Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [26]
I doubt, however, that some of her exercises would pass muster with fitness experts. This one is particularly suspect: "Suck against the heel of your hand. This makes thin lips full, full lips firm, and fat cheeks lean."
Steinem had less need of arm pulls than many women. That was another thing she had in common with Barbie: her looks were good enough to land her a job as a Playboy Bunny. After weeks of wobbling around on spike heels, stuffing her bra with dry cleaner bags, and having her cottontail yanked by customers, she penned a behind-the-scenes expose for Show magazine on the sordid, brutalizing, anything-but-glamorous working conditions at the Hefner hutch.
Significantly, Steinem's article, as Marcia Cohen has noted in The Sisterhood: The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World, "made the point that Playboy Bunnies were exploited, though it did not make the point that they were exploited because they were women"—an oversight Steinem acknowledges. "It was interesting," Steinem told Cohen, "that I could understand that much and still not make the connection."
Perhaps it was difficult for a woman whose looks had opened doors to realize that there were problems to having them opened that way. The Beach Book has an introduction by economist John Kenneth Galbraith, whom Gloria met in the Hamptons and who was captivated by her "terrific good looks." "If Gloria says it's otherwise," Galbraith told Cohen, "she's wrong." Galbraith's remarks make me think of Barbie's New York Summer, a young adult novel with Barbie as a character that Random House published in 1962. In it, Barbie's clever writing earns her a job at a magazine; she goes to Manhattan and is fawned over by rich, powerful men. "There are many chic women in New York," one tells her, "but . . . you are young and fresh and perfectly enchanting."
Galbraith strikes me as an apt introducer for The Beach Book, which is in large part about economics. The young Gloria—like the newly minted Barbie—was not unfamiliar with defining a lifestyle through things. She explains how one can change roles by changing outfits, very much the way Barbie does. Some beach looks include the "Ivy League" ("Women must wear tank suits and single strands of pearls"), "Muscle Beach" ("Alternate the coconut oil with the application of mascara . . . Chew gum"), and "Pure Science" (Carry "moss-filled Mason jars, a notebook, and a long-handled net"). If you're not going to wear high-status garments, though, you'd better be able to pass for a model; the Pure Science look "works only if you are very beautiful."
Steinem's book not only catalogues the status value attached to objects, it offers suggestions for condescending to the less fortunate. This seems odd for a woman who claims to have grown up in poverty. "One gets the sense talking to Gloria that she was born in the Toledo equivalent of the manger," Leonard Levitt once wrote in Esquire. But she has thought a great deal about the class implications of sun-altered skin tone and offers this hope to those who cannot tan: "With every office clerk able to afford a vacation at the shore, you may be able to make white skin worth more in status than a tan."
Well versed in the art of sunbathing, Barbie, in 1963, had not yet had her feminist consciousness raised—though, like Steinem's political awareness, it would evolve with time. ("Feminism didn't come into my life at all until 1968 or 1969," Steinem told me when I asked her about The Beach Book.) In Barbie's defense, however, she could hardly have pondered the condition of "women," having been for four years the only adult female doll on the market. This, however, changed when Mattel introduced her so-called best friend Midge.
Freckled of face, bulging of eye, Midge was from the outset a sorry Avis to Barbie's Hertz. Her debut commercial was a catalogue of tortures endured by homely teenage girls. Midge, the ad