Barbie at 50: Still giving them something to talk about

The rap on Barbie has never been pretty.

Born 50 years ago today - happy birthday, doll - Barbie's been accused of a lot of things, from being politically incorrect to being groaningly politically correct - and has survived innumerable bad haircuts and senseless beheadings - and she's emerged remarkably unscathed.

Sensible little girls like Ava Stites, 5, of Westmont, are still totally psyched to be allowed to wander into the Toys R Us in Cherry Hill, as Ava was last week on her actual birthday, and spend birthday money ($17.99) on a Barbie.

"I want pink," she told her mom, pointing at the purple mermaid Barbie, who swishes when you follow the instruction to "Squeeze my tail!"

Why Ava? Why Barbie?

"Because they're beautiful," she said without hesitation. "Sometimes they swim around."

And so - as Barbie's corporate handlers prepare a midcentury bash for the midcentury doll at her real Malibu dream house, a spin in her real Corvette convertible, a peek into her real actual closet (containing one billion pairs of shoes), a new House of Barbie in Shanghai, and a newly faux-controversial Tattoo Barbie - the doll Ruth Handler created in 1959 continues to get her share of attention, derision, and adoration.

At 50, it seems prudent to ask: Where, other than on high heels or, for the accessory challenged among us, in a heap, naked and barefoot, does the fashion icon stand today?

Everybody's got a take on Barbie.

"She has very little of redeeming value," said Diane E. Levin, a professor of early-childhood education at Wheelock College in Boston and the author of So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids.

Levin has studied Barbies for 30 years and is not at all assuaged by the "It's a doll, people" attitude.

Levin said that Barbie's foray into feminism through 108 careers, presidential aspirations, and other adjustments (Barbie once said, "Math class is hard!" but now says "Math is hard, but not impossible," according to Mattel) was short-lived.

In recent years, Levin said, the toy's focus has returned to glamour and its close relation, shopping, in even the oddest contexts. ("Is it glam time, girls?" a Barbie horse says in the "Barbie Groom and Glam" stable set.) The best-selling Barbie was the 1992 Totally Hair Barbie.

"Barbie totally supports that view of the world," Levin said. "It makes it very hard to get out from under that. It's telling that's what you need to be a girl. The focus in play is on shopping, appearance, and dress-up," she said. "Children pretend they're going on dates."

In a culture whose sexualized icons have long left Barbie in the dust, there is still something about Barbie that Levin and others find objectionable, even though the rival and litigated-against Bratz dolls have outsold Barbie over the last few years.

In tallying up the various grievances against Barbie, this one comes up over and over again: that the plastic, bosomy doll with the skinny waist encourages unrealistic body images, too much attention to appearance, and other superficial matters.

Two British studies found that "Barbie dolls could promote girls' insecurity about their image, which in turn may contribute indirectly to insecurity and eating disorders later in life."

Mattel tried to fix this in recent years, letting Barbie's belt buckle out a few notches, but that did not stop a West Virginia lawmaker this month from trying to ban Barbie and other dolls that, he said, emphasize beauty over deeper pursuits.

As for being overly curvaceous and sexualized, she was, after all, modeled after a German fashion doll called Bild Lilli, which was inspired by a German newspaper cartoon whose curvy character was known to be a bit of a tart: (To a policeman who tells her two-piece swimsuits are banned, she replied: "Which piece do you want me to take off?").

Robin Gerber, the author of Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World's Most Famous Doll and the Woman who Created Her, said Barbie's origins are indeed somewhat salacious. But she notes that Ruth Handler's story is often overlooked: a woman who cofounded and created a company that would grow to be the world's biggest toy company.

She said Handler - who loved clothes and possessed an ample bust herself and so saw nothing wrong with either of those things - wanted to give girls an alternative to the baby doll and its proscribed role of mother.

"She came up with the idea that girls want to imagine themselves being big girls and they need a way to do it," she said. "Is it also true that culture devalues us and is sexist and values us for how we look? I would argue that Barbie has been adopted into that culture rather than creating that culture. I don't think you can lay it all on the doll."

In 2006, an original 1959 blond Barbie (#1 Ponytail) with her original blockhead-ish forehead still in the box (NRFB in collector speak) sold for $27,450 in an auction. She's not wearing her original swimsuit (OSS), but an apron stocked with barbecue tools.

These originals continue to be highly sought after, said Sharon Korbeck Verbeten, author of The Best of Barbie, Four Decades of America's Favorite Doll. Their look is much different from Barbie today. "If you look at the 1959 face, it's very severe, the face paint is severe, it's very white, the haircut is different," she said.

Internationally, Barbie has appeared in 50 nationalities and is currently making inroads in China. But some markets remain dicey. Barbie is banned in Saudi Arabia for being "Jewish, with revealing clothes and shameful postures" - a stature that led NPR's Scott Simon to lament: "Though there have been Disco, Tennis Pro, Fashion Model, Malibu, Valentine, and scores of other Barbies, there's never been a Bat Mitzvah Barbie doll. But boy, would that be a party."

In any case, Barbie has always been a slave to fashion and to the trend of the moment, be it shoulder pads or running for president. In a society where "Pink" is a label of Victoria's Secret marketed to young teens, Barbie's still in the thick of it. Her pink-label dolls are wannabe Paris Hiltons desperately looking for lattes.

And yet. Facing off across the Walmart aisle with the sexualized bad-girl Bratz, and the sleeky rock-star glam Hannahs, competing in a world where obnoxious MTV bisexually-seeking reality shows get the attention of younger and younger girls, Barbie's 50-year-old concept of glamour begins to seem the least offensive choice out there.

Christine Cybulka of Huntingdon Valley was looking in Walmart for a Kitchen Set Barbie because her 7-year-old daughter, Julia, wants nothing more than to be a Rachael Ray-like host of her own cooking show and wants, as so many have before her, to do her training with Barbie.

"She pretends with them, so it's good," Cybulka said. "There's a lot of talk about Barbie having a bad image for girls, but those Bratz dolls, they look like they're trying to sell themselves."

Besides, moms these days are busy fighting on other doll fronts: like Mattel's dubious attempt to make cool bilingual, backpack-lugging Dora the Explorer grow up into a city shopping-centric, pinkified tween, which recently sparked an online petition protest.

And so, after 50 years, moms like Ruth Ann Stites are wary, but yielding. "As much as I've tried to avoid Barbie, it's inevitable," she said.