Authors: M. G. Lord
Forever Barbie (25 page)
So does the Lady Bunny, the drag queen who organized "Wigstock," an annual transgender Woodstock-type festival that takes
place in New York's East Village. She feels that the look of the early Barbies—the ones she knew as a little boy in Chattanooga,
Tennessee—had a significant impact on her style. "I loved the shiny hair," she told me, "which is a kind of cheap wig hair.
It's not meant to look natural, it's meant to look brassy and showbizzy. Which is a look I try to get—I love the wigs with
the big bumps in the back." Size-twelve, Barbie-style mules also assist her trompe l'oeil; they lengthen her legs and curve
their calves, making them appear more "feminine." If the shoes are a little small and the heel hangs over, that's okay, she
explained. The overhang is called a "biscuit."
When she was a child, her parents were reluctant to buy her a Barbie; they feared it might affect her gender identification.
When they eventually relented, she used the doll to puzzle out the components of "femininity," or "the tricks of the trade,"
as she calls them. She is still envious of the effortlessness with which the doll pulls off certain hard-to-achieve effects.
"It's so easy for
her
to work those evening capes with the crinkled taffeta," she said. Had I only spoken to her while she was in drag, I might
not have appreciated the extent to which her "look" was "worked," or been viscerally struck by how artificial the cues that
telegraphed "feminine" were. When we made a date for tea, I had expected to interview her stage persona— a Barbie doll with
a sweet southern drawl. But she met me as her offstage persona—a clean-cut young man wearing blue jeans and a hooded sweatshirt,
the image of Ron Howard in
American Graffiti.
Vaginal Davis, a poet, drag queen, and self-described "Blacktress," with the bearing of Norma Desmond and the seeming height
(in heels) of Michael Jordan, also acknowledges a debt to the doll. As a child, Davis used Barbie and her friends to project
herself beyond boundaries of gender and class, to invent the "woman" she is today. "Growing up in the inner city I wasn't
a part of what you might call 'society,' " she told me. "And I always thought that I was born in the wrong social sphere—the
wrong social class. I should have been a debutante. I should have been going to a Seven Sisters school. I should have been
jet-setting to Milan and dining with heads of state and living a very Audrey Hepburn sort of life—far from my life in the
projects, in Watts." Although she couldn't afford authentic Mattel outfits, she made clothes out of found objects and scrap
materials—ball gowns and coronation dresses—inspired by her other childhood fascination: English royalty.
Some say drag queens perpetuate demeaning stereotypes of women; others argue that by caricaturing stereotypes of gender, they
subvert them. What's interesting about both positions is the assumption that "femininity" is something quite different from
actually being a woman, just as "masculinity" has little to do with actually being a man.
These days, for human beings, gender identity can be something of a morass. Nearly two decades ago, in an essay on "Primary
Femininity," psychiatrist Robert Stoller used the term "core gender identity" to refer to a child's concrete sense of his
or her sex. Stoller took into consideration the fact that the biological sex of a child and its gender were not always the
same. Developmental geneticists had discovered that without some exposure to fetal androgens, anatomical maleness could not
occur—even in a child with XY chromosomes. Likewise, with the wrong sort of exposure to fetal androgens, a fetus with XX chromosomes
would develop as an anatomical male. Then there were the hermaphrodites for whom sex assignment at birth was completely arbitrary.
For those of you who are counting, we are up to
five
sexes now. But because society only recognizes two, children who were not clearly boys or girls were nonetheless placed in
one of those categories. And, ideally, their "core gender identity" developed in accordance with the decision that the attending
physician made in the delivery room.
Today, the trendier gender theorists argue that the assignment of gender is by definition imprecise. Because of the limitations
of the binary system, all gendering is "drag." "Drag constitutes the mundane way in which genders are appropriated, theatricalized,
worn, done," Judith Butler writes in "Imitation and Gender Insubordination." "Gender is a kind of imitation for which there
is no original," she argues. What the so-called genders imitate is a "phantasmic ideal of heterosexual identity."
Regardless of whether this "ideal of heterosexual identity" is "phantasmic" in people, however, it seems pretty real in Barbie
and Ken—or maybe Barbie and G.I. Joe, since Ken, in response to research showing that pronounced male secondary sex characteristics
scare little girls, has lost his macho edge. 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.
Heterosexual men use pornographic renderings of the Barbie archetype for sexual fantasies, just as children use the actual
doll for make-believe. Although Barbie looks like an adult, children wield power over her—in much the same way that a male
viewer, through projected fantasy, wields power over the female object in a pornographic image. In her short story "A Real
Doll," A. M. Homes picks the scab off this relationship and probes it through the musings of her narrator, a boy who is "dating"
his sister's Barbie. This involves making the doll complicit in his autoerotic escapades—"the secret habits that seem normal
enough to us, but which we know better than to mention out loud." Rape her, fondle her, feed her Valium. Masturbate into the
hollow body of her boyfriend. Barbie will never squeal.
In writing the story, Homes was interested not only in the doll, but in "what it means to be a 'good girl' or 'good boy' at
that really odd moment when no matter how hard you try, you can't," she told me. "Because you're coming into a sort of sexual
life and it seems inescapably perverse—no matter what you do."
Although Homes was aware of the doll as a child in Chevy Chase, Maryland, it was not central to her life. "I grew up in one
of those families where we didn't have guns or dolls or anything," she said. "My parents' idea of a good gift would be a blank
piece of paper. If it could have been Marxist Barbie, it probably would have been fine. But Barbie symbolized all the wrong
things."
