Why Barbie Must Be Punished

The Weekend Essay – Why Barbie Must Be Punished

By Leslie Jamison | July 29, 2023

My childhood Barbies were always in trouble. I was constantly giving them diagnoses of rare diseases, performing risky surgeries to cure them, or else kidnapping them—jamming them into the deepest reaches of my closet, without plastic food or plastic water, so they could be saved again, returned to their plastic doll-cakes and their slightly-too-small wooden home. (My mother had drawn her lines in the sand; we had no Dreamhouse.) My abusive behavior was nothing special. Most girls I know liked to mess their Barbies up; and when it comes to child’s play, crisis is hardly unusual. It’s a way to make sense of the thrills and terrors of autonomy, the problem of other people’s desires, the brute force of parental disapproval. But there was something about Barbie that especially demanded crisis: her perfection. That’s why Barbie needed to have a special kind of surgery; why she was dying; why she was in danger. She was too flawless, something had to be wrong. I treated Barbie the way a mother with Munchausen syndrome by proxy might treat her child: I wanted to heal her, but I also needed her sick. I wanted to become Barbie, and I wanted to destroy her. I wanted her perfection, but I also wanted to punish her for being more perfect than I’d ever be.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

• Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being
• Goal 5: Gender Equality
• Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities
• Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production

It’s not that I literally wanted to become her, of course—to wake up with a pair of hard plastic tits, coarse blond hair, waxy holes in my feet betraying the robotic fingerprint of my factory birthplace—but some part of me was already chasing the false gods she spoke for: beauty as a kind of spiritual guarantor, writing blank checks for my destiny; the self-effacing ease afforded by wealth and whiteness; selfhood as triumphant brand consistency, the erasure of opacity and self-destructive tendency. I craved all of these—still do, sometimes—even as my own awareness of their impossibility makes me want to destroy their false prophet: Barbie as snake-oil saleswoman hawking the existential and plasticine wares of her impossible femininity, one Pepto-Bismol-pink pet shop at a time.

Even after I grew out of playing with Barbies, I found a surrogate to embody the same fraught double helix of adoration and resentment: the popular girl. As a figure, the popular girl was at once supernatural—larger than life—and many-headed all around me. At my prep school in Los Angeles, popular girls were everywhere, spritzing themselves with the Gap perfume called Heaven and presumably all gathering at the same Beverly Hills mansion to snort coke, get waxed, and act aloof around the same boys who only ever spoke to me if they were asking to borrow my TI-82 graphing calculator. It only got worse when I became friendly with two of these popular girls—we ran cross-country together—and found them wickedly funny, and (worse) genuinely nice. It all seemed like a cosmic clerical error, a lopsided allocation of assets. The story that was helping me survive my own adolescence—that the popular girls were hopelessly vapid and morally bankrupt—had collapsed; now I had a more robust vision of their superiority, validated and verified, to wear like a hair shirt. Turns out that Barbie was just the first name I gave to the lifelong project of punishing myself with the imagined perfection of others.

SDGs

• Goal 4: Quality Education
• Goal 5: Gender Equality
• Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities

If Barbie embodied something that always felt beyond my reach, then playing with Barbie—subjecting her to an array of trials and tribulations—was less about becoming her than it was about exerting some sort of power over the archetypes that tyrannized me. I didn’t have to become her; I could be her god—a loving god, or a vengeful one. Walter Benjamin once observed that “ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects,” but—as everyone knows—intimacy is never a pure feeling. It’s never as simple as unmitigated affection or adoration; it’s always striated with resistance and resentment. Perhaps this is what Barbie offers, the chance to feel both things at once: wanting something and wanting to destroy it. Wanting to become something and hating yourself for wanting to become it.

SDGs

• Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities
• Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production

Greta Gerwig’s summer blockbuster, “Barbie”—fuelled by a marketing campaign so large you can practically see it from outer space—knows that much of Barbie’s appeal stems from the fact that people love to hate her. The film’s slogan promises “If you love Barbie, this film is for you; If you hate Barbie, this film is for you,” a pledge that seems to knowingly get it while actually missing the point entirely. It frames love and hate as mutually exclusive states, when Barbie’s power rises from her ability to make you love her and hate her at once.

SDGs

• Goal 5: Gender Equality
• Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities
• Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production

In the early stages of developing Barbie, in the late nineteen-fifties, Mattel commissioned a report from a marketing expert named Ernest Dichter, who recommended leaning into

SDGs, Targets, and Indicators

1. Which SDGs are addressed or connected to the issues highlighted in the article?

• SDG 5: Gender Equality
• SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities
• SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production

2. What specific targets under those SDGs can be identified based on the article’s content?

• SDG 5.1: End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere
• SDG 10.2: Empower and promote the social, economic, and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion, or economic or other status
• SDG 12.5: By 2030, substantially reduce waste generation through prevention, reduction, recycling, and reuse

3. Are there any indicators mentioned or implied in the article that can be used to measure progress towards the identified targets?

• No specific indicators are mentioned in the article.

Table: SDGs, Targets, and Indicators

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Source: newyorker.com

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