May 25, 2009 • 21 mins
Barbie is an extremely popular children's toy, but her origins aren't so innocent. Uncover Barbie's dark, secret past in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop? Mom never told you?
From House to works dot Com. Hey there, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Kristen h Molly Molly. As we speak,
(00:22):
every second, two Barbies are being sold somewhere in the world. Wow,
that is that's astounding. That's a lot of Barbies. That's
according to Mattel, the manufacturer of Barbie. Yep, lots of
Barbies being sold. And Barbies, I think are sort of
the one thing that I mean, if you're in a
name like ten things you think of when you think
of women and their toys, I guess you come up
(00:45):
with Barbie. Yeah, Barbie's the most popular toy in the world.
She is the queen of toys. But truth be told, Molly,
I never owned a Barbie. That doesn't surprise me, Kristen, Yeah,
me neither. Um. My mom really wasn't into her busty figure,
so I got cabbage patch dolls instead, which kind of
looked like sexy potatoes. Yeah. I had Barbies. I got um,
(01:07):
I had about three, I think, and but I never
got Barbie. Closed from the store. I inherited all my
mom's Barbie clothes, which were hands owned by my grandmother.
So my Barbie, I think, was a little bit more
stylish than other Barbies with clothes from my grandma. Yeah,
they're pretty cute. A lot of Grandma was pretty uh
gretty hip. Grandma made a corduroy suit for Barbie that
(01:29):
she rocked like. It was like, give that girl a
job argue with a corduroy suit. Mommy, do you think
your mom would have been as into Barbie though she
knew about her, her her sexy predecessor. I am shocked.
I was shocked to learn about barbie sordid and dark
past has a sex doll. Let's talk about this. Let's
(01:50):
talk about Barbie's Barbie's secret past. Um. On July, we're
in Germany. It's after World War two, is in did
things are a little chaotic days, probably dark days. And
there's a German tabloid that's still in existence, actually called
(02:10):
what's it called Christian. I'm not a native German speaker,
so I apologize if I do not pronounce this correctly,
but I did look the pronunciation up on the internet,
and it is uh as close as I can get
build z tongue. And on that day, July, a cartoon
called Lily was featured for the first time. And Lily
was a saucy little dame. Okay, she was. She was blonde,
(02:33):
very busty, rarely wore much more than a bra and
some newspaper across her lab and she was basically a
gold digger. She was out for for money. She always
dated these fat cats who didn't treat her well, but
as long as they bought her clothes and diamond necklaces,
she was happy. And she always said little sassy things
(02:55):
that the German Men just loved. But really she had
to make do right. The war had sort of forced
her into a very poor state, and rather than you know,
be drugged down by it, she wanted to be provided for.
I think that's sort of a natural response after after
a war, sort of Scarlett o'harah, he will be with
(03:15):
fat cats is a natural response to wartime poverty. Maybe so, Molly,
so Barbie taught me. Whatever the case, Uh, Lily became
such a popular character that in nineteen fifty five they
decided to turn her into a doll, bring her into
the three D world of doll and she wasn't I mean,
she wasn't a doll in the sense that little girls
(03:38):
played with her. No. No, Lily was not marketed for
for babies. As we mentioned, it was sort of a
sex doll for adult men. I mean she was only
only seven inches long, um or eleven inches me. She
wasn't the full size sex dolls who might imagine today. Right,
We're not talking about like a blow up doll or anything.
