the stand-in's Open Salon Blog

To Barbie or Not to Barbie Is Not Really the Question

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:10:04 -0400

Warning: this post contains images that some parents may find disturbing, namely, a picture of Barbie’s waistline.

The Gabriella doll came first. It was an innocent gesture from an old friend of mine who now works for the Princess Headquarters conglomerate otherwise known as Disney. Leaving work one day, on his way to meet me for dinner and a 20 year catch-up and knowing that I had a young daughter, he filled a bag with Disney film franchise goodies which included DVD copies of The Little Mermaid and Sleeping Beauty, as well as the aforementioned Gabriella doll, which looks a little bit like a young, hip Latina version of the once-popular Midge doll.

Midge was Barbie’s brown-haired predecessor, and, to my mind, the one with much better fashion sense, playing respectable to Barbie’s hoochie mama look that has been both trumped up and down over the last five decades. But Barbie didn't start off as skanky. Originially she looked like a gal who could have been in Antonioni film or at least someone I might want to have coffee with.

My five-year-old was thrilled to receive the Gabriella doll, which came with a red one-piece bathing suit and some tiny red and white shorts modeled from the outfit the real Gabriella wore at her summer job as a lifeguard.

In case you don’t know who Gabriella is, and you should feel blessed and possibly even superior to me for this ignorance, she is the female protagonist in the High School Musical trifecta, a series of Disney movies that, in my efforts to begin schooling my daughter in the wonderful whimsical and edifying world of musicals, I “exposed her to.” (I assuaged my guilt by repeating the phrase both to myself and to other moms who hadn’t seen it yet, “It’s Harmless,” which is basically true.) Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) is a young Latina high school genius who falls in love with Troy Bolton (Zac Ephron), the school’s handsome young, white, not-so-dumb basketball star who may have also been responsible for the recent trend of boys with shags and long bangs that nearly cover their eyes.

Troy and Gabriella sing songs together, dance together, and eventually, although not until High School Musical II, kiss. The grand conclusion of the triad (though I believe more is on its way) is that Gabriella, despite being in love with this Troy Bolton character, goes off to an early admission to Stanford, leaving behind her foxy basketball star and musical co-star, who ultimately decides to attend UC Berkeley in an effort to be closer to her. It’s a moment any skeptical parent could be proud of. For me it was the first time that my daughter and I talked about universities in California.

“What is Stanford mom?,” she asked as the movie was concluding. It wasn’t a conversation I thought I’d be having with my then 4.5-year-old.

But I wanted her to know that Stanford wasn’t some evil halfway house that stole girls away from their first boyfriends. A good mom would have surely said, “Stanford! Why that’s the college you’re going to go to someday!” But, in light of our recent finances, it would have been smarter for me to say, “Better start working towards that scholarship now so that you, too, can go there, or any college for that matter, some day.” I said neither. I did tell her that it was a big school not far from us, and that we could go visit someday and see if we think it is worthy of Gabriella’s brilliance and charm.

Then came Sleeping Beauty. She was a birthday gift from a classmate. I’m sure my daughter must have blurted out the name on the playground, giving her classmate a helpful bit of information when it comes to shopping for a birthday present for someone you barely know. Sleeping Beauty doll is a bit taller and more exaggerated than the Gabriella doll. She is decidedly white and blue-eyed and tan with heinously dyed blonde hair that looks more like tacky costume jewelry than something that actually grows on your head. She’s Barbie on steroids and she’s got those awful Barbie feet, too. The standing-on-her-toes ones that make it impossible to wear comfortable shoes, god forbid she ever step foot in a gym or go for a run, or go do relief work in Sudan or something. It’s impossible! Not with feet that are only made for stilettos.

Our Gabriella, on the other hand, wears cute little ballet flats and preppy sneakers. She’s in high school, after all. I’m pretty sure Sleeping Beauty, whose real name is Aurora, never went to school. She was too busy, as the story goes, with her peasant life (which doesn’t explain the feet at all or the fact that I had to explain to my daughter what a “peasant girl” was, and that this was supposed had to be my example!?)

I should tell you that Barbie has been a source of conversation in my family of origin. My mother, a pretty traditional woman, is rather proud of using me as an example of a former Barbie owner who “turned out all right.” It’s true. I had a bunch of them as a kid in the 70s. I had several, and a Skipper, and a Ken, and a GI Joe doll. I used to stage a kind of Melrose Place with them, giving them weddings and divorces and having them talk behind each other’s backs and argue and make up.

