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Better Be Meta

@betterbemeta / betterbemeta.tumblr.com

Media, Fandom, Analysis, Horses, Inclusive Feminism, Dinosaurs.
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betterbemeta
wizardpotions
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coughloop

gods greatest punishment was putting 1 trillion cool rocks on earth and no one with eyes big enough to see them all

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coughloop

..ive been such a fool

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thyrell

thats okay ^-^ the wise man is blessed with knowledge once but the fool is blessed to learn every day

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coughloop

*gets scared and throws one of my cool rocks at your fourhead*

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thyrell

ow what the hell

betterbemeta
ragedaisy
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vesper-of-roses

Imagine my shock as a neurodivergent teen when I first realized that using large vocabulary and eloquent speech doesn't make you less likely to be misinterpreted, rather it adds an entirely new layer of misinterpretation I had never even realized existed in the form of people thinking you're being snobbish or condescending when you're just trying to be specific

betterbemeta
golvio
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animentality
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marzipanandminutiae

so, let's talk about this. because it's not quite true

Barbie was not the only fashion doll on the market (much less the only one to ever exist, a worrying claim from the first Barbie movie trailer). Dolls like Madame Alexander's Cissy, Ideal's Miss Revlon, and Uneeda's Dollikin were all available before Barbie's 1959 release

While Mattel would love for you to believe that Barbie was the first, Cissy- released in 1955 -would like a word.

Ruth Handler might well have SAID that she "noticed the only dolls on the market were babies," but she and her husband ran an existing toy company; Barbie was not Mattel's first project. She 100% would have been aware of the other fashion dolls available. In short: if she said that, she was...almost certainly stretching the truth.

There was indeed pushback against fashion dolls from cultural commentators who thought little girls should only play with baby dolls, to encourage Maternal Instincts(TM)...but that dates at least back to the French fashion dolls of the 1860s-1890s, which were accused of making little girls "worldly" in magazines of the day. It wasn't a new idea developed especially in response to Barbie.

What set Barbie apart from other fashion dolls was twofold:

  1. She was smaller and cheaper. Cissy retailed for like $13 in just her lingerie, which was quite pricey for a doll at the time (Barbie cost $3 originally), and stood 20" tall. Miss Revlon was similarly large and unwieldy for a child to carry around. As I understand it, Handler noticed her daughter's fondness for movie star paper dolls and sought to create a 3-dimensional version.
  2. She had an adult face. As you can see above, Cissy may have had breasts, but she was also quite baby-faced. Barbie, with her arched brows and narrow cheeks, looked more like an adult woman in her facial proportions.

Still unusual! Just not unique

But I'm not really here to split hairs about which was the actual first 1950s fashion doll. My main thesis is this: Barbie was NOT originally meant to be empowering.

...or disempowering. Or anything but a fashion doll for which a businesswoman trying to make money felt there was a niche.

Yes, she had a career at the beginning- as a fashion model. Hardly a job many men were trying to keep women out of. The first non-modeling careers she had were ballerina, flight attendant, and registered nurse, female-dominated fields that nobody was challenging women's right to pursue.

(Original Barbie box. If you can't read the text, it says "Barbie(T.M.) Teen Age Fashion Model.")

That's not to say that Handler was completely without deeper thoughts on Barbie's place in the world. She was adamant that, while Barbie might model a bridal gown, she would never actually marry Ken to prevent her from being tied down as a wife and mother. And certainly later in her life, she got onboard with the "girls can do anything!" messaging of later Barbie generations.

But to say that Barbie was intended to be #empowering or make a statement from the beginning is just revisionist history that's bound to leave people disappointed. I mean, what's Twitter OP going to think when they discover that an early Barbie babysitting set came with a little book called "How to Lose Weight" that simply said "Don't eat!" on the back? Handler was still president of the company at the time- how does that fit with this starry-eyed vision of her creating an empowering doll for little girls?

Putting Barbie on a pedestal is going to lead to just as rude an awakening as casting her in the "worthless bimbo doll" role.

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roach-works

i’d also like to chime in with some cynicism about the mythologized state of american women’s empowerment in the late 50s. women knew they could do men’s jobs because they had done them during the war. fifteen years previously women had built ships and airplanes! they’d flown cargo planes and drove trucks and worked in mines and and worked farms and fought fires and kept things running while men went off and killed themselves. then the surviving men came back and demanded, as their due, that all the women get back to the kitchen. and some women agreed and some women disagreed and were violently persuaded to agree. and that was the 50s.

women were very much removed, wholesale, by force, from the workplaces they had capably run. they were allowed to substitute for men in a pinch, but never ever compete with them. and the men who enforced this relegation knew very well that women could do men’s jobs, because they had just done them. it was imperative after that to make sure what had just happened was seen as a tragic aberration of the natural order, and best forgotten.

so like. women in the 60′s weren’t inventing women’s empowerment from a state of childish innocence. the older you get the more you realize fifteen, twenty years isn’t all that long. things can change, fast, and for the worse. these girls with their air hostess barbies, their aunts might have been pilots.

every step forward, women clawed back from men by force. feminism wasn’t invented out of a naive ignorance of any alternatives, where women suddenly suggest a bold new idea that just occurred to them and then men realize what big sillies they all were. women can do anything that men can do, and they always have. the fight is over whether or not they get to. 

betterbemeta

power scaling doesnt have to escalate forever. after a certain point I think things should become a point-and-click adventure game. nothing can be solved by 'punch hard' or 'move fast' or 'use fantastic powers' anymore, we're past that. things can only be solved by tying a slim jim to some dental floss and a rubber duck you saw across town 20 minutes ago to create some kind of rudimentary fishing lure that can float on top of lake mead and lure the interdimensional octopus out of hiding without scaring it bad enough it destroys the hoover dam in an alternate reality. you need to capture it in an ikea bag, but from space ikea. it's wrong to hurt an endangered species.