She was just sort of a funny little bachelor gift
that guys would give each other. She would usually wear
(04:00):
saucy little outfits. Um, I've seen one Lily doll wearing
just a little little black nightie. And uh, if you
if you look at her face closely, she she has
these really uh I keep saying saucy. She has these
really pouty lips, and her eyes look off to the
(04:20):
side sort of. Um, she doesn't even make eye contact
with She kind of has bedroom eyes, right. And one
of the taglines was whether I don't know if you
want to say this in your German X, but one
of the taglines was whether more or less naked Lily
is always discreet? Yeah, she was obviously advertised as you know,
just sort of a funny little toy. And I read
(04:41):
this one account about how German men would sometimes put
her on their dashboard in their car, and and friends
of theirs would like to just pick up her skirt
every now and then. They're pretty easily entertained after the war,
I guess. Yeah, sex toys back then evidently were far
more dame than sex toys now. But anyways, a whole
lot of podcast So Molly, So let's say that you're
(05:03):
on vacation and you see this doll. You got a
little girl at home, and you have been kind of
frustrated that all she has to do is play with
like paper dolls and baby dolls. Yeah, the dolls marketed
for girls back then were um, like you said, other
paper dolls that would depict you know, women, women, older women,
curve or like Lily or the actual three D dolls
(05:24):
that they would play with were uh, mostly just kind
of pot bellied, pre pubescent girls. No boobs, no hips,
none of that. So let's say you're a woman who
wants your daughter to play with more than just you know,
these two extremes of the thing. You want her to
have sort of a maybe a relatable role model and
you're on vacation, you pick up a lily dollah, in fact,
(05:45):
you pick up three, and you go home and you
start a worldwide doll empire. Tell us how that happened, Kristen, Well,
Molly Uh, That exact scenario happened to a woman named
Ruth Handler. Now Ruth Handler happened to have just started
a company with her husband, Elliott, called Mattel. I like,
(06:05):
where this is guy? Yeah. Elliott and Ruth moved out
to California during World War Two and they got into
the plastics business and they started making plastic picture frames
and then somehow that spiraled into ukulele. The first big
hit was this plastic ukulele that they made, and it
was all these kids loved it sold a ton, and
(06:25):
so eventually Mattel decided to go into the toy business.
They wanted to take over the toy industry. And after
World War Two you have this boom in consumerism, and
as companies are looking for new ways to market things,
they discovered that kids are actually a whole consumer group
(06:46):
all to their own. And with the debut of The
Mickey Mouse Show actually in ninety five, that really sort
of set off this trend. Of advertising directly to kids.
So all of this is going on with sort of
the revolutionizing of the American toy industry. Mattel is taking off.
Ruth Handler decides to jet set off to Switzerland. And yes,
(07:08):
she sees none else then Lily sitting in a shop window,
and she thinks she's adorable. She doesn't think that she's
some some sexy little novelty for German bachelor men. No,
she sees a new playmate for her daughter. Yeah, she
has this daughter, Barbara, who um, I think maybe she
was ten or twelve at the time, and she had
noticed that whenever Barbara and her her girlfriends would play
(07:30):
with her paper dolls, they would always choose see adult women,
and she thought that that was their way of practicing
for adulthood, right like you would sort of, you know,
pretend to be a mom, pretend to you know, have
a girl playing house maybe things that they saw their
moms doing, and they were start of practicing that role
through their dolls exactly. But aside from like I mentioned before,
(07:52):
aside from the paper dolls, there were no other sort
of physical dolls that they could really take the clothes
on and off of, brush their hair all of that.
So when Ruth Handler saw Lily, she bought three and
brought them back to the US to show give one
to her daughter, Barbara, and then you see other two
as models for a new doll for Mattel. And since
(08:13):
Barbara was sort of the you know, uh inspiration for
buying Lily, they named this new doll Barbie Barbie. What
do you know? Now, if you hold up a an
original Lily doll with the original Barbie, they look pretty similar.
Ruth Handler did have sort of a hard time convincing
the all male design staff at Mattel that they really
(08:35):
should go for put all this energy into making a
new doll, But once it finally happened, it was a
pretty painstaking process. They went over to Japan to the
factories too, because they wanted to craft this perfect doll,
and when they were deciding how to designer, they pretty
much kept the same figure as Lily, this very curvaceous bombshell.
It did take off I guess the original. It was
(08:57):
pretty pretty made up, had a lot of trollop paint on, yes,
sort of downplayed all of that, and um, but her
eyes still the original Barbie doll still had that sideward
sideways gaze. She debuted at the nineteen fifty nine New
York Toy Fair wearing saucy heels and a black and
white striped strapless one piece swimsuit and some very classy sunglasses.
(09:23):
And I think one of the reasons we should probably
mention here that she kept the kind of figure that
would let her wear this saucy spoast did she keep
saying is that when they were designing clothes for this
new doll, to get the clothes to fit right and
not just look like these shapeless move moves, basically they
needed to have curves for the clothes to fall on
(09:44):
because they were using real fabric used for real people,
and it didn't have sort of the give that tiny
people need, and so it was basically just to keep
the clothes looking shapely. So the funny thing about this
debut of Barbie, now the most buler toy in the world,
is that she really did not make waves at the
New York Toy Fair. The manufacturers or the boy store
(10:06):
owners really kind of couldn't care less at first about her.
I wouldn't imagine that it would be sort of the
thing to do to buy real, big, big booby doll,
well exactly, Mattel had a pretty pretty big task on
their hand of figuring out how exactly to market this
very busty doll. Because when they were serving before they
put her out on the market, but serving mothers to
(10:28):
see whether or not they would buy this for their daughter.
