Barbie: Feminist Icon or Toxic Ideal of Beauty? – 7/20/2023 – Balance and Health

Greta Gerwig’s new film causes frenzy around the world, but what’s behind the Barbie myth? There she is—a monolith in a desert landscape: icon, goddess, superwoman.

Margot Robbie, the Barbie from Greta Gerwig’s movie, removes her sunglasses from her face and, over the rim, winks at her admirers. Meanwhile, a little girl rips her old doll apart and hurls her into space to the bombastic sound of Richard Strauss.

The scene, previously released for publicity purposes, not only alludes to Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001 film: “A Space Odyssey”, but also refers to the founding myth – and the recipe for success of the Barbie doll.

The idea of ​​Ruth Handler, the “Barbie Mom”, after all, was not to bring to the world yet another doll with which her daughter and her little friends could train for the future role of mothers reserved for them. The new doll, which would become one of the best selling toys around the world, was a young, self-assured and attractive woman. What’s more, she had a job, which was unusual in 1959, the year Barbie was born.

The American Ruth Handler (1916-2002) came from a Jewish-Polish family of emigrants in which everyone, male or female, had to contribute to the maintenance of the household. Alongside her husband Elliot and Harold Matson, she founded the Mattel company in a garage in 1945, focused on the production of frames and furniture for dollhouses. As doll furniture sold well, the small company ended up specializing in the production of various toys, thus achieving worldwide success.

During a trip to Europe in 1959, Ruth Handler ended up coming across copies of a doll called Bild Lilli, which had been sold in Germany since 1955, with its image inspired by a comic strip in the Bild tabloid aimed at an adult audience. The doll had similar proportions to the models that would become Barbie. Handler returned to the US with several in her luggage, to serve as a basis for creating her own line of dolls.

Barbie: message of an “unlimited potential”

Like her creator, Barbie also made a career. And not as a secretary, something common at the time, but as a doctor, airline pilot, astronaut — and even president of the United States (where, it is worth noting, no woman has ever reached such a position in the real world). And even today, one of the toy company’s pledges is to “mobilize the limitless potential” of every girl.

For American writer Susan Shapiro, an inveterate fan of Barbie, the message is clear: “You don’t have to be a mother and take care of small children. You don’t have to get married.

Barbie even has her own home and car — and since 1961, also a loyal companion at her side, always sitting in the passenger seat: Ken. But he never managed to keep up with the glamor of the diva, and this is conveyed in the film through a sad song sung by Ryan Gosling in the role of the puppet: “No matter what I do, I’m always number two. I’m just Ken”, he laments.

Feminist icon or toxic ideal of beauty?

The fact that Ruth Handler turned the doll, named after her daughter Barbara, into a hard-working, financially independent woman was a provocation in the conservative world of the 1950s and early 1960s. However, Barbie ended up gaining a bad reputation in feminist circles that persists to this day. For American author and feminist Jill Filipovic, the doll conveys “an unhealthy and idealized image of femininity and what it means to be an attractive, good and dignified woman”.

Elongated legs, little guitar waist, toned body. With Barbie, the ideal standard of beauty was transported to the children’s room: “Young, white, without disabilities, willing and able to act in a capitalist world”, sums up cultural scientist Elisabeth Lechner in an interview with DW. A questionable ideal that, as studies suggest, can trigger disturbed body image in girls.

Barbie becomes more diverse

Mattel responded by expanding the range of its products and making them more diverse. Today, there are already Barbies with bodies of different sizes, with prosthetic legs, in a wheelchair, undergoing chemotherapy and, more recently, with Down syndrome. But for Elisabeth Lechner, who has dealt extensively with body images and the subject of body positivity, that doesn’t change the core problem: “There are now studies that show that forms of objectification, even those with good intentions, i.e. with positive compliments on someone’s appearance, end up reminding women that everything comes down to their appearance.”

The first black Barbie

The first step towards diversification was taken in the 1960s, when deep racial conflicts shook the United States. In the year that Martin Luther King was assassinated, Christie, the first black doll in the Barbie universe, appeared. In her documentary Black Barbie, director Lagueria Davis tells what that story was like.

It was African-American workers like Lagueria Davis’s aunt, Beulah Mae Mitchell, who convinced Ruth Handler of the idea: “We want a toy for blacks!” They wanted a black doll; a doll that African-American girls could identify with. “Because if the toys we play with are very different from us, what does that mean?” asks Lagueria Davis.

That’s how the black Christie doll appeared — which until 1980 could not be called Barbie. “The Mattel narrative is one thing. There, they were very progressive and presented a black friend for Barbie”, criticizes Lagueria Davis. “That’s how black women became part of the Barbie universe. They think it’s progressive, but that’s not how we see it. After all, for 21 years there hasn’t been a black doll worthy of the Barbie brand.”

Still, at the time it was a triumph for many women of Beulah May Mitchell’s generation: a black Barbie—proof that African-American women were beautiful, that they could be glamorous and successful.

competition from africa

In the meantime, black Barbie gained a strong rival on the African continent. The person responsible for putting it on the market in 2007 was the Nigerian businessman Taofick, moved by a comment from his daughter, who said in an interview that she would rather be white than black, because “white is beautiful”. Since then, he started looking for a character that would show African girls that they too could be proud of the color of their skin and the shape of their body. And so the “Queens of Africa” ​​emerged, which are not restricted to black women, repeating a globalized ideal of beauty: Okoya dolls are based on the different skin tones of many Nigerian ethnic groups, their hairstyles and clothing. “The message from the Queens of Africa is: this is my identity. This is me,” says Taofick Okoya.

Is Barbie sustainable?

A doll is much more than a toy. She can be a role model for a child, shaping a whole future image of normalcy and beauty. No wonder, therefore, that Barbie, probably the best-selling doll in the world, still inflames debates, whether about empowerment or about obsession with beauty. And, last but not least, also about sustainability — after all, making the doll involves a lot of plastic. According to The Conversation media network, American researchers quantified the cost of the doll to the environment: each 182 gram unit causes about 660 grams of carbon emissions. The calculation includes production, manufacturing and transport of plastic.

Insightfully over the six-decade history of Barbie, Mattel has shaped its marketing strategy in the spirit of the times, now even offering a version made from recycled plastic. Barbie is probably the “most woken doll” ever. There’s only one thing she still hasn’t managed to date: getting old. Regardless of her skin color, Barbie is “forever young”.