Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [30]
As for Barbie's new friends, their principal distinction was their body type; more boyish than bovine, they could wear the trendy, so-called Mod clothes imported from London. "Mod" was not arbitrary, but a systematic effort to throw off the codified fashions of the 1950s—fashions that had made Barbie's name. It parodied historical styles, mixed blazing colors and metallic textures, and reflected, often with wit, the disapproval that its young adherents felt for the established culture. It was, say fashion historians Arian and Michael Batterberry, "a sort of ecstatic vision of Imperial Rome and Byzantium conceived by Moreau and Bakst and brashly adapted to the beat of rock-and-roll."
It also had an element of androgyny. Boys wore velvet and had long hair; girls wore bell-bottoms and didn't. Nor could Mod have happened without the canonization of those girlish guys from Liverpool, the Beatles. John, George, Paul, and Ringo offered "a vision of sexuality freed from the shadow of gender inequality because the group mocked the gender distinctions that bifurcated the American landscape into 'his' and 'hers,' " say Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs in Re-Making Love. "To Americans that believed fervently that sexuality hinged on la difference, the Beatlemaniacs said, No, blur the lines and expand the possibilities."
Barbie's body, which we will examine more carefully in a later chapter, did not blur anything; it was la difference incarnate. It was the body of Dior's New Look—cinched waist, accentuated breasts—that had hit the market in 1947. By the mid-sixties, it had begun to look as stuffy and dated as Jackie Kennedy's pillbox hat.
The reason, one suspects, for the gender-blurring was the increasing popularity of the birth control pill, which had been approved for sale in 1960. Once women had the option of turning off their fertility, they could behave as rakishly as men. In the age of the pill, sex did not automatically lead to marriage and babies; it generally led to more sex. So in 1966, the Barbie team made a decision. The times they were a-changin'. And Barbie, to some degree, would have to change with them.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE WHITE GODDESS
Let us leave Barbie poised for metamorphosis and shift the narrative to a living room in La Jolla, California—a modest, middle-class room with nubby green wall-to-wall carpeting, a nut-brown sectional and a black-and-white television in the corner. There is a large picture window through which one can make out a hazy strip of Pacific Ocean. The year is 1963 and I—a milk-white, painfully thin only child with long, anemic braids—am sitting alone on the carpet surrounded by my Barbie paraphernalia.
Almost invariably, when I told women my age that I was writing about Barbie, they said: "Why you? I should be writing that book. I own twenty thousand Barbies." Or, "I threw up after dinner for a year because of Barbie." Or, "I am a model or a stylist or a fiction writer or a you-fill-inthe-blank because of Barbie."
And they are, of course, right. Barbie left a personal impression on many members of my generation. But like my friends I have a story to tell, and this seems to be the right moment to tell it.
At thirty-seven, I am a five-foot-six, 123-pound, tolerably fit woman whose knees and elbows are considerably more prominent than her breasts. At the same age, my mother was, by most people's definitions, a beauty: five feet ten, 132 pounds, and possessed of breasts that in their size and shape resembled Barbie's. They didn't droop or sag; nor did their size—38-C— interfere with her ability to win at sports. Even in her forties she could swim faster and hit a Softball harder than people half her age. No doubt you assume that I will write about how her perfection placed me in competition with her and, by extension, all women; how I ached to have 38-C breasts; and how every month when