A lot of mothers were very concerned about barbies bus size.
They thought that it would that their husbands would be
a little more into Barbie than they should be. So
they brought in this advertising guru named Ernest Dicter to
figure out how exactly to dive into the female psyche
(10:51):
and get those women to buy their daughters Barbies. And
he came up with a pretty ingenious plan, right yeah.
Instead of sort of running away from this potential scandal um,
he said, why don't you use this as a teaching device.
Why don't you say, here's this very well dressed, attractive doll.
Don't you want to grow up and be well dressed
and attractive. Then learn these lessons about what an ideal
(11:12):
feminine appearances. So instead of trying to hide Barbies insane
bus line and hips, he said, emphasize them. Emphasize how
you look in a swimsuit, and as you can just
see from a line like that, this is the thing
that's gonna get Barbie in trouble much much later. And
it didn't take a long time for this marketing to
really take off. I think it by the by the
(11:34):
end of the first year of her being on the market,
little girls were buying Barbies everywhere. She was just flying
off the shelf. And at that point she was she
was marketed as a teen fashion model. So it's pretty
brilliant of Mattel because that way, if she's a fashion model,
fashion models need what clothes, clothes, lots and lots of clothes.
And it wasn't long before Barbie's boyfriend Ken came along.
(11:56):
He came around in nine and just like Barbie, as
a tribute to Ruth Handler's daughter, Ken was named for
her son. So basically, um, though many a girl has
probably you know, let Barbie and Can have their way
with each other, you're actually playing with um siblings. It's
a little incestuous and maybe I don't know, maybe that's
(12:16):
why Mattel never let Barbie and Can get married or
have babies. Well, I mean, Barbie did have quite a
few dream weddings as I recall, but I think they were.
But Barbie. Mattel has always been very careful to keep
Barbie's single, never really had I mean, you've had Barbie
in a wedding dress, but she she's had so many
careers in her in her lifetime, right, I think that
(12:39):
Mattel was trying to show, you know, you don't necessarily
need the man Ken was always an optional accessory. Um,
but you could have a lot of careers you could have,
you know, it could be a doctor, a veterinarian, a
race car driver, a McDonald's cashier, shoot for the Stars,
really Dallas cowboy, cheerleader. And one of the first big
makeovers that that Barbie underwent was the release of Malibu Barbie,
(13:01):
the first Melaibu Barbie in nineteen seventy one. She was
a little tanner, she had more of the platinum blonde
hair that we think of when we think of Barbie today.
And for the first time, she looked at you straight on.
No more of those sideways, tawdry glances. Barbie was looking
at you right in the eye. But eventually, Kristen, what
Mattel had to look right in the eye was the
fact that it wasn't always going to work to sell
(13:23):
Barbie as this sort of female role model. Eventually someone
did the math and figured that with Barbie's thirty eight
eighteen thirty four measurements, she may not have been able
to menstruate. I mean, she is a skinny girl. She
uh she, you know, to be fair, it's sort of
an unrealistic body image. And so if your ad campaign
is built around teaching girls, you know, look like Barbie,
(13:45):
learned to grow up like Barbie, then that's that's a
ton of red bells right there. There are bells, red, red,
red flags. It's a ton of red flags. Right. And
in Ninete Mittel downsized Barbie a little bit. They gave
her a little plastic surgery, but she's still just as
cravacious as she ever was. He's a busty girl, right
(14:08):
And U this this whole connection between negative body image
in Little Girls and Barbie has been referred to as
the Barbie syndrome. But I gotta say, Molly, and trying
to figure out whether or not this Barbie syndrome exists,
the research is a little lacking. Really. There hasn't been
a lot of the the articles about how you know,
(14:30):
Barbie is evil and she's promoting bad self esteem. Were
mostly anecdotal and opinionment base. The one study I think
in two thousand came out in two thousand four found
nixed results when they were surveying girls from six to
eighth grade about their views on Barbie. Some liked her,
some didn't, just kind of just it was a mixed bag,
(14:52):
nothing conclusive about whether or not she was actually chilling
girl self esteems. So it's it's possible that you could
play with barbies and not be completely sure you played
with destroid. Yeah, I played with barbies, but there was
a there was a definite moment, and I hear I
hear anecdotally that this is sort of true across the board,
where you kind of you start torturing your Barbies as
(15:13):
a way to uh, you know, you know, sociologists will
have a field day with this. But I think that
it's been described in some ways is sort of renouncing
your childhood and putting all of that away and saying,
you know, now I am no longer playing with dolls,
I'm no longer buying into dressing up all the time,
and I'm moving forward. But what are they moving forward to? Kristen,
have they been I'm still not convinced that they haven't
(15:35):
been damaged by Barbies. For example, Kristen, here, I've got
this for you. What do you make of the barbie
who said math class is tough? Molly? Okay? That was
that was bad. Mattel definitely had egg on its face
after that. But they pulled that barbie from the shelf,
and um, you know, yeah, I mean all of Barbies pink.
