My Barbiography

Throughout plenty of my formative years, Barbie was my idol. Along with many other girls my age, there was something deeply appealing to me about a person who had acquired their own private jet license and pet zebra. Barbie was an extremely high achiever, whose career took many brave and interesting turns (Dentist Barbie, Olympic gymnast Barbie, Ambassador for 'World Peace' Barbie), and it's a wonder she managed it all; as scientists have pointed out, a real woman with her bodily dimensions would be forced to walk on all fours due to the elegancy of her wrists and ankles, and the length of her neck would make her incapable of lifting her head.
I dressed up as her. She came along on our holidays. She lit up my life in the form of a lampshade and particularly lurid set of bedroom curtains. And whilst my friends were starting to devote increasing amounts of time to the local boys, I still felt more at ease in the safe and private 'girls' world' that Barbie furnished for me, rather than stringing along with them. I was entrusted with our old video-camera as a kid, and another big hobby of mine was reeling off hundreds of stop-start animations involving plasticine, and often my dolls too. I never felt like a loner when I was in their company, and I liked that I could keep Ken as the discretional accessory to my stories that he was.
Our time together ended formally when my mum took Barbie and her friends on one final outing to the charity shop. And I didn't really take the blow too badly at the time as I had other things to fill my mind and new ways of keeping entertained, such as the emerging of the internet, a new-found love of a simulated-people computer game called 'The Sims', and a deepening sense of dread for secondary school. My mother had been quite firm in her decision that it was time to give Barbie up, that I was approaching 'a bit too old to be playing with dolls' age. I wasn't the first in the family to be into them perhaps a little later in life than most; my aunt is an avid collector of vintage Sindy dolls, a pastime which is looked upon and talked about by the rest of the family with a respectful mixture of compliance and pity. But If I'm completely honest, I don't think I would find doll or doll memorabilia collecting such a bad bit of fun, if it wasn't for the social shame it might make me feel. People who play with dolls into adulthood are commonly deemed 'weird'.
As so many of us do, I swiftly became quite repressed in my early teens, turning "goth" for a brief period in a staunch rejection of anything pink or 'pop'. As the years crept by I gradually forgot the joy Barbie had once brought to my life. But stuck for project ideas in my final year of university, on a module titled 'Subversive Children's Literature', she came to my rescue once again and I decided to reflect on Barbie as a career role-model. I designed and created 'Postal Carrier Barbie': an attempt at a less gender-specifc adaptation of her; one daring enough to perform a role considered to be a 'man's job'. It was an attempt to challenge the highly glamourous and sexually-objectified doll that I had known and loved in order to provide a more realistic career model for girls with lower school grades or from less wealthy backgrounds.
Standing in the toy aisle of Tesco's, squinting at the shocking-pink shelves to select my victim, the old, forbidden feelings flooded back. Later at home, I got to relive the rush of untwisting the little sandwich-bag wires which clamped her limbs into place. I stripped her of her sassy mini-dress, removed her copious makeup with acetone, chopped her hair into a bob and fashioned her a new postal-carrier outfit from felt, completed by a red shoulder bag with miniature origami envelopes and tiny readable letters inside. She was the eight year old feminist's dream. She was educational, too, as I included a simple 'follow-the-arrows' type instruction, intended to help children with writing their first letters, in the romantic hope that my infantile audience would enthusiastically begin blanketing their extended families' doormats.
I received one of my highest grades for my efforts, but I couldn't help but feel I'd created a bit of a monster; the dull eyes behind her cavalier smile brought me unexpected pain. It was almost like I'd performed a voodoo; I had hurt someone, or something, far away, and yet very close to me. To this day, the bombastic glittery platforms I stole alongside the rest of her original garb rattle about somewhere at the back of my desk drawer.
There is something very 'pink' about my personality through which I related to Barbie; or perhaps it was Barbie who persuaded me to ascribe the colour pink to that sense of my femininity. However, because of her maturity and womanliness, I was always aware of a distance between us as I played; she was more of an aspiration than a friend. To study me and my routine nowadays I don't compare to her much; the scuffed, muddy shoes I ordinarily wear not much akin to her pristine rows of plastic heels. But that's not to say that I haven't ever tried to model myself by her in some subconscious way, especially when I was even younger and wished almost daily that I could stretch my legs longer and press my tummy flatter, mould my boobs rounder, like the power I once had over my plasticine. And I've always been a little haunted by what I 'could' have been, if only I'd been blessed at birth with brains and beauty like hers.
Barbie has experienced a drop in sales in recent years, and has been no stranger to controversy across the decades, particularly in regard to her measurements which, studied in info-graphics, would make her possibly anorexic if she were a reality. She has been criticised as a degrading stereotype of women, and linked to our epidemic of body hatred amongst young girls, something I've certainly not been immune to growing up (and still am not). But it seems a bit foolhardy to blame her solely for these foibles in our society and, on a more superficial level, my fascination for the fabulous miniature keeps drawing me back to her defense. All that said, I don't play with dolls anymore, and it's comforting to think that after all this writing I can unwind in a more normal way; by playing 'The Sims', for instance.