Forever Barbie (24 page)
Authors: M. G. Lord
What Hanson learned in her odyssey through the porn world was "traditional sexual power"; she internalized the visual coding
of the early Barbies—a way of presenting herself so that, as she saw it, she was sexually in control. "I could make men love
me—I could make men want to see me and be with me and stay with me because I was a great lay," she said. "Men really will
stay with a woman and love a woman if she's very sexy. It's exactly the opposite of what my parents told me." Hanson has,
in a way, realized the Barbie fantasy, the girl-version of the American Dream. She has a steady boyfriend, a place in the
city, a getaway in the country, and a lucrative job that she loves.
Significantly, Hanson scorns the face of the current Barbie. Much of the original doll's "traditional sexual power" emanated
from its heavy-lidded, almost vampiric gaze—the "aggressive eye of the gorgon," as Camille Paglia has put it, "that turns
men into stone."
"That is the most powerful eye," Paglia told me. "It is far more powerful than the 'male gaze,' which, as defined by feminism,
is simply a tool by which men maintain their power in society. A woman lying on a bed with her legs open is not in a subordinate
position. She is in a position of total luxury, like an empress: 'Serve me and die'—essentially that. . . . That very sultry
and seductive woman seems half asleep, but what is awake is her eye." And it is the eye that implicitly draws the male observer
to the woman—at his peril. The eye "hypnotizes you; it paralyzes you; it puts you under a spell."
Some, however, feel that the characterization of women as vampires in art and myths has less to do with women's real nature
and more to do with how the men who created the art and myths perceived them. Even when they are well into adulthood, boys
still fear and dread Mom for the power that she once held over them—and they extend that fear to all women, demonizing them
into a lethal army of femmes fatales. Men "create folk legends, beliefs and poems that ward off the dread by externalizing
and objectifying women," Chodorow writes. Yet regardless of whether the vampiric female gaze is an objective fact or a metaphorical
construct, it is a recurring theme in the history of male heterosexual desire. And it is as crucial as Barbie's breasts in
understanding why straight men slaver over flesh-and-blood versions of the doll.
Male heterosexual desire, however, is not shaped by boyhood experiences alone. It is influenced by what the culture designates
as "erotic"—not merely pornographic nudes, but artistic ones. A nude, by definition, should arouse in the viewer "some vestige
of erotic feeling," Kenneth Clark writes.
Historically, society has eroticized particular female body types at particular times. In
Seeing Through Clothes,
Anne Hollander shows how from ancient statues to modern photographs, the look of the unclothed figure has been influenced
by the fashions of its day. Today, artists sexualize the female breasts and buttocks, but from medieval times until the seventeenth
century, bellies were all the rage: whether a painting's subject was a virgin or a courtesan, she could not have too big a
tummy. Likewise, the mega-mammaries that men pant over in
Bust Out!
were in the 1500s considered abhorrent, and usually featured on witches and hags. It wasn't until the mid-nineteenth century,
when women cinched in their waists with corsets, that commodious breasts became alluring, in, for instance, paintings by Gustave
Courbet and Eugene Delacroix.
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. Just as G.I.'s pined over chesty pinups, they also thirsted for milk—and
those on the front lines craved it more than those stationed near home. If one makes a link between the meanings of milk and
its infantile source, the top-heavy, hourglass shape of postwar fashion that Dior introduced with his "New Look" wasn't solely
about hobbling women so that they would retreat from the workplace. It was about meeting the returning troops' profound psychological
needs.
Barbie's absent nipples also comment on the extent to which those body parts have been eroticized in American culture. As
a clothes mannequin, Barbie has no functional need of nipples; yet their omission is critical to establishing her sexual "innocence"
and suitability for children. "So long as only the upper parts of the breasts are exposed, and the balance hidden, no sexual
excitement is produced and no shock is administered to modern morality," Lawrence Langer observes in
The Importance of Wearing Clothes.
"But let the nipples fall out and panic ensues!"
Barbie's combination of voluptuous body and wholesome image was precisely what Hugh Hefner sought in models for
Playboy,
which he founded in 1953. Although such classic pinups as Jayne Mansfield and Bettie Page appeared in the magazine's earliest
issues, Hefner's ideal Playmate was the girl next door—a member of a sorority house, not a house of ill repute. She was a
girl who looked, as David Halberstam put it in
The Fifties,
as if she'd "stopped off to do a
Playboy
shoot on her way to cheerleading practice." But although Hef's paradigm was a "good girl," she was—like Barbie—not on the
prowl for a husband. Before his recent reconversion to marriage, Hef's longtime girlfriend was
Barbie
Benton.
"Something I've thought about with
Playboy
and the Playmates is that they're women who are not really procreative females," Hanson observed. "They have very narrow hips,
very boyish figures, big false breasts and they're Playmates, not wives. So a man can escape the reality of his childbearing
wife. There's no possibility of her getting pregnant." The large breasts also encourage men to recall the scale of breasts
in infancy. Hence, too, the look of infertility: Men dread fathering a rival.
Mattel claims Barbie's hair is long because of children's fascination with "hairplay." But ever since Milton's portrait of
Eve in
Paradise Lost,
with her "golden tresses" falling "in wanton ringlets" to her waist, long hair has been part of the arsenal of seduction.
Marian the Librarian must shake loose her spinsterish bun before she can be seen as enticing. "Long-haired models and messy-haired
models are always more popular," Hanson explained. "If men want submissive women, they prefer them to be blond. If they want
dominant women, they want them to be dark-haired. But in general they want lots and lots of hair.
