Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [96]
Because of the historical association of hair with sexual power and passion, John Berger thinks that the absence of body hair, particularly in pornographic female subjects, is a way of making the male viewer more comfortable. The viewer doesn't want to satisfy a symbolically voracious woman; he wants a woman to satisfy him. It's hard not to pity John Ruskin for having been born too soon. Had he come of age when women aped Barbie and, by extension, Greek sculptures, he might have managed to consummate his marriage, instead of being revolted by the sight of his wife's pubic hair.
Although the original Barbie's scarlet talons no longer connote wealth, they still mean power. "Nails are very erotic," Hanson said. "There are men who like ragged nails because that indicates a rough nature—a woman who might drag them off to her lair and devour them. Others prefer short nails because they represent youth."
Barbie's firm, showgirl bottom was perhaps underappreciated when she first appeared. In the 1990s, however, with breast implants criticized as both life-threatening and fake-looking—attributes oddly cast as equal in their undesirability—"buns of steel" have been anointed by such arbiters as Allure and W as today's status symbol. As with the postwar breast boom, it was not ever thus. In the 1730s, the idealized female body curved at its sides but not at its front or back. "The figure was almost like roadkill, it was so flat," Richard Martin, director of the Costume Institute at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, told Allure. Next derrieres were veiled by layers of clothes. It wasn't until the advent of the miniskirt in the 1960s that the female hindquarters became an official object of desire. To achieve what Allure terms a "thumpable melon butt," a woman must not only firm her gluteus maximus, but (a la Barbie) wear high heels, which tilt the rear end as much as 20 percent. This tilt arouses a man's inner ape. When female chimpanzees are in heat, their genitals swell, and, as a seductive gesture, they angle their behinds in the direction of their mates.
"Older men and men who are looking for mates and for love relationships want bottom-heavy women," Hanson agreed. But Barbie-generation men prefer that effect to be achieved bionically. "Lip jobs, butt jobs, tummy tucks, and boob jobs" are no longer sufficient to qualify for a job in porn; the latest trend is "customized" genitalia. "I understand in L.A. it's fashionable among the young porn models to get collagen injections in their labia to make them look more swollen and excited," she said.
The fashion for exaggerated depictions of sex, however, is not confined to pornography. In mainstream movies, soulful lovemaking has given way to strenuous gymnastics—"iibersex," Walter Kirn calls it—the erotic act interpreted as a cartoon car chase. Ubersex is what occurs between human-Barbie Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct. It is rigorous, yet tidy—a mating of mannequins, "taking the basic Ken-and-Barbie poses familiar to naughty ten-year-olds and heaping on Playboy-approved perversions," Kirn writes in Mirabella. It is also utterly humorless.
Watching Stone and the other dolls in Basic Instinct, I thought of Jack Ryan and his R&D team in the 1960s, who eased some of their creative tension by playing pranks and shooting one another with water pistols. They also did what engineer Derek Gable and others have characterized as "a lot of racy stuff" with Barbie and Ken— modifying their anatomy and staging X-rated puppet shows. It's not surprising that imaginative grown men with senses of humor joked that way with the dolls. What is extraordinary, though, is that thirty years later their ribald gags would wind up in the movies, presented as everyday lovemaking.
One does not have to be