Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [99]
Although Homes was aware of the doll as a child in Chevy Chase, Maryland, it was not central to her life. "I grew up in one of those families where we didn't have guns or dolls or anything," she said. "My parents' idea of a good gift would be a blank piece of paper. If it could have been Marxist Barbie, it probably would have been fine. But Barbie symbolized all the wrong things."
Homes bought her first Barbie while a graduate student at the University of Iowa. When she displayed it above her fireplace, she found visitors could not resist undressing it. "These were adult people coming into my home, immediately going to my mantel and taking off the doll's clothing," she said. "Men, women, whatever came in the door. And I thought: Why are they doing this? And they would proceed to then tell me all the horrible things that they had done to Barbie as a child—sort of abusing her in my presence. People were telling me how they chewed her feet off, they took her head off. And I told them: You're maniacs."
But the anecdotes stayed with her, as did Barbie's powerlessness. In "A Real Doll," she contrasts the difference between a boy's perception of the doll and a girl's. The boy is comfortable with Barbie's foreignness and objectification; the girl, who compares Barbie unfavorably with herself, is not— and she retaliates by mutilating the doll. Not all little girls gravitate as naturally to Barbie's "feminine" affectations and "traditional sexual power" as did Dian Hanson or the Lady Bunny. "We live in a world where it's hard to be a person and a girl," Homes told me. "When I put on high heels— number one, I've actually broken my leg just trying to walk in the things. But I become a very different person. Because I can't even cross a room as Amy Homes. All of a sudden, I'm crossing as Amy Homes, Girl.
"Men think they would like a real-life Barbie, but if they met her, they wouldn't want to go near her," Homes elaborated. "She'd be seven feet tall and she'd be too scary." Playboy's 1991 photo spread on the "Barbi Twins," however, suggests otherwise. Photographed wallowing in wet sand on Maui, the pair—who call themselves Shane and Sia—are a bizarre assemblage of anatomical components, notably four gargantuan breasts that, proportionately, are even larger than the doll's. Former belly dancers with slim hips that would look right at home on a fourteen-year-old boy, the two actually described themselves to Newsday as "truckdrivers in drag." Although Playboy presents them with its characteristic earnestness, there is something almost laugh-aloud funny about their mismatched body parts. And, to their credit, they seem both to have understood and exploited the fact that they are walking errors in scale. First they named themselves after an eleven-and-a-half-inch doll; then, in 1989, posted giant photos of themselves on a billboard over Sunset Boulevard. It was as if Barbie, the ultimate controllable object, got her revenge by starring in Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman. Or perhaps I should say "Barbi"—their e disappeared after objections from Mattel.
Evidence suggests that the doll themes that excite heterosexual men are not of equal interest to lesbians. In 1989, when On Our Backs published photos of a Barbie-like doll used as a dildo, readers protested. "Is this what you call erotic?" one less-than-euphemistic reader began. "Barbie is the ugliest piece of shit to come out of Amerikan factories." Fantasies involving scale, power, and, well, brand penetration would appear to be principally male.
Grown men amusing themselves with adult female dolls is not new in the history of fetishism, which, as Louise J. Kaplan has explained, "involves using deadened and dehumanized objects as a substitute for living, excited persons." The German Lilli doll is part of an international tradition