She's Skanky And We Like It: Why People Need To Get Over Barbie Already
I’m allowed to call Barbie a whore because I played with her for 13 years and I think I know her pretty damn well. Plus, a whore is always allowed to call a spade a spade.
As an avid Barbie lover (which can be rated on how many birthdays one spent with the Barbie-shaped cake and the amount of furniture and clothes one had in one's dream house), I can tell you full-well that my girl got around.
And Ken, well, Ken had it made. One man with his pick of 100 hot, skinny ladies, all of whom I envisioned as the perfect embodiment of a woman. He probably slept with about 10 of them, only my favorites.
It was playing Barbies that I first learned about sex from my Sunday school friend who occasionally came over after the Presbyterian lemonade and cookies.
Now, of course, Barbie never went by Barbie, but some name like Natalie or Vanessa, one of those hot names you wish your parents had the gall to name you.
The chosen girl was always the hottest one, the one with the belly shirt and the long blonde hair and tanned skin. She had perky tits and a tight ass, not to mention an allure that made you want to brush her hair and stare at her face for hours.
We were playing our usual setup: Barbie and Ken in the bedroom, Ken telling Barbie how beautiful she looked while we both thought of the dirty things that really came into the forefront of our minds, yet never daring to say aloud.
We didn’t talk; we both just sat with upright dolls in our hands, silently saying the dirty things really going on between the two consenting dolls.
Eventually, the perfect couple would end up in bed with Barbie on top, before I even knew what it meant to be a woman on top.
I felt something weird in my days-of-the-week underwear, but it was the usual sensation I got when playing with my erotic dolls. However, at this point, I didn’t know exactly what sex was. I just thought they laid on top of each other, feeling each other's weight.
“You know what sex is, right?” my Sunday school friend asked me, becoming arrogant with her knowledge. I normally would have lied, but I wanted to know, so I admitted to my ignorance. “It’s when a man sticks his penis inside a woman’s vagina” she proudly stated.
It was the dirtiest thing I’d ever heard. By first grade, no one had exposed me to anything that wasn't acceptable to air on PBS; penis and vagina in one sentence was just filthy. I didn’t say anything, but held the knowledge like a thousand weights in my fleetingly innocent mind.
We kept playing. It really didn’t make much of a difference now that I knew exactly what Ken and Barbie were doing lying on top of each other. It was still as erotic as it felt before, and Ken would still take her out to dinner after.
I played with Barbies for six years after that and never once looked at Barbie any differently. She was just this amazing woman I could only hope to be like when I grew up.
She had a beautiful home, with a kitchen, dining room and a bedroom. She had beautiful friends and a wardrobe of the most beautiful clothes I’d ever seen, and still to this day.
She’d have Ken over for dinner and they would eventually get married. They bought a pink Jeep Wrangler and had some kids. Sometimes they would take vacations on their private jet, which my parents bought me one Christmas.
To me, Barbie was this perfect girl who lived this perfect life. While I played out her life as a fantasy of my own, I knew in the back of my little head that she wasn't real, that my life wouldn't actually be like that. Even children become aware of the limitations of reality.
To me, she was this emblem of an ideal world, of a dream. Yet, now that I’m hashing it out, she just seems superficial and immoral.
By society’s standards, she was a slut and a gold digger. She didn’t have a job; she stayed in her house all day, going out to lunch with friends and getting around with a few blond Ken dolls I eventually added to the collection.
She had sex almost every night, with a man who had no qualms sticking it in her best friends. But who cared? She was my doll in my fantasy.
She was my escape from reality, my sexual exploration and my time to dream about worlds that I knew didn’t exist. It was something I didn’t have to explain because it all went on in my own, dirty little mind.
So I must ask, as Barbie prepares to grace the covers of “Sports Illustrated” and the Internet goes up in arms about the disproportion of America’s favorite doll, why all the fuss? Why the new dolls of humanized standards and the overt attention on a doll that’s been played with for generations? Why all the drama? Why now?
We’ve been playing with these dolls for 55 years. I don’t think making her shorter and extending her waist is going to change how younger generations play with her, or how growing generations feel about the image she continues to portray.
Despite what all the over-concerned PTA moms and liberal protestors believe, there are much more significant factors out in the world today that will negatively affect a woman’s self-image than a skinny, naked doll.
The alterations of wider hips and less makeup are just another standard of beauty that the little girls with curled spines and pockmarked faces will strive to live up to.
What everyone is forgetting is that these dolls are nothing more than fantasy for young girls, another outlet for play.
They are as magical and fantastical as the stuffed animals we collected, only their semblance of vaginas and hard pecks allow us to explore another facet of human play.
When all is said and done, Barbie is just a toy, an imaginary woman in an imaginary land who is nothing more than a beautiful whore, and that's how we like her.
Top Photo Courtesy: Tumblr
