Me and Barbie

I am so old that I have next to no feelings or opinion about Barbie, the doll. My parents essentially did not want me to participate in popular culture at all, and saw to it that I did not in so far as they could. I was and am a good girl, so I simply did not, which further excluded me from pop culture. I tend to look at it from the outside and sort of analyze, which the Catholic church with its long history of intellectual leadership, carefully and insanely taught me to do. Essentially, I don't care what anyone does, but I do look at it with an analytic approach. The best classes I ever had in thinking were in English literature, theology, and algebra at St Michael's Catholic school for girls. For the record, the church also formed my aesthetic sense, based on this same long tradition.

Of course, that was completely nuts for an institution descending into an insanity of power hunger. By the way, as far as I can tell, no one on Earth is stupid enough to teach literature that way any more. Now professors tell you what to think; you memorize and spit it back, but the damage had already been done as far as I was concerned. I get my A unless the professor is insane and gets my attention at the same time. That is hard, but not impossible. Then I think exactly what I want. I also read what I want. That helps me to think.There are actually a few other people like me, minding their own business, making their own judgments, rolling along, despite the subversive originality of their thought.

Back to Barbie. My younger sisters were teenagers when Barbie's hard face appeared in toy stores. By then, Mother and Daddy had thrown in the towel, and my sisters both had Barbies in abundance. When my children came along, I was determined that they would be as happy as I could arrange for them to be. I really didn't care much whether they could think. Thinking clearly has been forced on me by pain, and I damned well did not want that for anyone I loved. However, the idea was that guns were bad for little boys, and people should not waste their time on TV, which kind of made sense to me. No TV, no guns. TV is boring anyway. Well my son started sneaking down the street to watch Speed Racer; we bought a TV. My older brother gave my son a real gun for his 10th birthday. The kid was furious when I took it away; he has still never forgiven me; we gave him toy guns for Christmas. Towel thrown in.

I thought Barbie was a poor model for young girls, but I could not stop Manuel's family from lovingly giving my girl every variety of Barbie doll they could find. I read Bettleheim. He was not always wrong, whatever he did to actual parents and children. When a person wants something, there is always a reason. If they get the thing, they can think or feel about the thing and what it means to them. Little girls are running over lines of princess Barbie's in their mothers' cars. They are real American middle class girls. That means something. Something to think about. By the way, my children were so beloved and spoiled that they never gave that red bike a thought; they knew they could have the moon if it could be found and bought. They decided for themselves what to think, and they still do. They make lots of mistakes, like all of us, but they don't actually go out and shoot strangers' babies to make them free.







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Wednesday, March 05, 2008


art, pain and conformity