"Sometimes I'll use women with very short hair in
Leg Show
because a lot of my readers feel so inferior and believe so much in female superiority that they don't think there should
be any women who have sex with men," she continued. "They want them all to be lesbians." She handed me some photos. "Here's
'The Secret Sex Lives of Real Dykes'—a real lesbian couple in France who are posing. One of the women is older, non-made-up,
rough-looking. And men can fantasize that they're lesbians, which a lot of them wish they were."
Body hair, however, is perceived as repellent, Hanson said, "except by the small groups of men who want them furry like apes."
Like the nude female statues of ancient Greece, Barbie has no pubic fleece; but that's not, as in the case of the statues,
a reflection of women's actual appearance. The average contemporary woman, unlike her archaic counterpart, does not depilate
herself. Until recently, a nude rendered without pubic hair was considered arty, its opposite raunchy and obscene. But
Playboy's
love affair with the airbrush ended that. Its models may not be fully defoliated, but they are certainly pruned.
Because of the historical association of hair with sexual power and passion, John Berger thinks that the absence of body hair,
particularly in pornographic female subjects, is a way of making the male viewer more comfortable. The viewer doesn't want
to satisfy a symbolically voracious woman; he wants a woman to satisfy
him.
It's hard not to pity John Ruskin for having been born too soon. Had he come of age when women aped Barbie and, by extension,
Greek sculptures, he might have managed to consummate his marriage, instead of being revolted by the sight of his wife's pubic
hair.
Although the original Barbie's scarlet talons no longer connote wealth, they still mean power. "Nails are very erotic," Hanson
said. "There are men who like ragged nails because that indicates a rough nature—a woman who might drag them off to her lair
and devour them. Others prefer short nails because they represent youth."
Barbie's firm, showgirl bottom was perhaps underappreciated when she first appeared. In the 1990s, however, with breast implants
criticized as both life-threatening and fake-looking—attributes oddly cast as equal in their undesirability—"buns of steel"
have been anointed by such arbiters as
Allure
and
W
as today's status symbol. As with the postwar breast boom, it was not ever thus. In the 1730s, the idealized female body curved
at its sides but not at its front or back. "The figure was almost like roadkill, it was so flat," Richard Martin, director
of the Costume Institute at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, told
Allure.
Next derrieres were veiled by layers of clothes. It wasn't until the advent of the miniskirt in the 1960s that the female
hindquarters became an official object of desire. To achieve what
Allure
terms a "thumpable melon butt," a woman must not only firm her gluteus maximus, but (a la Barbie) wear high heels, which tilt
the rear end as much as 20 percent. This tilt arouses a man's inner ape. When female chimpanzees are in heat, their genitals
swell, and, as a seductive gesture, they angle their behinds in the direction of their mates.
"Older men and men who are looking for mates and for love relationships want bottom-heavy women," Hanson agreed. But Barbie-generation
men prefer that effect to be achieved bionically. "Lip jobs, butt jobs, tummy tucks, and boob jobs" are no longer sufficient
to qualify for a job in porn; the latest trend is "customized" genitalia. "I understand in L.A. it's fashionable among the
young porn models to get collagen injections in their labia to make them look more swollen and excited," she said.
The fashion for exaggerated depictions of sex, however, is not confined to pornography. In mainstream movies, soulful lovemaking
has given way to strenuous gymnastics—"iibersex," Walter Kirn calls it—the erotic act interpreted as a cartoon car chase.
Ubersex is what occurs between human-Barbie Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas in
Basic Instinct.
It is rigorous, yet tidy—a mating of mannequins, "taking the basic Ken-and-Barbie poses familiar to naughty ten-year-olds
and heaping on
Playboy-
approved perversions," Kirn writes in
Mirabella.
It is also utterly humorless.
Watching Stone and the other dolls in
Basic Instinct,
I thought of Jack Ryan and his R&D team in the 1960s, who eased some of their creative tension by playing pranks and shooting
one another with water pistols. They also did what engineer Derek Gable and others have characterized as "a lot of racy stuff"
with Barbie and Ken— modifying their anatomy and staging X-rated puppet shows. It's not surprising that imaginative grown
men with senses of humor joked that way with the dolls. What is extraordinary, though, is that thirty years later their ribald
gags would wind up in the movies, presented as everyday lovemaking.
One does not have to be female to affect Barbie's exaggerated "feminine" look, which may be part of its appeal. Before
The Crying Game,
a movie whose most beguiling "female" character isn't biologically female, one might have been hard pressed to argue that
drag queens have a more profound understanding of "femininity" than do biological women. But merely possessing an XX chromosome
does not guarantee a mastery of (or a desire to master) the stylized conventions of "femininity." The "feminine" signals that
say come hither to heterosexual men can be affected by persons of any gender; they have also been in large part invented for
women by gay men. "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. The doll is built like a transvestite, with broad shoulders, narrow hips, and huge breasts. Significantly, in the
late eighties and early nineties—when Barbie sales rocketed—the fashion industry worked hard to make the idealized female
body that of a drag queen. Designers like Jean-Paul Gaultier (whom we have to thank for the torpedo brassiere Madonna wore
outside
her clothes on her Blonde Ambition tour) and Stephen Sprouse were among the first to use male transvestites, such as Terri
Toye, a Barbie-esque blonde, to model women's clothes. Other designers followed: Todd Oldham employed Billy Erb, Kalinka engaged
Zaldy Soco, and Thierry Mugler brought out Connie Girl—a striking black "woman" who is also a Barbie collector. Race is no
impediment to copying Barbie: between his platinum wig and steep heels, black transvestite recording artist Ru-Paul—who, as
a child, excised the breasts from his Barbie dolls and, more recently, reported on the introduction of Mattel's Shani doll
for the BBC—does a good imitiation.