Remember the talking one they had: “Math is hard!” Yes, let’s encourage girls to be morons.

Oh, the idea of Barbie came from a doll named “Lili” that German trucks had hanging from their windows. She looked like a whore.

Some role model.

Oh, and lighten up, Lilith!

It’s just, there was lots of stuff Barbie couldn’t do. And if you tried to make her do that stuff, she got broke.

I figured out how to bend her knees, but after a few months of bending, they’d usually break. Sometimes metal would come out, or sometimes she’d look like she’d been in a terrible ski accident. And, as a poster said above, barbie was really good at standard splits, but she couldn’t do Russians. I was good at Russian Splits, and I wanted Barbie to do them, too. But her legs would always pop off. So I pulled them off and put them next to her–presto! Barbie was doing a split! Just like me! Also, if you wanted Barbie to stand on her own without leaning against something, one good way to do it was to put something heavy down and then sort of spread her legs around it–she’d grip it and not fall (though she’d list a bit forward or back if you didn’t jam it in properly). This, along with the Russians, put a definite strain on miss Barbie’s hip joints until eventually they wore down to a point where the legs couldn’t be jammed back on (although, of course, one leg usually went before the other. And there began the “pirate Barbie” tales).

Same for the arms–Barbie could wave for a taxi and do tarzan swings, but she couldn’t hold hands in a circle and spin. So, her arms got pulled off (though far, far less frequently).

Everyone cuts Babrie’s hair and draws on makeup or other things. The shock is that when you’re done, Barbie doesn’t look as good as you’d thought she would, and she doesn’t go back to the way she was before. But even when you realize that, it’s really hard to not cut Barbie’s hair, because maybe it’ll look cool! And why wouldn’t it grow back?

I never was mad at Barbie, I never hated Barbie particularly. I liked making clothes for her, mostly because I lost her real clothes, even though I wasn’t very good at it. I actually liked watching my other friends make better clothes. That, to me, was the best part of Barbie–the clothes my friends made with strips of fabric, rubber bands, pipe cleaners, etc.

But it’s true I never saw Barbie as “real” and having feelings. Unlike my stuffed animals, who definitely got sad when I didn’t play with them enough.

“Nairn said many girls saw Barbie as an inanimate object rather than a treasured toy.

“Whilst for an adult the delight the child felt in breaking, mutilating and torturing their dolls is deeply disturbing, from the child’s point of view they were simply being imaginative in disposing of an excessive commodity in the same way as one might crush cans for recycling,” she said. “

The child can critique barfydom like Joan Rivers at the Oscars!

Make no mistake, this kids self image is not tied to an out of proportion plastic sex symbol in any way shape or form.

P.S.
Ive never microwaved a barfy. Is it fun? Maybe I’ll suggest it at our next Girl Scout meeting.

I never mutilated Barbie, but I did have a stunt Barbie, who got tossed around quite a bit. My brothers drew beards on some of them. Wonder if they’ll do a study on that!

But you do splits the wrong way, the legs pop of anyway. They are not very durable.

It’s kind of disturbing in ways Lilith described, but there might be a variety of reasons why it’s done as well.

As a result of my concern, I actually went to a charity store and bought a used Barbie doll. I took it home and placed it in my microwave, with some trepidation. After just 55 seconds of microwaving, thick white smoke and an acrid burning-plastic odour were billowing from around the edges of the microwave door. I hastily opened the door and the room filled with the most choking and presumably toxic fumes. Putting the air-con on full blast for 10 minutes still left the room hazy and smelly.

I believe the results of my experiment deserve widespread publicity, as I fear the girls imitating what they have no doubt seen in the media may endanger their health through breathing the fumes of their cremated toys, or worse, burn down the family home - I didn’t experiment further to see what would happen if I left the Barbie in the microwave for the full 10 minutes I had programmed!

[I actually did this last year, not in my childhood. I had an idea for a still life.]

Decapitating her and covering her in sharpie shows that you’re not one of those silly, stupid girly-girls who likes pink. Barbie is targeted more often because she’s so popular.

Looking back, I think the anti-girly sentiment that drove me and my peers to mutilate Barbie (I’m talking deliberate destruction, not creative alteration) is somewhat disturbing. So is vehement hatred of pink and other things that are associated with girls.

I think you’ve got something there, and I used to be this person, too. Everything in my world (including two brothers about my age) supported the notion of female inferiority so I came to depise outright girlishness until age 20 or so. I had no pink in my wardrobe and gravitated towards the boyish pursuits of my brothers (video games, D&D, Transformers, etc) but still got “girl gifts” like Barbies from people. I chopped their hair off and didn’t otherwise mutilate them, but I remember the anti-girl sentiment of my youth vivdly and think Barbie getting tortured more than other toys is entirely plausible by kutsuwamushi’s reasoning of the rejection of femininity.

I read in some lefty mag or other about a teacher who rebuked some girls snickering over the mention of gay men by explaining to them that society’s rejection of gay men is part and parcel with its rejection of the feminine in all its perceived forms. When I think on how weekly papers carry prostitution ads for women and transgender men socially performing femininity but not transgender women socially performing as men, that anecdote about the teacher trying to explain the social degredation of femininity in all its forms comes to mind.

I never had a Barbie. I did have a talking Action Man though. He was very boring and repetitive. Clearly these things have no effect at all on what you turn out like as an adult. No, really…

Besides, 100 children do not a good study make.

It doesn’t necessarily make a bad study. The law of diminishing returns applies: 1000 is better, but not ten times better.

The main credibility killer for studies with small samples is that they’re usually far from representative. Big, well-funded studies usually go to significant lengths to obtain a random representative sample.

I don’t know why but something about that doll made it impossible to imagine her doing anything else.

Possibly because she couldn’t stand up on her own ? Skipper could, back in the day, but I think they gave her a makeover and that’s no longer the case.

Talk about showing your age: I can remember that some company had a doll called Dynamite where part of the selling pitch was that she could stand up on her own. Also, there was briefly a motorcycle-riding female doll named Daring Something-Or-Other.

I think part of the problem with Barbie is she’s just not fun to play with. I had lots of dolls, all of whom had their own personalities and took part in elaborate multipart adventures where they ran away from orphanages, time traveled, met aliens, etc. But you could never play anything with Barbie except getting her dressed up for a date. I don’t know why but something about that doll made it impossible to imagine her doing anything else.

http://tribethefilm.com/index.html

And I never played with my Barbies like other girls did. No shopping for my Barbie. I had her fighting alongside GI Joe and raiding tombs like Indiana Jones. The doll was merely a toy that allowed me to use my imagination to entertain myself.

But in general, Barbies (most action figures in fact) just don’t stand up well to the rigors of children’s play. They come apart too easily, and they are simply blank canvases for budding young designers, tattoo artists, and hair stylists to practice upon.

“Will this damage my blender or void my warrenty?” “We have no idea- Barbie blending is a new art form and we’re all forging this path together.”

Though, the most extreme time was probably when I discovered that one of the Ken dolls I owned had, for some reason, a head that screwed on. Well… If it screwed on, it could damn well screw back off, couldn’t it? So I took it off and started throwing it around with my older brother and one of my girlfriends. That just escalated. The three of us tore apart all of my Barbie dolls (and their associates: Ken, whatever the little sister’s name was, etc.) and threw the limbs out of my bedroom window. I still remember how much fun it was. I couldn’t have been more than 9 and I was probably younger. I wasn’t given any more dolls after that. That suited me just fine. I went back to blowing up Legos.