Q: It is the eternal question: Is Barbie feminist or anti feminist? On the one hand, she’s a CEO, a paleontologist, a paratrooper and an astronaut who went to the moon before women were permitted to vote. On the other hand she’s, well, Barbie — plastic toy with unattainable proportions who once announced that “Math is hard!” and inspired chants of “I am not a Barbie doll!” at the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality in New York City. Is there a research-backed, academically sound way to answer this question — once and for all?
Wasserman: I’m afraid there’s no way to answer this question simply, in large part because regardless of how Barbie is designed and marketed, some people will always use Barbie in subversive ways. Barbie certainly promotes unattainable, toxic beauty ideals as well as an image of whiteness that’s deeply harmful. The first African American doll in the Barbie range is usually regarded as Christie, who debuted in 1968, almost 10 years after Barbie’s initial launch. Black and Latinx Barbie dolls were released in 1980. But blonde, white, hyper-feminine, impossibly thin Barbie remains a potent symbol. And this matters. As Toni Morrison put it so searingly in her 1970 novel The Bluest Eye, “Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs — all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.” This is incredibly damaging and is a lasting part of Barbie’s legacy.
However, no one — not even Mattel — can script how people will actually use or relate to Barbie. To use myself as an example, I was a tomboy and thought Barbie was boring. I had one Barbie that I used to experiment on: She was many different colors thanks to food coloring, had a wild hair cut (calling Weird Barbie from the movie!) and was launched from slingshots, submerged in water, melted over candle flames, and used as an obstacle in courses built for my gerbil.
Q: There’s been so many think pieces about Barbie in recent weeks/years. What do you think is missing from the mainstream Barbie discourse?
Wasserman: I’d like to see more discussion of plastic and its oddly enduring place at the center of toy culture. Despite growing environmental awareness and a general anti-plastic trend, Barbie endures in her plastic glory. I wonder if Mattel has ever thought about using other materials, or what the environmental effects of their manufacturing processes are. Are there landfills littered with non-decaying Barbies out there? Is Sustainable Barbie an oxymoron?
I’m also currently writing a book about 1980s computers and the popular culture that helped mainstream them, and there’s a really wacky game from 1984 called “Barbie” that was published by Epyx for the Commodore 64. I didn’t love Barbie dolls as a kid, but I loved this game. I haven’t seen anyone talking about this particular Barbie artifact, which I think is fascinating not least because it represents an attempt to market computer games to girls, which didn’t happen very often in the PC’s early days.
Q: Did you see the Barbie movie? What did you think?
Wasserman: I did see the Barbie movie and enjoyed it: the performances are great, the comedy works well, and the aesthetic is fun. I don’t think that the film does enough in terms of its critique of consumerism, and some of its points about gender are quite obvious, but it’s effective as a movie that creates a vibe and taps into nostalgia.
Q: And did you wear pink?
Wasserman: My friends wore pink, but I couldn’t resist — I showed up in an Oppenheimer-style suit and hat for contrast and laughs.
Article by Diane Stopyra
Photos by Diane Stopyra and courtesy of Sarah Wasserman
August 03, 2023