Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [25]
Barbie's similarity to Brown's brave, new, vaguely selfish and decidedly subversive heroine has more than whimsical ramifications. It makes Barbie an undercover radical. Brown was "the first spokeswoman for the revolution," say Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs in Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex, even though today Brown is "a woman whom many feminists would be loath to claim as one of their own." Long before feminism was a part of the American political vocabulary, they point out, droves of women bought Brown's book—an antimarriage manifesto and plea for women's financial liberation and sexual autonomy disguised as a breezy volume of self-help.
In choosing clothes, Brown urges: "Copycat a mentor with better taste than yours." And while Barbie didn't literally choose Charlotte, the designer certainly imposed her taste upon the doll. More significantly, the doll, to whom children looked up, was a sort of mentor to them. Just as Sex and the Single Girl spread Brown's gospel to adult women, Barbie and her paraphernalia conveyed it to their younger sisters.
In Brown's protofeminist philosophy, preoccupation with appearance was a pragmatic necessity, not a narcissistic luxury. Men desired a single woman because she had "time and often more money to spend on herself . . . the extra twenty minutes to exercise every day, an hour to make-up her face for their date." Brown's Single Girl did not live in the world of ideas, where a looker like Robert Browning would fall for a lump like Elizabeth Barrett; she lived in the material world, where beauty was the decisive weapon in the everlasting battle for men. The Single Girl was not an intellectual; introspection, Brown makes clear, was a waste of energy. But the Girl was encouraged to have a sort of cunning—a nonverbal sagacity; she expressed herself through a vocabulary of objects rather than words.
"Men survey women before treating them," John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing. "Consequently, how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated. To acquire some control over the process, women must contain it and interiorize it." A woman must cultivate the habit of simultaneously acting and watching herself act; she must split herself into two selves: the observer and the observed. She must turn herself, Berger says, into an "object of vision."
Brown's book taught women how to turn themselves into such an object. Sex and the Single Girl is a Berlitz phrase book to the vernacular of clothing and style, a guide to help women manipulate men by manipulating how they appear to men.
For some girls, Barbie no doubt functioned that way too. Not for all, but for many, I suspect. The relationship of the observed self to the observing self is much like that of a Barbie doll to its owner. When a girl projects herself onto a doll, she learns to split in two. She learns to manipulate an image of herself outside of herself. She learns what Brown and Berger would consider a survival skill.
Another developing feminist who understood the importance of a woman's appearance was Gloria Steinem. In 1963, the Viking Press published The Beach Book, her massive volume devoted not to gender inequalities but to looking good in a bathing suit. "Nothing is as transient, useless, or completely desirable as a suntan," she observed. "What a tan will do is make you look good, and that justifies anything."
Steinem, whose dust-jacket profile reveals that her "formative years were spent almost entirely in bathing suits," seems to have been in a particularly Barbie-esque stage of evolution in 1963. Decades before Jane Fonda, Maria Maples, and Barbie made exercise videos, Steinem prescribed a workout for her female readers—twenty arm pulls daily, executed while chanting: