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Consumer Behavior
In Their Fantasies, Do Girls Want to Be Feminists?
Personal Perspective: The interplay of fantasy, femininity, and feminism.
Posted August 11, 2023 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
One of the most conflictual achievements the feminist movement led in its struggle has been the makeover that the famous Barbie doll went through. A large part of the feminist struggle has revolved around the pressure exerted on women to conform to social perceptions of how the female body should look. These pressures have led to low body image in many girls, as well as eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia, depression, anxiety, and plastic surgeries.
The main claim against Barbie is that the doll has had a negative effect on the body image of young girls because of her unreasonable physical measurements. A full-grown woman with Barbie's proportions, for example, could not have her period. After countless protests, in 1997 the doll's waist was slightly widened, and in 2016 Mattel released a line of Barbies with different body structures, including a curvaceous Barbie, who was modeled on the cover of Time magazine with the title: Now can we stop talking about my body?
The protests sought to convey the message, "You can be medium size and still be successful." However, the desired behavioral change was not as expected.
If up until that moment, Mattel was proud of the fact that every second, two Barbie dolls were sold in the world, that was not the case anymore. After the new Barbie was released, sales results showed that the victory of common sense over emotion had been celebrated too soon. The attempt to promote the body measurements of an average woman has been an economic failure. Barbie sales dropped by 15 percent after the introduction of the more-curvaceous Barbie. Ruth Handler, the doll's creator, would have turned over in her grave if she had seen that Barbie, which, for her, symbolized the feminist struggle, had become a clear symbol of chauvinism and discrimination.
Barbie's Image vs. Reality
At the American Toy Fair in 1959, a historic mistake was about to be made. The first people who saw the Barbie doll decided that no one would ever want to buy it. Initially, representatives of Mattel called it "the doll with the breasts," and did not want to hear about it at all. Its reps felt uncomfortable producing and marketing such a doll. (They eventually changed their minds.)
The reason so few predicted success for the Barbie doll was a mistaken assumption about what girls wanted. At the time, the assumption was that little girls wanted to play at being a mother, or to play "House." However, even though Handler was herself happily married, the idea that all a woman should hope for was a family and children filled her with sadness and frustration.
The realization that a doll like Barbie could succeed arrived for Handler after hours of watching her daughter, Barbara, after whom the doll was named, at play. Hendler noticed that Barbara had a special way of playing with paper dolls: She imagined through them her life as a mature girl in role plays that did not include being a mother or a housewife; she could use the paper dolls to play any character she wanted. This is where Handler got the idea that little girls actually did want to pretend they were grown up, with real accessories and real clothes.
There are two fundamentally different basic assumptions here: Do all little girls wish to become mothers, or do they aspire to be anything they can imagine?
A New Concept of Femininity
Ironically, the Barbie doll that is now seen as a symbol of the distorted model of beauty was created to fight outdated patriarchal concepts, according to which a woman should dream only of a family and children. In this sense, Barbie was a trailblazer. Created by a woman who had made her way through the male-dominated business world, Barbie succeeded in bringing to America a new understanding of femininity. She taught families across the country, and eventually the rest of the world, that women can be the center of their own lives, and not just accessories to a husband, family, or home. Barbie is actually a representation of the desired self on which all hidden desires and desires can be projected. But it took a while for Barbie to be warmly adopted; parents of little girls initially balked at the thought of letting their girls play with a grown-up female doll.
As sales struggled, Mattel recruited psychologist Ernst Dichter to consult with them. Dichter was aware of parents' concerns about Barbie, and understood that the doll's marketing story must meet parents' fantasies about their own childhoods. The idea was to market Barbie as a role model for young girls, who would help turn them into "ladies." This was the ambition of the parents at that time. The result of the campaign was that Mattel nearly collapsed under a load of orders for the doll.
But our story about the wonderful doll is not over. One question remains open.
Why Did the Curvaceous Barbie Fail?
You will not find the reason for this sales failure in the books that educate girls about a healthy body image, nor in feminist protests. The answer lies in our unconscious, primitive parts. Girls want their Barbie to fulfill their fantasies; they want to imagine everything they can't be through their Barbie doll. The marketing trick devised by Dichter could not work to save the curvaceous (some might say chubby) version of the doll—as this time, the recoil against it came from girls themselves, not their parents.
The reason why Barbie had been such a resounding success among children is that all fantasies could be thrown at her. Barbie was for the girls everything they wanted or aspired to be. The drop in sales after the modified versions went on sale represented a clear statement: Don't ruin our fantasy. In fantasy, we are without extra weight, we have smooth and shiny hair, and all of our clothes sit on us perfectly. Girls don't want a Barbie to be like them; they want to have a perfect fantasy and a full-figured Barbie can't always fulfill that role.
This decline in sales after introducing the fuller-figured Barbie can be attributed to the explosion of a balloon, the breaking of the ultimate fantasy. No girl wants their Barbie to leave the fantasy world and enter the real world.
