Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [39]
This is not to say that when daughters emulate their mothers in Barbie play, it's always a constructive experience. Mothers who believe in restricted roles for women transmit messages of restriction: of opportunities, behavior, even body size. "There are a lot of mothers who don't want their kids to be fat when they go to the country club and put on bathing suits," Singer told me. "I have in my own practice now a child whose mother is forcing her to diet. She goes to Weight Watchers for Children . . . and this kid eats this crazy stuff. She's a little plump but not in any way overweight or looking obese."
Sometimes mothers blame Barbie for negative messages that they themselves convey, and that involve their own ambivalent feelings about femininity. When Mattel publicist Donna Gibbs invited me to sit in on a market research session, I realized just how often Barbie becomes a scapegoat for things mothers actually communicate. I was sitting in a dark room behind a one-way mirror with Gibbs and Alan Fine, Mattel's Brooklyn-born senior vice president for research. On the other side were four girls and an assortment of Barbie products. Three of the girls were cheery moppets who immediately lunged for the dolls; the fourth, a sullen, asocial girl, played alone with Barbie's horses. All went smoothly until Barbie decided to go for a drive with Ken, and two of the girls placed Barbie behind the wheel of her car. This enraged the third girl, who yanked Barbie out of the driver's seat and inserted Ken. "My mommy says men are supposed to drive!" she shouted.
Her two playmates looked stunned. Fine and Gibbs looked stunned. Even the girl with the horses looked stunned. Fine finally shrugged his shoulders and said: "And they blame it on us?"
CHAPTER FIVE
THE BOOK OF RUTH
As a feat of engineering, the 1967 Twist 'N Turn Barbie is a marvel. Steve Lewis and Jack Ryan devised a doll that swiveled on a compound angle at its hips and neck. A compound angle is not perpendicular to the vertical axis of the doll; it is askew, and the resulting tilt gives the doll a human-looking contrapposto. A delicate new face with eyelashes made of real synthetic hair added the final touch. Lewis remembered the meeting at which he unveiled the prototype: "Everyone sat back and there was great silence. And one of the VPs, who is still in the toy business but not with Mattel, said, 'That is the most beautiful doll I have ever seen.' "
The doll's promotion was less attractive, however. In the Twist 'N Turn kickoff commercial, a swarm of girls stampeded to a toy store to trade in their old Barbies for a discount on the new one. So much for projecting a personality onto a beloved anthropomorphic toy, so much for clinging to Barbie as a transitional object, or, as in the case of the toy in Margery Williams's The Velveteen Rabbit, cherishing Barbie because she had been "made real" through wear.
Futurist Alvin Toffler condemned the trade-in as proof that "man's relationships with things are increasingly temporal." But he missed what was, for women, a more alarming message. It wasn't worn sneakers or crushed Dixie cups that the kids were throwing away; it was women's bodies. Older females should simply be chucked, the ad implied, the way Jack Ryan discarded his older wives and mistresses. Ryan, inventor of the Hot Wheels miniature car line that Mattel would introduce the following year, brought automotive obsolescence to Barbie.
In 1968, Mattel plunged Barbie deeper into social irrelevance. It gave her a voice—so she could declare her membership in the Silent Majority. "Would you like to go shopping?" the doll twittered. "I love being a fashion model. What shall I wear to the prom?" This may be what Tricia Nixon said when you pulled the loop at the back of her neck, but in my experience a young woman in 1968 had broader concerns.