Actually, I’ll just come clean about all of it. When I was a kid, I had a three-story Barbie penthouse, with a pool and a car. My Barbie lived large, had a lot of bling in her life, lots of friends, and a couple of guys to chose from. Although, I don’t know if my mom knew how this played out in my room.

A dozen years later, after I joined the Women’s Studies department at UC Berkeley, I do remember having more than a couple of Barbie discussions. My mom seems to remember me saying that I would never let my own daughter play with a Barbie. I don’t think I was quite that pedantic, but Women’s Studies classes can make you say things that, in retrospect, sound rather—pardon the expression—cocky.

There comes a time in every feminist's life when she or he has to face this Barbie issue. At the very least I had hoped to not go through the whole Disney princess thing with a daughter, but I have come to realize that as humans we are attracted to what we are attracted to, and that much of it is based on archetypes that we can explain without too much judgment and anger at our culture—which I still have plenty of. When she gets a little bit older we can start busting through the assigned gender roles and stereotypes and, of course, the sexing up of young girls that we all bristle at. With an opinionated loud-mouth for a mother, my daughter isn’t going to have much of problem distinguishing between the passive and active roles that women play in our culture, still the definitions of beauty conversation isn't going to be an easy one. I am confident that she’ll get it without me having to pull out the documentaries or make her read Simone de Beauvoir in middle school, but peer pressure is another can of worms.

So, as a mom, I’ve wondered quite a bit about this Barbie thing. I suppose I let them enter my house even if I didn’t purchase them. And, I think at some point they will be useful in having a conversation about gender roles and women’s bodies, etc. I wasn’t ever personally angry about the role that Barbie played in my life anyway. Despite having been born and raised with blond hair, I never wanted to be her, or to look like her. If anything, I think that falling asleep each night to my little FM radio and listening to all the "love songs" of the 70s did more damage to my life expectations and feelings about gender roles than Barbie ever could.

Still, Barbie has had a tough life, and I feel for her. From the get go in 1963, she was told she was too sexy, too mature for young girls. I mean, come on, is that her fault? Midge and her counterpart Skipper, which I also owned, were apparently created to appease the Barbie critics. Midge, originally marketed as Barbie’s best friend, had a fuller face that was supposed to be “less sexually intimidating.” And, she had freckles. Eventually Midge came in pregnant version, was sold with a husband, and later in an African American version and was picked up by Wal-Mart. But, as we all know, Barbie is not alone. There are hundreds of both slutty and the more buttoned-up variations of Barbie, Gabriella dolls among them.

Barbie has been the source of so much parody. She's been accused of being a meth maker and dealer, which could help explain her unusually low weight, and an anorexic. Can't a girl be skinny anymore without being a drug dealer or having an eating disorder? (Oh, and don't forget the Karen Carpenter story retold in a film acted out with Barbie dolls. I haven't.)

To make everyone else feel better, Barbie’s gone through a great deal of reconstruction, too. After spending a long time looking demurely to the side, her eyes look forward now. Since 1997, her waist has been widened, her boobs softened and reduced. She doesn’t come equipped anymore with a scale that reads 110 pounds, as she did in 1965. With the advent of high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils, how could she? That would be so unrealistic.

Mattel has tried to make her body look more teenage and less grown-up.

She keeps current, has her finger on the pulse, and, well, at least she doesn’t say unrealistic things, as she did in her 1992 version that generated many phrases such as “Math class is tough!” Today’s Barbie is a math whiz, a candidate for a Nobel Prize in Economics, or like Gabriella, a genius who corrects her own high-school math teacher’s formulas. She’s just a girl on her way to Stanford who is not going to let Troy stand in her way of future success or future earning power.

As for the Sleeping Beauty doll my daughter received, that’s another story. She has that glassy-eyed soul-less look, like she might just spend her life in front of the mirror, or worse, asleep, and waiting for her prince to come and kiss and revive her. She wears nothing practical, or even fashionable. Pink, always pink. She's all glitz with nothing interesting to say.

But, despite all of this, I knew things couldn’t be all that bad when I came into my daughter’s room the other night and listened to her playing with both of the dolls.

This was what I overhead:

Gabriella: Hey Sleeping Beauty, you better get up. Stop sleeping all the time!

Sleeping Beauty: (silent, asleep)

Gabriella: Come on Sleeping Beauty you have to get out of bed. You’ve gotta get up and go to Stanford!

Then Gabriella leans over and kisses her and Sleeping Beauty wakes up.

P.S. Since Barbie turned 50 this year, I've been wondering about the possibility of a Menopause Barbie. Wouldn't a Barbie that has hot flashes and mood swings be kind of cool to own?

Who's Afraid of the Big K (Kindergarten, That Is)?

