This is Not Really a Piece About Barbie

– July 2023

I was born in 1960. Mattel released Barbie in 1959. My father gave me my first Barbie in 1967. My mother read Friedan, Steinem, and Greer in the 1970’s and gave away all twenty-six of my Barbies in 1972. She attended the International Women’s Day rally in Melbourne in 1975 and took me with her.

In 1961 Mattel released Ken, which was also the year the Berlin Wall went up, although I doubt that Ken and Barbie cared two hoots about the Eastern Bloc. They were after all perfect products of western world capitalism; young, attractive and white; the aspiration of a new breed of female tween consumer. The Wall wasof interest to my father though, still an ardent communist in the 60s, even though so many others, like my mother, had left the Party in 1956, after Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s purges and the Soviet Union invaded Hungary.

When my father used to visit me and my baby sister on his parental access days in the late 60s and early 70s, I’d wait for him on those Saturday mornings, with a mix of excitement and anxiety. My dad was coming to see me and sometimes with a new Barbie! But when he and Mum were together it felt bad, and I couldn’t wait for him to take me out and into his world. For those few precious hours, he wanted me. Perhaps those Barbies were proxies for love, a way to appease his guilt for leaving his two kids. Perhaps he just didn’t know what else to do with me. A still-young divorced Italian man with two girl children and an ex-wife whom he was still obsessed with and who had thrown him out that final time in 1967 after having married him twice.

‘Elizabeth Taylor married Richard Burton twice too, you know,’ Mum says. ‘I was stupid to go back to him, but people were all telling me I should give him another chance. So, I did. And look how that ended. Sorry.’

Women in the 60s tended not to leave their husbands. This was the days before no-fault divorce, introduced in 1975 in Australia and when you needed to prove that one party was ‘at-fault’ for the breakdown of a marriage.  The days before the supporting mothers’ benefit, introduced in 1973. There was little structural or community support available for single mothers and victims of what today we’d call ‘coercive control’.

My father eventually left the city to live in the country over 3 hours away. He married again, and my little sister and I only saw him on the school holidays after that.

Mum pursued a career as a schoolteacher even though she’d loved her time as a young writer and translator on an Italian Communist rag in Sydney after she’d divorced Dad that first time and before her children were born. As a schoolteacher she could work full-time and keep the same hours as us kids. Dad didn’t do alimony or child support for long. I saw him tear up a 50-dollar note and throw it at Mum once. She went it alone after that. I blamed her for Dad not being around but what did I know. I too spent  some time in an abusive marriage but couldn’t leave because I didn’t want my son to come from a broken family like I had. So, my husband did the leaving when our son was 5 months old.

Before Mum had chucked out all my Barbies I’d guarded my substantial collection from my sister, but she couldn’t have been less impressed with my dumb long-legged, tiny-waisted, plastic dolls with their luscious ponytails and exquisitely miniature brightly coloured clothes and accessories. Those tiny high heeled red plastic shoes. That black and white striped one-piece strapless bathing suit. The fur pill box hat. That full skirted evening gown with its close-fitting waist. The perfectly formed little square clutch bag. That tailored skirt. The suit with short boxy jacket and oversized buttons. That pair of gold wedge sandals. The knee-high white plastic boots!

In case you have been, as they say, living under a rock, Barbie the movie is released this month and its pre-publicity has eclipsed the forthcoming referendum, the death of rock legend Tina Turner, and well, no, it hasn’t quite managed to side-line the Robodebt findings but then nothing has yet. Apparently, Barbie is funny, looks fabulous and is feminist-y but not so much as to scare the horses. I’ll go see it. On my own.

That Barbie has endured for half a century is impressive. But even though Mattel created a new campaign in 2015 titled You Can Be Anything to encourage young girls to be ambitious and to aim for the top, plenty of research has found that young girls who were given the original Barbie like I was in the 60s have lower self-esteem and more body image issues than girls who didn’t get given them. So, it’s Dad’s andBarbie’s fault that I’ve had an eating disorder for most of my adult life! 

I was in a collectables store recently with my boyfriend and there she was – all 11.5 inches of her standing tall amidst a collection of otherwise lame vintage toys. I felt a surge of desire. I longed to hold her again. But she was encased in a plastic box like a small coffin. My boyfriend wanted to buy her for me, but the price tag was crazy and come on, I mean, don’t be silly, she’s just a doll. So we moved on to the vintage men’s shirts.

My father died last year. I’m sixty-three this year. Barbie is sixty-four.

Will you still need me/ will you still feed me/When I’m sixty-four?

Yes. Yes, I will.