Homes bought her first Barbie while a graduate student at the University of Iowa. When she displayed it above her fireplace,
she found visitors could not resist undressing it. "These were adult people coming into my home, immediately going to my mantel
and taking off the doll's clothing," she said. "Men, women,
whatever
came in the door. And I thought: Why are they doing this? And they would proceed to then tell me all the horrible things that
they had done to Barbie as a child—sort of abusing her in my presence. People were telling me how they chewed her feet off,
they took her head off. And I told them: You're maniacs."
But the anecdotes stayed with her, as did Barbie's powerlessness. In "A Real Doll," she contrasts the difference between a
boy's perception of the doll and a girl's. The boy is comfortable with Barbie's foreignness and objectification; the girl,
who compares Barbie unfavorably with herself, is not— and she retaliates by mutilating the doll. Not all little girls gravitate
as naturally to Barbie's "feminine" affectations and "traditional sexual power" as did Dian Hanson or the Lady Bunny. "We
live in a world where it's hard to be a person and a girl," Homes told me. "When I put on high heels— number one, I've actually
broken my leg just trying to walk in the things. But I become a very different person. Because I can't even cross a room as
Amy Homes. All of a sudden, I'm crossing as Amy Homes, Girl.
"Men think they would like a real-life Barbie, but if they met her, they wouldn't want to go near her," Homes elaborated.
"She'd be seven feet tall and she'd be too scary."
Playboy's
1991 photo spread on the "Barbi Twins," however, suggests otherwise. Photographed wallowing in wet sand on Maui, the pair—who
call themselves Shane and Sia—are a bizarre assemblage of anatomical components, notably four gargantuan breasts that, proportionately,
are even larger than the doll's. Former belly dancers with slim hips that would look right at home on a fourteen-year-old
boy, the two actually described themselves to
Newsday
as "truckdrivers in drag." Although
Playboy
presents them with its characteristic earnestness, there is something almost laugh-aloud funny about their mismatched body
parts. And, to their credit, they seem both to have understood and exploited the fact that they are walking errors in scale.
First they named themselves after an eleven-and-a-half-inch doll; then, in 1989, posted giant photos of themselves on a billboard
over Sunset Boulevard. It was as if Barbie, the ultimate controllable object, got her revenge by starring in
Attack of the
Fifty-Foot Woman.
Or perhaps I should say "Barbi"—their
e
disappeared after objections from Mattel.
Evidence suggests that the doll themes that excite heterosexual men are not of equal interest to lesbians. In 1989, when
On Our Backs
published photos of a Barbie-like doll used as a dildo, readers protested. "Is this what you call erotic?" one less-than-euphemistic
reader began. "Barbie is the ugliest piece of shit to come out of Amerikan factories." Fantasies involving scale, power, and,
well, brand penetration would appear to be principally male.
Grown men amusing themselves with adult female dolls is not new in the history of fetishism, which, as Louise J. Kaplan has
explained, "involves using deadened and dehumanized objects as a substitute for living, excited persons." The German Lilli
doll is part of an international tradition of pornographic miniatures. Mascot Models, an English firm, currently markets six-inch
replicas of naked women with detailed genitalia in the sort of hobby shops that sell model trains, boats, and airplanes. The
"girls," which often come with boots or whips, can be assembled with "thick superglue or five-minute epoxy" and (oral fetishists
beware!) are made of metal parts containing lead. Far safer to gnaw upon are the Japanese-made miniatures of Caucasian women
in bondage that artist David Levinthal used in his 1991 series of photographs called
Desire.
Available by mail order only, they come in chains, ropes, and leather gags; their legs splayed or trussed up like a dead deer's.
One even hangs on a cross. Like their English counterparts, the dolls must be glued together and painted.
There is even a historical interface between soft pornographic miniatures and the toy industry. When Louis Marx ran Marx Toys,
he produced several limited editions of "American Beauties"—six-inch plastic nude or seminude female figures that he handed
out as gag gifts to his friends. 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.
For subscribers to Dian Hanson's
Leg Show,
however, Barbie has lost none of the Lilli doll's fetishistic appeal. When Hanson invited her readers to comment on Barbie,
many replied—the most eloquent of which was a rural New England foot fetishist who wished to be identified only as "Resident."
Part Russ Meyer, part Jonathan Swift, his fantasy, if filmed, might be titled
Barbie Does Brobdingnag.
"Barbie's legs are the most noteworthy feature of her whole body," his letter begins. "I've spent hours caressing them and
examining them, kissing them and sucking them. I've found that their form and shape closely resemble real women's legs. They
are warm to the touch and bend in much the same manner as the human leg does, with the curvature of the calf becoming more
round when the knee is bent." Barbie, he feels "lacks only three human features: 1) leg and foot scent, 2) a rounded heel
and 3) digits for toes.
"I have an incredibly strong sex drive and realized long ago that most women either don't understand or take seriously my
love of their legs and feet," he explains. "I ended up being left out in the cold all the time— lonely, depressed and frustrated.
Thus the Barbie doll is important to me. I can play out my sexual fantasies with the kind of woman I want in real life. I
can dress her and undress her any way I want. Her elegant legs can be posed in a variety of positions. My favorite is with
her back leaning against a pillow, legs bent slightly at the knee with her two hands holding onto her thigh, which may be
raised up as if she were massaging it. . . .
"If they made a life-size, realistic, fully functional Barbie doll I would probably marry it," he goes on. "I have grown to
love Barbie as if she were a real woman and I envy 'Ken' with a passion. Why Mattel hooked her up with such a John Doe is
beyond me. Hooking sweet and beautiful Barbie up with a guy ruins the magic.