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:08:50 -0400

I know this much about the three dimensions: up, down; left, right; forward, backward. I realize that space and time are relative, and I don’t have any particularly special insights to add to Einstein’s theory of the space-time continuum. I’m just a mom who is starting to freak out about the fact that my daughter is, in a matter of days, about to start kindergarten and, in doing my part to keep the requisite parenting clichés up and running, thinks it all happened too fast.

You can tell me to calm down, that millions of children have done it and survived, that I should just get over it like every other mom does. I already know that. I know I am overreacting, as I am prone to do.

But the way I see it, after all these years of sinking ourselves financially to pay people to take care of her—and precisely because of that paid relationship, their aim was to please us—to teach her colors, shapes, numbers, how to play, how not to play, how to have a conflict, how not to have a conflict, how to deal with the bullies of the world, how to deal with the mean girls of the world, after all that coddling time, my daughter is being thrown into “the system” (in which, it goes without saying, the aim is not to please us).

We’re plopping her into the cornerstone of a democratic society—she’s going to public school, you know the ones that are about to be slammed by California’s nefarious budget crisis, the ones whose class sizes are likely increasing to 30 kids, roughly twice the number of the class size she is used to (and even that number is large by some standards). I’m well aware that this is the real world, but I guess I didn’t realize it was going to happen so suddenly.

Remember, I say to myself, there are no stationary objects. Things keep moving.

When my daughter and my husband I lived in a small town in Oregon, we were a few doors down from a Waldorf kindergarten. All the kids on their way to school carried gentle little woven (required) baskets with their lunches in it, and the day consisted of playing with wooden toys, and being in a “natural environment” without any trace of licensed characters (no Dora, no Power Rangers, no Minnie Mouse, no slutty little Bratz) or evil food additives. The kids also got to stay in kindergarten until they were six or seven—two years was considered a normal kindergarten run.

I remember I used to feel sorry for those kids whose parents, in an effort to keep them from “harmful” things, had sheltered them from the real world. I thought, in my indignant state of recently transplanted urban self-righteousness, that the kids were suffering from living in a sterile little bubble that would one day burst and leave them angry and bitter and starved for everything their parents had withheld from them. (I once had a Waldorf child in my house pleading for dye. He wanted any food with dye in it, precisely because it was forbidden.)

But, I suppose you could argue, we all emerge from that state at some point, regardless of whether we went to Waldorf school or not.

I knew I didn’t want to do that with her. I wanted my daughter to grow up with kids of all races, all backgrounds, all levels of dysfunction and neglect, just like I did. I wanted her to know people of every stripe, and to have television and media be a normal part of her life, not something she pined for and obsessed over because it was hidden from her. So what were we doing in a small town in Oregon? Actually, we were escaping from an expensive violent urban environment in the Bay Area, one in which the public school system hosted some of the most troubled in the country. And the escape was both pleasant and eye-opening.

For a variety of reasons not related to where she would go to school, we moved back to California, just as the economy was about to tank. We didn’t come back to Oakland, the aforementioned land of blessed diversity, but closer to the ocean, where the family is, where the family can help raise our daughter, whose parents are strapped financially (the curse of artsy, underemployed types) and physically (dad has a chronic illness that the healthcare system, or rather his insurance, doesn’t concern itself with too much). And, yes, where the public schools are ones you can be proud of.

So here we are, about to start public school, albeit a not particularly diverse one, and daughter is absolutely thrilled about going, even though she is on the young side (not even five yet) and I’ve already gotten past the red-shirting issue I blogged about here on OS. It’s just mom, putting her ideals to the test, who is feeling trepidation. Go figure.

So what exactly am I afraid of?

Up, down, left, right, forward, backward. I think it might actually boil down to those things. Just movement. That is, just her growing up while we blinked. Here are some other things I try to consider in an effort to quell my anxiety:

1. She won the lottery as far being born into a situation in which she has enough to eat, people who care about her, a place to live, and she doesn’t have to be afraid of being shot or bombed as she walks to school, or made into a child soldier/prostitute, etc.
2. She’s got pretty attentive parents who might be able to offset the 30+ class size at home (and no siblings, which means all our resources go to her).

And, of course,

3. This is the real world, replete with licensed characters—some of them violent even, food additives, bullies, mean girls, overcrowding, underpaid and unappreciated teachers who, each year, have to fear losing their underpaid, underappreciated jobs, or fear being replaced by younger, less jaded Teach for America volunteers, or fear having to teach to the test rather than teach what they think is best for a child’s development. This is the real world, in which you get special attention because you learn differently, act differently, think differently, especially when you are branded with a diagnosis, and by the way, what is that diagnosis going to be? So deal with it. Just deal with it.

