Barbie’s Feminist Figure?

Ann Friedman recalls how her childhood Barbies were a part of “a lot of plastic dry-humping”:

This is one of the rarely acknowledged benefits of a doll mostly singled out for her downsides: Barbie is a safe way for girls to explore dangerously adult concepts like sexuality. “Little girls are starting to understand their own sexuality but also what it means to be a grown woman, and Barbie is the perfect vehicle for that,” says Joyce McFadden, a psychoanalyst and author of Your Daughter’s Bedroom: Insights for Raising Confident Women. She likens young girls’ play-acting Barbie sex with them trying on their mothers’ makeup or bras. They’re trying to imagine what life is like for grown-ups.

Anti-Barbie arguments have a tired ring to them — even among feminists, we’re in backlash-to-the-backlash mode. There’s also some research to back up the claim that Barbie affects girls’ body image and their views on gender roles. Yet when I look back at my own Barbie-influenced youth, I have a hard time pointing to anything but positive effects. “The feminist perspective is she has this unattainable figure,” McFadden says. “But Barbie was the only doll that had breasts, the only one to create a space where girls could start to fantasize about that.”