Not a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world

There were many years when Christmas was a disappointment due to my parents’ stubborn refusal to allow a Barbie doll into our household. When you’re 6 and all your friends have like 5 Barbies and 2 Skippers and an actual drawer full of Barbie clothes, it’s hard to understand the whole body image thing. I just wanted a Barbie, dammit. But my parents would have none of it, although to this day my mother says she doesn’t remember me ever wanting a Barbie.

“You never uttered the B-word,” she said. “I never thought they were healthy but I suppose if I’d known you really wanted one, we would have bought you one.”

Instead, I appealed to my grandmother. My wonderful Jewish grandmother who would do just about anything for me, including gifting me with plaid underwear with lace ruffles on the butt that she bought on a seniors tour of Scotland. Cooking was not her forte, but shopping—she knew from shopping. So one Hanukah, I opened a suspiciously Barbie-shaped box and, lo and behold, I was the proud owner of my first and only Barbie doll.

My mother was about as pleased with this gift as my grandmother was about the presence of a Christmas tree in our house, but I was young and oblivious and too entranced with my leggy new possession. Up to that point, my favorite toys were a small fleet of yellow metal Tonka trucks and my growing collection of Matchbox cars. Is there anything better than Tonka trucks for playing in the garden? I think not.

Needless to say, it took about 3 days for me to lose interest in Barbie. Yes, her clothes were fun to put on and take off, but she couldn’t do anything fun. Give her a truck to push and she looked stupid. Lean her against the wall and she fell over. My brother’s GI Joe action figures were too small to be decent playing companions, and her smile—that horrible, frozen, insipid smile. She bothered me and then bored me to tears. So one day I gave her a Marine buzz cut with my mother’s sewing shears and then pulled her leg off.

Apparently I wasn’t the only girl with destructive Barbie tendencies.

One look at the mutilated plastic stick figure in my trashcan and both my mother and my grandmother vowed never to give me another plastic doll again. I pleaded and begged—because in all honesty, Barbie was fun to pull apart—but no dice. A year later, my mother relented and gave me a more acceptable Barbie placeholder—the Darcy doll. Darcy was bigger than Barbie. Her limbs were more proportional to a real girl’s and her clothes covered more flesh-colored plastic than Barbie’s did. Sadly, this meant that Barbie’s flashy clothing didn’t even fit over Darcy’s plump thigh, much less over her badonkadonk. I grudgingly accepted the substitute and played with her for a few years, mostly on long car trips when it got too dark to read. And now I hate Barbies with a passion. But when you’re six, what do you know?