Okay, really I’m fine. It’s going to be no big deal. My daughter is going to kindergarten. Right now I am just going to focus on getting a new lunch box for her. I can do that.

Kids Say the Darndest Things About Gay Marriage

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:06:26 -0400

The other day my four-and-a-half-year-old daughter and I were walking down the street after leaving our favorite frozen yogurt place. We’d been celebrating her last day of preschool and were headed back to our car so that we could meet up with another kid from her preschool at a nearby park for a “playdate.” (As much as I resisted this terminology, there is no better alternative for describing the kind of pre-arranged, adult-supervised activities that we have with our children, who are no longer allowed to roam the neighborhood, visiting the houses of the kids they want to play with, as I did as a child in the 1970s.)

On this busy downtown street, a young man with a clipboard approached us and, after hesitating for a moment, (we were already late--as usual-- for our playdate), I stopped and listened to his request. Do you have a minute to help support gay marriage?, which of course, still not being over the sense of rage and shock I felt by the failing of California’s Proposition 8, I did. I must admit that I often don’t have that “minute” the person is asking for. I am even guilty of looking more hurried than I actually am just to avoid having my attention constantly redirected by all the needs of the world. In this case, I tried to offer my signature, but he wanted money, and I had none at that moment. So he directed me to the office where the campaign was headquartered, and my daughter and I continued on our way.

“What did he want mom?” my daughter asked earnestly.

“Oh, he’s trying to raise money for his cause,” I replied, somewhat aware of the fact that people on that busy street were listening to this conversation.

“What’s his cause mom?” she pressed on. My daughter is the sort who loves to ask questions, and she’s never ever satisfied with your vague answers. Why should she be? I always ask myself. But there have been many moments when I am not quite prepared out in public for my answers about how, say, a woman and a man actually make a baby, or why those angry Iranian people on the cover of The New York Times have set all the cars on fire. I have to take a moment and think about how I’m going to cover a complex topic, because I realize that the first time I explain something or introduce a concept is a crucial moment.

At least I think it is.

"Well," I started in as she eagerly awaited my explanation, "you know how the kids next door have two dads, and some of your friends have two moms? Well, some of them want to be married, just like dad and I are. And the law says that they can’t get married. Even though some of them have gotten married, because they don’t care what the law says…"

For another moment I stopped myself. There are some abstract concepts that I don't have a problem explaining, but the "law" isn't once of them. She understands what it means when I say we have to wear our seatbelts or drive the speed limit or the police will give us ticket. And when she and I once got pulled over for driving 35 in a 25 zone (!) it illustrated the concept a little better. But in the case of speeding or not wearing a seatbelt, we're talking about the potential of not harming someone, right?

How do you make a case for the terrible things that might happen if two men get married? You simply don't, because there aren't any.

Because I have always tried to normalize any offbeat sexuality/parntership choices when I talk about things with her, we haven't really talked about the fact that there are people in the world who think gay people are evil and demented and that they should be treated like criminals or drug dealers. So, we've just been breezing along talking about so and so's two dads without any discussion about what that means (you know, just doing my part, as the bumper sticker says, to piss off the religious right, I suppose). I just didn't want to plant any judgments in her head, or give her any reason to start looking at people like they aren't "normal." Someday we'll have the "contiuum of sexuality" conversation...perhaps in kindergarten?

So how do I even begin to explain to her that "the law" says Janie's parents, the ones who have selflessly given birth to and cared for her since she was conceived, aren't allowed to get married?

How could I tell her about the article I'd read earlier that day, about the nonprofit hospital in central California that refused to allow a lesbian woman to see her partner in the emergency room (the Associated Press.), a woman who was rushed to the hospital after collapsing during a pro-gay-marriage march? I didn't. But the news was still hanging there in my view.

Instead did my best to state the fact that in California gay couples aren't "legally allowed" to marry. I tried to say it matter of factly, though I'm sure she realized how I felt about it. And what followed was one of those moments that will occupy a particularly memorable place in my history as a mom, a moment that, as writer Ayelet Waldman writes, I “should be able to melt with emotion” over. So I am doing that here, now.

My preschooler said, "I think people should get to choose whoever they want to marry. It should be their choice, not somebody's elses."

I couldn't have said it better.

And I couldn't have gushed more. By this time we were driving to the park, she was strapped into her booster seat, and I turned around and said, "I like the way you think." What I wanted to say was, "I am so proud of how smart you are I can't even stand it..." If she can figure out something so simple, what is everybody else's problem?