Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [50]
In contrast to the fad diets they had embraced in the seventies—Pritikin, Scarsdale, Beverly Hills—people in the eighties trained their bodies to burn fat instead of cutting calories. Being fit meant being able to eat conspicuously. "The only way to keep ahead—to eat significantly, impressively, competitively— was to keep in shape," Barbara Ehrenreich observed about the decade in Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. "In a very real sense, eating was what one got in shape for."
So it's not surprising that Barbie Loves McDonald's was followed in 1984 by Great Shape Barbie, a doll that came with a leotard, leg warmers, exercise shoes, and (presumably) a health club membership. Of course Barbie didn't need to take an aerobics class; she already had the consummate eighties body. It had "definition," the goal toward which every gym rat sweated, and, metaphorically, the essence of the eighties persona. "To achieve definition was to present a hard outline to the world," Ehrenreich writes, "a projection of self that was not sensitive and receptive—as therapies in the seventies had aimed at—but tough and contained." Few projections of self could be harder than Barbie's—her "skin" is, in fact, a carapace. In the eighties, it wasn't just Barbie's curves that women sought to emulate, it was the toughness of her vinyl. During Barbie's first years, Bud Westmore, Universal Studio's makeup wizard, modeled Barbie on real-life actresses; her blond hair, for instance, was matched to Kim Novak's. By the eighties, however, the tables had turned: real-life women were modeling themselves on the doll.
But transforming flesh—a pliant, yielding, organic substance—into plastic is not easy. The formula for this conversion—"No pain, no gain"—seems to have inspired the Great Shape dolls; indeed, their description in Mattel's catalogue reads like an instruction manual for a dominatrix. Under a picture of a contorted Barbie is the directive: "Make her do scissor lifts." Under Ken, who is frozen, doglike, on all fours: "Make him do push-ups." And over Skipper, who appears to be trying to drag herself across the floor with a broken leg: "Make her do back extensions." The dolls are even packaged with a booklet of diagrams to make sure they do their "exercises" correctly.
In projecting her future persona onto a Great Shape Barbie, a little girl can learn to split herself not only into "the surveyor" and "the surveyed," but into "the trainer" and "the trainee." By internalizing the sadism of an aerobics instructor, a little girl can, in her own exercise regimen, turn that sadism upon herself. But let us not rush to blame Barbie for making children obsessed with exercise. Not until 1992 did Barbie come out with her own workout video. Let us place the onus where it belongs—on drill sergeant and recovering Barbarella Jane Fonda. Besides, slothful children, of the sort that I once was, could happily—perhaps even sadistically—move Great Shape Barbie through her miniature workout without feeling the faintest urge to perform one of their own.
Significantly, the Great Shape dolls contained no mechanism to cause them to exercise by themselves. This was a breakthrough. Led by Judy Shackelford, who had joined Mattel in 1976 and was named its first female vice president in 1978, the Barbie marketing team let the doll go back to being a doll. Although her 1981 Western incarnation winked, Barbie had finally ceased to be an action toy. Girls, Shackelford observed, didn't want gimmicky doll bodies engineered for dynamic obsolescence; they preferred inert figures with fancy clothes and combable hair. Girls "didn't care if Barbie winked or not," Shackelford told me. "Guys cared. They said, 'God, look at that doll wink.' " Of Western Barbie, she confided: "It was the ugliest Barbie doll we ever did."
Instead of reworking the doll, Shackelford implemented