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"You know what dolls my mother did give me?" Jan suddenly blurted. "Trolls! I never had a Barbie house but I had a troll house. I was thinking: Is this what she wants me to identify with—these horrible things with purple hair?"

Today, no one observing Jan and her handsome husband—"a cross between Jeff Bridges and Jeff Daniels," she says—would suspect that she had a Skipper Complex. Yet just as I will never quite shake the legacy of Midge, Jan has been forever burdened with Skipper. Jan, however, doesn't scapegoat the doll; in therapy, she learned to distinguish between the message and its messenger.

That distinction, however, has increasingly begun to blur. The Barbie doll has become so synonymous with female sexuality that at Sierra Tucson, a trendy Arizona substance abuse clinic, women in treatment for "sex addiction" are required to carry one with them at all times. Lugging around Barbie, Alethea Savile explained in London's Daily Mail, forces them to reflect constantly on their objectified sexual selves.

Nor is it news that people connect Barbie's oddly proportioned body to adolescent eating disorders. According to a group of researchers at University Central Hospital in Helsinki, Finland, if Barbie were a real woman she'd be so lean she wouldn't be able to menstruate. Her narrow hips and concave stomach would lack the 17 to 22 percent body fat required for a woman to have regular periods—and a failure to menstruate is one of the symptoms of anorexia nervosa, a condition of self-starvation that principally afflicts young women. Significantly, though, Barbie isn't alone in her emaciation. The same researchers found that beginning in the fifties, when Barbie was introduced, life-size department-store clothes mannequins began to be made with the appearance of 10 percent body fat. Mannequins from the 1920s, by contrast, were stouter: Were they suddenly made flesh, they would have no trouble getting their periods.

This thinning down might be of greater alarm if it were without precedent, which it isn't. In the history of art, representations of the figure have often been distorted so that their drapery would fall in a pleasing fashion—and Barbie, like a clothing-store dummy, is a sculpture that exists to display garments. "The body of the Ceres in the Vatican Sala Rotunda is visibly distorted in some dimensions for the sake of displaying the clothes to advantage, rather than the other way around," Anne Hollander notes in Seeing Through Clothes, and she doesn't exaggerate. The statue's giant breasts seem to sprout from its shoulders, and there is room for a breast and a half between them. Nor was such distortion unusual in classical sculpture. "The identical body without the dress would look somewhat awkward, whereas a perfectly proportioned body could not wear such a fully draped costume without looking swamped and bunchy," Hollander says of the Ceres. The same could be said of Barbie.

The controversy over Barbie's thinness heated up in 1991, when High Self Esteem Toys of Woodbury, Minnesota, introduced "Happy To Be Me," a doll whose measurements were alleged to be more "realistic" than you-know-who's. Abetted by a tenacious PR firm, Cathy Meredig, Happy's developer, took her crusade to the press. Two percent of girls in the United States become anorexic at some point in their lives, she explained to The New York Times, 15 percent become bulimic, and 70 percent view themselves as fat. "I honestly believe if we have enough children playing with a responsibly proportioned doll that we can raise a generation of girls that feels comfortable with the way they look," she told The Washington Post.

And the press embraced her. From Allure to People, pro-Happy pieces sprang up like dandelions in a summer lawn. The vice president of the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders in Highland Park, Illinois, called Happy "a much-needed development." Yet by 1994, Happy was virtually history. Mothers may have told reporters, "Wow! A doll with hips and a waist," but they bought Barbie.

Meredig