Barbie tree houses in the bushes in the backyard, hid her under the jack-in-the-pulpits and pretended it was a rainforest, cut my own clothes for her out of fabric scraps, and had her kidnapped by a wizard (but because I had lost my Ken doll, she had to save herself).

Any response to playing with a Barbie doll is appropriate. Whether you want to take her on wild jungle safaris or give her the damsel in distress role, she's a doll. The only limit is your imagination. Barbie can be a mom, a CEO, an explorer, an astronaut, a movie producer, a builder, or a writer. She's a foil, a tool, a plastic model, and she can become what the girl wants her to be.

The problem comes when people start to ascribe a certain personality or role to us based on Barbie's body shape, plasticity, or general silence. The idea that women should hold to a "quiet dignity" as the plastic doll does is insulting to all women, no matter the roles they choose in life. The idea that we should aspire to her body destroys young girls' self perceptions and their health.The idea of Barbie as a role model limits us to her pre-approved career packages and personality types.

Barbie isn't the problem. A world of people who want to be seen as merely dolls and nothing more is.

I took my Barbie and imagined all the things she could do. As a stand-in, she became my heroine, my warrior, my damsel, my mother, my child, and my ingenue. She was a toy for a world I created, and the ideas I spun in those days of early childhood still inspire me today.

It's when she becomes more than a toy that she becomes a problem.