Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [124]
"There are tens of thousands of collectors—everything from casual to passionate to obsessive," Blitman said. "Some people . . . have their job, whatever they do, and the rest of their life is Barbie."
"Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects," Walter Benjamin writes in "Unpacking My Library," his essay on book-collecting. The relationship reflects not merely a nostalgia attached to the things, but to their period, their workmanship, and their previous owners. "A lot of people are drawn to the hobby because they like to sew for the dolls," said Blitman. Other Barbie aficionados customize the doll's look. "They paint the face; they reroot the hair; they spend hours and weeks and months, sometimes," doll expert and Barbie Bazaar contributing editor A. Glenn Mandeville told me. "People today are taking Barbie and really making it a mannequin that they drape their own dreams on."
To collect artifacts from the past is to own the past—and sometimes, to imagine a better past than the one that actually existed. The baby boomers' fascination with the sitcoms of their childhood—what nostalgia network Nickelodeon terms "classic television"—has a lot to do with a longing for an idealized past. Many of the male Barbie collectors did not fit seamlessly into their heterosexist nuclear families. As a child, one male collector, who now has several hundred dolls, took an after-school job to buy Barbies and hid them under a loose board in the basement, until his mother discovered them. "I've given those dolls to an orphanage," she told him. "And we're not going to tell your father."
By manipulating early Barbies and Kens, collectors can both control and fit into that lost world—or, through parody, deflect the sting of its rejection. Barbie and her props lend themselves to the playing out of revised scenarios. With their fold-away walls and sketchy details, her houses resemble a TV soundstage.
Because Barbie is an emblem of female glamour, acquiring her can mean something different to a female collector from what it does to a male. "A lot of women are buying Barbie because they can't be Barbie, and they live out this dream of being slender and pretty and popular and all that through the doll," Mandeville said.
Historically, Mandeville added, doll-collecting has not been the unique domain of women; "a lot of so-called manly men have been interested in dolls." John Wayne's collection of kachina figures, for example, is currently on display at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. But it takes a tough man to challenge a gender convention, which is what buying Barbie involves. "There are a lot of men that I sell to who have P.O. boxes—who whisper on the phone," Blitman told me. "Some collect with their wives, although you get the feeling that the husband is more the collector than the wife. They start out collecting Ken, then they get one Barbie because it will look good next to the tuxedo. And suddenly they're into the first seven years—if not more—of Barbie."
"A lot of gay men are into Barbie," said Jan Fennick. "She's as much of an icon as Madonna or Marilyn or Judy Garland. . . . To me, the ultimate male bonding is when you know forty-year-old men who play with Barbie dolls on the kitchen table together. And I have friends who do this—they play with the Color Magic—sticking the heads under water to see whether the colors change." In fact, so substantial is Barbie's gay following that The Advocate devoted an extensive article to the phenomenon,