Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [58]
I asked her if she viewed children as noble savages or beasts to be civilized. She rejected both extremes and talked about "magic . . . that keeps the child in all of us alive." I asked why no rival doll had ever successfully challenged Barbie—as if I, Midge, didn't know. "I think you've got heritage going," she explained. "We've got the marketing and product design talent. There really is no hole that somebody's going to come in and fill. And anytime someone comes after us frankly only makes us smarter and better. You've got to stay on your toes."
I lumbered flat-footedly out of the interview, wallowing in my Midge-hood. Something Camille Paglia told me sprang to mind: "Barbie truly is one of the dominant sexual personae of our time." What did it mean, I wondered, to identify with the personae of the supporting cast? If Barbie were Ur-woman, did that make me Ur-sidekick?
Barad has grumbled about accusations that she used her looks to advance herself—"I've seen very handsome men in business," she told the Los Angeles Times. "Does anyone ever say it's because he was so handsome that he got ahead?"—but after listening to her polished, diplomatic responses, I was sure that she hadn't. It did, however, cross my mind that she may have used her looks to camouflage her nonreliance on them—and, so briefly as to be almost unnoticeable, Day-to-Night Barbie flashed before my eyes.
But even with her record sales, the Barbie of the late eighties was not the vibrant virago of the early eighties. "We Girls Can Do Anything" gave way to "We're into Barbie," a slogan that suggests turning inward, away from active engagement with the world. "The viewpoint of people changed," Barbara Lui explained, "and the 'mommy track' came on, and women didn't believe anymore that they could do anything. We're in an era—perhaps we're leaving it now—where people did not give themselves goals that were as tough."
Lui did not get that idea out of the air; though whether it was true or not remains a subject of debate. "The supermom is fading fast—doomed by anger, guilt, and exhaustion," Newsweek reported in 1988. "A growing number of mothers" believe "that they can't have it all." Yet in her book Backlash, Susan Faludi points out that the survey on which Newsweek based the article revealed nothing of the sort. It found that 71 percent of mothers at home would prefer to work and 75 percent of the working mothers would go on working even if their financial needs could be otherwise met. Faludi also reports that Good Housekeeping's 1988 "New Traditionalist" ad campaign, which featured born-again housewives happily recovering from the horrors of the workplace, was based on neither hard facts nor even opinion polls. The two opinion studies by the Yankelovich organization, which had allegedly buttressed Good Housekeeping's position, had, in fact, showed no evidence that women were either leaving work or wanted to leave.
This is not to cast Barbie as a New Traditionalist. Even in retrograde times, she has never stayed at home against her will. The jobs on her 1989 resume—physician, astronaut, veterinarian, fashion designer, executive, Olympic athlete—are impressive; a little girl could do worse than identify with such a doll. Her move away from demeaning stereotypes can also be documented. Compared with, say, the 1973 Barbie Friend Ship, in which Barbie is forced to play scullery maid to a painted-on pilot, the 1990 Flight Time Barbie, developed in 1989, is herself an aviatrix. But Flight Time Barbie is also a Day-to-Night doll, and her after-hours outfit, vastly more girlish than what she wore in 1985, undercuts her authority. In five years, her homeovestite behavior has intensified, suggesting that her achievements have left her fraught with anxiety.
What Flight Time Barbie wears at night is a Christian Lacroix-inspired "pouf" skirt that barely covers her plastic derriere. Susan Faludi draws a convincing parallel between the juvenilizing