Throwback: 17-year-old Claire defends Barbie (and Women's Intelligence)
August 2, 2023
The below article appeared March 9, 2009 in The Daily Record, which was then my local paper. I was a high school senior at the time, and someone in West Virginia wanted to ban dolls that "influence girls to be beautiful." (Yes, seriously. Even The Guardian covered it.) Incensed, I hit back with this op-ed, the thesis of which is effectively, "Stop underestimating women's capacity for critical thought." Last week when we saw the live-action Barbie in theaters, my mother was reminded of this op-ed, and reached out to the paper to get a copy. Here it is in all its late-Aughts glory...
The power of plastic
For a little girl, Barbie a reason to dream big
To my great consternation, a lawmaker in West Virginia is seeking to ban the sale of Barbie dolls, on the grounds that they "influence girls to place too much importance on physical beauty, at the expense of their intellectual and emotional development."
Aside from questioning whether this should be a government priority in such troubled times, my first reaction is that Democratic Delegate Jeff Eldridge may be overestimating the power of a plastic doll.
A Barbie, like most toys, is highly adaptable. For one thing, she and her extended network of family and friends can be purchased with hundreds of outfits and accessories. More importantly, though, Barbie is not so much a character as an actor. Barbie has been, in various animated movies, Rapunzel, 12 dancing princesses, the fairy Elina, a princess and a pauper, Princess Odette of Swan Lake, and Clara of The Nutcracker, to name a few. There is no counting how many other people she has been in living rooms across the world. Since many little girls (and the occasional little boy) have more than one Barbie doll, each Barbie is likely to have a different name and place in the family -- and these can change every day.
As children, I estimate that my sister and I were blessed with 12 Barbie dolls. Our family went on vacation almost exclusively to historical sites, and we used the stories we heard there as templates for our games. Thus, Barbie crossed the Atlantic (the rug) on a sailing ship (a very big pillow) and lived in a tenement (under a chair) while trying to learn English and assimilate into American culture. Barbie also crossed the Great Plains (the hall) in a covered wagon (the pillow again) in order to settle the West.
Was Barbie unrealistic, body-wise? Absolutely. She had built-in high heels, her hair never grew, and if her head fell off, Mommy could glue it. The important thing was that no matter how many Barbies we had or how long we kept them, they never changed size or had to wear hand-me-downs. Everything we put on them fit perfectly right away, so we could go on with our prairie-crossing and natural-disaster-managing*.
Besides, what real woman can simultaneously be a big sister, a flight attendant, a doctor, a teacher, a cafeteria worker, an astronaut, a surfer chick, a riding instructor, and a high school student with a cute boyfriend? Barbie's life was an impossible goal, but it was also an invitation to dream big.
I wanted to be a teacher like her, I wanted to be a doctor like her, I wanted to have an elevator in my house like her. Yes, I also wanted to own that many ball gowns and have that great of a man around, but hey, I never got to cross the prairie either. Playing with Barbie was an entertaining bit of wish fulfillment, followed by a lesson in responsibility -- the importance of picking up Barbie's shoes before Daddy steps on one barefoot.
Are there women in the world with bad self esteem, who obsess over looks and define themselves in terms of the men in their lives? Of course. Did Barbie cause that? I am not so sure.** Barbie, in many of her incarnations, was a successful, blonde, career woman; she even broke up with Ken*** a few years ago without her life being over. In the real world, women usually earn less than men and face a glass ceiling; being single is often seen as failure.
Women dye their hair blonde to be more attractive, yet dumb blonde jokes would have us believe that a blonde-haired lady could never be a teacher, a doctor, or an astronaut, let alone all three. On top of all that, we live in a society where a celebrity gaining five pounds is news.
I survived my Barbie-infested childhood. I go to a school with uniforms. I don't put on makeup unless I want to. I rarely wear high heels, and my hair is short. I am a Girl Scout, a member of three choirs, a chocolate dipper, and president of the school math league. For two years, I ran a program that sent 17,628 boxes of Girl Scout Cookies to troops overseas, and coordinated the efforts of three defense contractors and 250 Girl Scouts to do so. I have a 4.4 GPA, straight A's in all my classes, two college acceptances (so far), top scores on three AP tests, and applications pending at four Ivy League colleges. I also have storage bins full of Barbies and their clothes, furniture, and accessories -- right next to the storage bin of books that I no longer have space for in my room. I've succeeded thus far regardless of my toy choices.
I thank Eldridge for his concern over my intellect, but I think it's doing just fine without him.
Claire Marinello, is a senior at DePaul Catholic High School in Wayne. She lives in Montville.
*Natural disaster management was a game my sister and I would play, in which Barbie's Dream House represented the "high ground" and all the other dolls had to evacuate to it during a flood. I'm not making this up.
**Now I'm sure the answer is "no."
***This is an actual thing that got covered by actual newspapers. They got back together in 2011. Then 20 years old, I purchased the "Together Again" commemorative set. Here I am with it:
14 years later and...
I still don't wear makeup. I am a teacher (adjunct professor, in fact) with a master's degree and a list of publications. I 100% stand by my teenaged defense of Barbie. Now, though, I have additional context for the "let's ban Barbie" lawmaker.
See, I've witnessed quite a few examples of male lawmakers trying to legislate women's lives in the past decade and a half. Remember when Congress was trying to decide if Obamacare should mandate insurance coverage of birth control? Remember how people said "some women need contraception to handle medical conditions like endometriosis or PCOS"? Which is true, except pregnancy is also a medical condition, so why on earth wouldn't contraception be covered by health insurance?
For that matter, remember how last year the Supreme Court struck down a woman's right to choose in Dobbs v. Jackson, with all 4 of the concurring opinions written by men? And remember how that got abortion banned in 14 states, including some that outright refuse to make exceptions for situations where nonviable pregnancies are killing the pregnant woman? Remember how one of the justifications offered for banning abortion was that doctors were somehow misleading women into wanting abortions, and if the procedure were simply outlawed, every pregnant woman would magically be happy to continue her pregnancy?
Did you ever notice the underlying assumption in all these attempts to regulate women's lives? Here it is: "We can't trust women and girls to make their own decisions. The state has to step in and protect them."
Nobody would put it that way in public, of course. But I hear it loud and clear when people argue against offering real-world, comprehensive sex education because "it'll give teenagers ideas." I hear it when people say doctors should be required to offer "detailed descriptions" of a fetus every time they offer a termination, lest the patient somehow misunderstand the fact that she is pregnant. I hear it when victims of sexual harassment are told they should "toughen up" and "not take it so personally." It even bleeds into critiques of my blog, when people say, "But audiences seem to love entertainment where the women die! If women don't like it, they just shouldn't watch!" The drumbeat underneath all of this rhetoric is that women can't speak for themselves, or think critically, or objectively determine their own preferences and boundaries, or even choose their own toys to play with!
Enough, Patriarchy. I want my gender-balanced entertainment and my healthcare and my income equality and my equal rights and, yes, MY BARBIES. You're gonna have to pry 'em from my cold, dead hands.