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Barbie is also a space-age fertility icon, a totem of an ancient matriarchal power. In the dark, primal part of our brains where we process primitive archetypes, she is Ur-woman. As an icon, she has come to represent not merely "American" women or consumer capitalist women, but a female principle that defies national, ethnic, and regional boundaries.

Nor is Midge to be overlooked as an archetype. If Barbie is Ur-woman, Midge is Ur-sidekick. The entire female sex can, for the most part, be divided into Barbies and Midges. From Gilgamesh and Enkidu to Achilles and Patroclus to the Lone Ranger and Tonto, epic pairings have historically involved men. But by the mid-twentieth century, the convention broadened to include women. For every Lucy, there began to be an Ethel.

Because of Barbie's archetypal resonance, to mutilate a Barbie doll is not to vandalize a toy; it is to attack a woman. As evidence, one need merely cite the police investigation of the "Sandusky Slasher," who within six months between 1992 and 1993 cut the breasts and mutilated the crotches of two dozen Barbie dolls at three stores in Sandusky, Ohio—where, incidentally, Barbie Bazaar is published. (Sandusky is also the hometown of Sugar Kowalsky, Marilyn Monroe's character in Some Like It Hot.) In February 1993, Perkins Township police received an FBI profile of the suspected slasher—a white male between the ages of sixteen and thirty. He is "an organized and controlled individual who is probably dominated in a relationship with a woman, possibly his mother," reported the Chicago Tribune, and is "considered harmless by friends." The FBI appears to have treated the crime as if the doll were an actual woman; it has constructed a psychological profile reminiscent of Hitchcock's Norman Bates. But my hunch is that the assault—like so much of the art that involves Barbie mutilation—may have been upon Barbie as a construct of femininity rather than Barbie as an archetypal woman. And if so, the perpetrator might well be female. (I find myself wondering if Andrea Dworkin can account for her time when the attacks took place.)

Nor has Barbie merely been a crime victim. In one of the more lurid kidnappings of 1993, she was an accessory. Accused Long Island child abductor John Esposito required a powerful magnet to lure seven-year-old Katie Beers away from a shopping mall and into a dungeon beneath his house. What was his bait? The Barbie exercise video.

Then there is the "Barbie strategy": a way of gaining attention for one's ideas by linking them to Barbie. Shortly before the 1992 presidential election, pop culture analyst Greil Marcus wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times explaining Bill Clinton's "Elvis strategy"—how he grabbed press coverage by associating himself with the King. When President Bush accused him of promoting "Elvis Economics," Clinton raised a saxophone to his lips and belted out "Heartbreak Hotel" before the astonished eyes of Arsenio Hall and his television audience. "Slap Elvis on anything and you'll be noticed," Marcus wrote. "Elvis in a speech is a guaranteed soundbite on the evening news."

In 1992, the American Association of University Women demonstrated that Barbie was a guaranteed soundbite, too. When the group complained about a Barbie who said, "Math class is tough," the story made page one of The Washington Post. Like Clinton with Elvis, the AAUW used Barbie to direct attention to its own agenda—a 1991 study it had commissioned which showed that girls begin to lose their self-confidence at puberty. At age nine, the girls were assertive and academically self-assured; but by high school fewer than a third felt that way.

The upshot from the incident—a public discussion of how that age-old toxin "femininity" warps bright, androgynous minds—was, of course, a good thing. But I couldn't help feeling Barbie got a bum rap. After all, the doll didn't say, "Math class is tough/or girls," or "Math class is tough; let's study cosmetology."