Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [93]
"My father said, 'The purpose of dolls in the life of girls is to train them to be good wives and mothers,'" she continued. "And girls should play only with baby dolls so they can learn to care for real-life families. He felt—and his religion feels—that women have no creative abilities, women have no place in the world except to support their husbands and raise their children. I think Barbie probably turned my dad on. My dad is a very sexual person . . . and he saw Barbie's sexuality. But once Barbie was proclaimed to be this sexual conspiracy object, she became much more provocative to me."
At first, Hanson would sneak off to friends' houses to play with their Barbies. But after about a year or so, when owning the dolls didn't appear to have any ill effects on her cousins, her mother caved in and gave her one.
"When I got Barbie, it was like my parents had given me heroin," Hanson said. 'The first thing I did was strip all her clothes off and marvel at her breasts and feel her breasts and look at her body and those tiny arched feet and the whorishly arched eyebrows and the solid thick eyelashes and the earrings that stuck straight into her head." She paused. "They were pins. It was very exciting to me to pull the earrings in and out. I did it to the point that they just fell out after a while."
Hanson usually played with Barbie in the company of her younger brother, who became a cross-dresser and committed suicide in his twenties. "I was supposed to play with my sister but we didn't get along. My brother was more appreciative of Barbie's sexuality . . . I had Barbie and Midge, and we used to parade them around naked in their high heels. We painted nipples on them one day to make them more realistic. And we were mortified that we couldn't get the paint off. So my parents were going to know that we had sexualized the dolls."
Nevertheless, because of the rituals of their religion, her parents' idea of "sexual repression" was not what everyone would consider repressive. Her father, a chiropractor and "naturopath," practiced nudism, and her mother gave birth to the children at home. "It was a sexually charged household," Hanson said.
"I lived out my own emerging sexual fantasies with Barbie," she continued. "I only wanted the sexy clothes, and my mother wouldn't give them to me. She bought me childish clothes—a blue corduroy jumper. We'd put Barbie in it without the blouse and the breasts would show. The two outfits that I coveted—and saved up money for, and had to fight with my mother over—were both strapless: the pink satin evening gown that fit real tight. It could barely go over her legs it was so tight. And you could pull her top down. The other one was the gold lame strapless sheath dress with a zipper up the back.
"I didn't like Midge because she didn't have a sexy face," Hanson said. "The old Barbie looked dominant: sharp nose, sharp eyelashes—she was a dangerous-looking woman. And of course she had those symbols of power on her feet. . . . I don't consider Barbie sexual anymore. I looked at new Barbies a year or so ago, and their faces were infantile—more rounded and childlike."
Hanson used Barbie to imagine her idealized future self, which in her case meant an object of male desire. "Barbie was an adult woman whom I could examine," she said. "And I wanted very much to be Barbie." Nor was Hanson the only budding sex maven to fixate on the dolls. "I definitely lived out my fantasies with them," Madonna told an interviewer. "I rubbed her and Ken together a lot. And man, Barbie was mean." Likewise, Sharon Stone's thoughts in Vanity Fair suggested an autobiographical episode: "If you look at any little girl's Barbie, she's taken a ballpoint pen and she's drawn pubic hair on it."
Hanson left home at seventeen and became a respiratory therapist. After