Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [36]
Witches traditionally muss up their hair when they are preparing to engage in witchcraft. As late as the seventeenth century, civilized Europeans, historian Barbara Walker tells us, actually believed witches "raised storms, summoned demons and produced all sorts of destruction by unbinding their hair." In Scottish coastal communities, women were forbidden to brush their hair at night, lest they cause a storm that would kill their male relatives at sea. St. Paul, one of history's all-time woman-haters, was scared of women's hair; he thought unkempt locks could upset the angels.
The toddler brushing Barbie's hair may look innocent, but who knows, perhaps she is in touch with some ancient matriarchal power. In 1991, a survey of three thousand children commissioned by the American Association of University Women revealed that girls begin to lose their self-confidence at puberty, about the time they give up Barbie. At age nine, the girls were assertive and felt positive about themselves, but by high school, fewer than a third felt that way. Perhaps this could have been avoided had the girls simply hung on to their Barbies. Forget trying to be Barbie; even gorgeous grown people would be hard-pressed to pass for an eleven-and-a-half-inch thing. But maybe they should build a shrine to the doll and light some incense.
There is a remarkable amount of pagan symbolism surrounding Barbie. Even the original location of Mattel—Hawthorne—has significance. The Hawthorn, or May Tree, represents the White Goddess Maia, the mother of Hermes, goddess of love and death, "both the ever-young Virgin giving birth to the God, and the Grandmother bringing him to the end of his season." Barbie's pagan identity could also account for Ken's genital abridgment; cults of the Great Mother were ministered to by eunuchs. And it would explain why the housewives in Dichter's study took an immediate dislike to Barbie: "The white goddess is anti-domestic," Robert Graves writes in The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. "She is the perpetual 'other woman.' "
Even if it wanted to, Mattel could not assert ignorance of pagan symbolism. This isn't merely because Aldo Favilli, the Italian-born, classically educated former sculpture restorer at Florence's Uffizi Gallery who has run Mattel's sculpture department since 1972, ought to know a thing or two about iconography. In 1979, the company test-marketed two "Guardian Goddesses," "SunSpell," "the fiery guardian of good," and "MoonMystic," "who wears the symbols of night." Identical in size and shape to Barbie, they came with four additional outfits--"Lion Queen," "Soaring Eagle," "Blazing Fire," and "Ice Empress"--sort of Joseph Campbell meets Cindy Crawford. But even stranger than their appearance was what they did. To "unlock" their "powers," you spread their legs-or, as their box euphemizes, made them "step to the side." Then they flung their arms upward, threw off their street clothes and controlled nature. Freezing volcanoes, drying up floods, blowing away tornadoes, and halting a herd of stampeding elephants are among the activities suggested on their box.
The goddesses took Barbie's crystalline hardness one step further. They wore plastic breastplates and thigh-high dominatrix boots--outfits created by two female Mattel designers that evoke Camille Paglia's characterization of the Great Mother as "a sexual dictator, symbolically impenetrable." Yet despite their literal virginity, their powers were metaphorically linked to sex. To set the dolls' mechanism, their thighs had to be squeezed together until they clicked. To release it, their legs had to be parted; the box features a drawing of two juvenile hands clutching