• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Barbie's large breasts make sense as a function of her time—postwar America. Breasts are emblematic of the home; they produce milk and provide security and comfort. Some of the strangest market research in Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders dealt with what milk meant to soldiers in World War II. Just as G.I.'s pined over chesty pinups, they also thirsted for milk—and those on the front lines craved it more than those stationed near home. If one makes a link between the meanings of milk and its infantile source, the top-heavy, hourglass shape of postwar fashion that Dior introduced with his "New Look" wasn't solely about hobbling women so that they would retreat from the workplace. It was about meeting the returning troops' profound psychological needs.

Barbie's absent nipples also comment on the extent to which those body parts have been eroticized in American culture. As a clothes mannequin, Barbie has no functional need of nipples; yet their omission is critical to establishing her sexual "innocence" and suitability for children. "So long as only the upper parts of the breasts are exposed, and the balance hidden, no sexual excitement is produced and no shock is administered to modern morality," Lawrence Langer observes in The Importance of Wearing Clothes. "But let the nipples fall out and panic ensues!"

Barbie's combination of voluptuous body and wholesome image was precisely what Hugh Hefner sought in models for Playboy, which he founded in 1953. Although such classic pinups as Jayne Mansfield and Bettie Page appeared in the magazine's earliest issues, Hefner's ideal Playmate was the girl next door—a member of a sorority house, not a house of ill repute. She was a girl who looked, as David Halberstam put it in The Fifties, as if she'd "stopped off to do a Playboy shoot on her way to cheerleading practice." But although Hef's paradigm was a "good girl," she was—like Barbie—not on the prowl for a husband. Before his recent reconversion to marriage, Hef's longtime girlfriend was Barbie Benton.

"Something I've thought about with Playboy and the Playmates is that they're women who are not really procreative females," Hanson observed. "They have very narrow hips, very boyish figures, big false breasts and they're Playmates, not wives. So a man can escape the reality of his childbearing wife. There's no possibility of her getting pregnant." The large breasts also encourage men to recall the scale of breasts in infancy. Hence, too, the look of infertility: Men dread fathering a rival.

Mattel claims Barbie's hair is long because of children's fascination with "hairplay." But ever since Milton's portrait of Eve in Paradise Lost, with her "golden tresses" falling "in wanton ringlets" to her waist, long hair has been part of the arsenal of seduction. Marian the Librarian must shake loose her spinsterish bun before she can be seen as enticing. "Long-haired models and messy-haired models are always more popular," Hanson explained. "If men want submissive women, they prefer them to be blond. If they want dominant women, they want them to be dark-haired. But in general they want lots and lots of hair.

"Sometimes I'll use women with very short hair in Leg Show because a lot of my readers feel so inferior and believe so much in female superiority that they don't think there should be any women who have sex with men," she continued. "They want them all to be lesbians." She handed me some photos. "Here's 'The Secret Sex Lives of Real Dykes'—a real lesbian couple in France who are posing. One of the women is older, non-made-up, rough-looking. And men can fantasize that they're lesbians, which a lot of them wish they were."

Body hair, however, is perceived as repellent, Hanson said, "except by the small groups of men who want them furry like apes." Like the nude female statues of ancient Greece, Barbie has no pubic fleece; but that's not, as in the case of the statues, a reflection of women's actual appearance. The average contemporary woman, unlike