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By Root 835 0

wear chalk-colored, Dusty Springfield lipstick or require Rogaine—she still probably wouldn't have dethroned Barbie. For a kid, being stuck by Mom with a Happy is a lot like being stuck with a Skipper— or perhaps worse, since while Skipper may not be sexually mature, she at least conforms to societal norms of attractiveness. And those norms are, of course, at the center of this fuss: In a world where women's bodies are objectified and commodified, is it better for a girl to aspire to an arbitrary standard of "perfection" or to avoid disappointment by keeping her standards low?

This is not, however, to let Barbie off the hook. In the doll's early years, before women spoke openly about anorexia, Barbie's props encouraged girls to obsess on their weight. In addition to pink plastic hair curlers, Barbie's 1965 "Slumber Party" outfit featured a bathroom scale permanently set at 110. Mattel also gave her bedtime reading—a book called How to Lose Weight that offered this advice: "Don't Eat." Ken, by contrast, was not urged to starve. His pajamas came with a sweet roll and a glass of milk.

THERE IS NO WAY TO AVOID PLUNGING INTO THE EATING disorder wars here, because for some, Barbie is a symbol of them. I say "wars" because experts disagree on why many women succumb to destructive, diet-related behaviors and others don't. I should say up front that I never had an eating disorder. As a teen, I was neither fat nor thin. I saw skinny models in Vogue and Mademoiselle, but never once thought of missing a meal. This doesn't mean I can't empathize with the many women for whom eating involves more than the mere slaking of hunger. But in high school, I was too preoccupied with homework, swim-team practice, and the domestic responsibilities that fell to me after my mother's death to evolve rituals around food.

To puzzle out why I had escaped the dietary scourges that afflicted many of my contemporaries—and to determine whether Barbie might have had a small manicured hand in inducing such blights—I interviewed therapists who treat anorexics, bulimics, and compulsive eaters. I read Kim Chernin, Susie Orbach, Louise J. Kaplan, and Naomi Wolf. And what I found were contradictions. In Female Perversions, Kaplan interprets anorexia not as a movement toward an idealized Barbie body, but as a flight from it. The anorexic transforms herself through emaciation into a sort of "third sex," liberated from menstruation and covered with a downy, masculine fuzz. "Behind [the anorexic's] caricature of an obedient, virtuous, clean, submissive, good little girl is a most defiant, ambitious, driven, dominating, controlling virile caricature of masculinity," Kaplan writes.

There is no universal consensus on why women become obsessed with dieting. One group of theorists views the problem as the result of a conspiracy. Now more than ever, the evil media have enshrined freakishly thin models who make normal-sized women feel like hippopotami. Another camp says, "So what?" As long as people have lived in communities, there have been community "standards of beauty" which, by definition, have been both arbitrary and hard to meet. Yet another group says it isn't the standards of beauty, but the importance a young girl places on them, which is a reflection of how her family feels about them and the degree to which her family encourages nonconformity. If Mom is so threatened by her daughter's chubbiness that she ships the girl off to a kiddie fat farm, the daughter may develop a lifelong neurosis about food. Likewise, if Dad makes clear that only slender women are sexually desirable, his daughter may obsess on appearing slender.

One theme, however, recurs in much of the diet-disorder literature: Mothers are involved in how daughters view their bodies. "While it might be hard to imagine the subtle transactions that occur around feeding in infancy, they are obvious during adolescence when the young woman's body changes precipitate a whole range of reactions around the family dinner table," Susie Orbach explains in Hunger Strike: The Anorectic's Struggle as a Metaphor