Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [94]
What Hanson learned in her odyssey through the porn world was "traditional sexual power"; she internalized the visual coding of the early Barbies—a way of presenting herself so that, as she saw it, she was sexually in control. "I could make men love me—I could make men want to see me and be with me and stay with me because I was a great lay," she said. "Men really will stay with a woman and love a woman if she's very sexy. It's exactly the opposite of what my parents told me." Hanson has, in a way, realized the Barbie fantasy, the girl-version of the American Dream. She has a steady boyfriend, a place in the city, a getaway in the country, and a lucrative job that she loves.
Significantly, Hanson scorns the face of the current Barbie. Much of the original doll's "traditional sexual power" emanated from its heavy-lidded, almost vampiric gaze—the "aggressive eye of the gorgon," as Camille Paglia has put it, "that turns men into stone."
"That is the most powerful eye," Paglia told me. "It is far more powerful than the 'male gaze,' which, as defined by feminism, is simply a tool by which men maintain their power in society. A woman lying on a bed with her legs open is not in a subordinate position. She is in a position of total luxury, like an empress: 'Serve me and die'—essentially that. . . . That very sultry and seductive woman seems half asleep, but what is awake is her eye." And it is the eye that implicitly draws the male observer to the woman—at his peril. The eye "hypnotizes you; it paralyzes you; it puts you under a spell."
Some, however, feel that the characterization of women as vampires in art and myths has less to do with women's real nature and more to do with how the men who created the art and myths perceived them. Even when they are well into adulthood, boys still fear and dread Mom for the power that she once held over them—and they extend that fear to all women, demonizing them into a lethal army of femmes fatales. Men "create folk legends, beliefs and poems that ward off the dread by externalizing and objectifying women," Chodorow writes. Yet regardless of whether the vampiric female gaze is an objective fact or a metaphorical construct, it is a recurring theme in the history of male heterosexual desire. And it is as crucial as Barbie's breasts in understanding why straight men slaver over flesh-and-blood versions of the doll.
Male heterosexual desire, however, is not shaped by boyhood experiences alone. It is influenced by what the culture designates as "erotic"—not merely pornographic nudes, but artistic ones. A nude, by definition, should arouse in the viewer "some vestige of erotic feeling," Kenneth Clark writes.
Historically, society has eroticized particular female body types at particular times. In Seeing Through Clothes, Anne Hollander shows how from ancient statues to modern photographs, the look of the unclothed figure has been influenced by the fashions of its day. Today, artists sexualize the female breasts and buttocks, but from medieval times until the seventeenth century, bellies were all the rage: whether a painting's subject was a virgin or a courtesan, she could not have too big a tummy. Likewise, the mega-mammaries that men pant over in Bust Out! were in the 1500s considered abhorrent, and usually featured on witches and hags. It wasn't until the mid-nineteenth century, when women cinched in their waists with corsets, that commodious breasts