(15:55):
Everything in her life is pink. It's all about clothes,
she's got the car. Everything is very consumer oriented for sure.
But do you think that maybe Barbie epitomizes a certain
gender role. And let me give you an example. There's
this big thing called the Barbie Liberation Organization and this
was based on New York City. And what they would
do is they did buy Barbies that had the voice boxes,
(16:15):
and they buy g I Joes that had voice boxes,
and they'd switched the voice boxes. So, you know, one day,
a little Johnny opens up a g I Joe that says,
let's plan our dream wedding? Or will I ever have
enough clothes? Zany Environnie would say, you know, eat crap
and die, or vengeance is mine and it was meant
to show that Barbie really is kind of um imparting
(16:38):
these sort of unbair gender stereotypes onto a girl. So
if they think that, you know, they have to grow
up and care about a dream wedding and buy pink
convertible and live in a dream house, absolutely I think
that you can't. You can't get away from the fact
that that Barbie definitely stands for stereotypical generals. But to
Mattel's credit, Barbie has been CEO of a company, president, astronaut.
(17:04):
I mean, you know, at least at least she's got
a job. She's a working woman. She's always been a
working woman. She has a working woman. She's not like
the Lilies of Old who just waited for Ken to
come around. And as we mentioned, she never married Ken.
She dumped Ken actually in two thousand. Before she dumped Ken,
she's like, I'm tired of dating my brother. This is weird,
been weird for long enough, and as of now, I
believe she's still single. I think that there was a
(17:24):
surfer dude for a while, but he was just a rebound. Well,
whatever the case, whether whether Barbie really has the stronghold
over over girls in her self esteems there there are
some new girls on the block who are threatening to
take over Barbie's territory. Really, are they just as evil
as Barbie? Um? Well, let's say that they are not
as uh there as prim really? Uh? Have you ever
(17:47):
heard of a little little doll line called Brats with
a z o? Chris, and I know how you feel
about brat I gotta say, Brat's they just freaked me out.
I don't know, why do they freak you out more
than just a Barbie? And I'm naturally proportionate Barbie, right,
They're definitely they aren't as curvaceous as Barbie. But Brett's
just have a little more sauce, if you will. They've
(18:10):
got a lot more makeup on. They're wearing tiny tops,
and I don't know, they just look they just look
a little racy to me. Call me, call me a prude,
but grandma, I know, I'm kind of my grandma sometimes.
But girls love them. Brat's were flying off the shelf
and Mattel kind of got freaked out, and in two
thousand six, Matel filed a suit against the Brat's doll manufacturer,
(18:34):
m g A Entertainment for alleged copyright and intellectual property
rights violations because a designer, I believe at Mattel, who
was working on working on Barbie at the time, then
went over to mg A Entertainment and started working on Brats,
so they thought he was giving some some secret information
(18:54):
over they might actually own, and Mattel Mattel won the suit.
And I think right now brats are not currently being manufactured,
but still you were probably behind this whole suit, Christian,
because I know you have hatred for Brat's in your heart,
but that's not going to help you get rid of
all the other wannabes. I mean, there are Hannam Montana dolls.
They're high school musical dolls. You're not going to get
(19:16):
away from dolls. And I gotta you know, we gotta
say that Barbie did also follow up on Brats with
the mycene Barbie. What was that Barbie? It kind of
looked like a brat's version of Barbie, and people people
made criticize matel for that. They kind of pointed it
and laughed. And I guess maybe it's just generational. We
grew up with them, Maybe we grew up with more
(19:37):
properly dressed Barbies, and it's I mean, I never had
a Barbie with a halter topped to you. Well, I
never had a Barbie at well my Barbie maybe because
my grandmother made the clothes while she was snazzy. Don't
get me wrong, she didn't have like a one piece
from suit. She didn't have a bikini, whereas I think
that now Beach Barbie or whatever their name for beach
Barbie is, probably probably has a bikini. Yea. Well, Barbie's
(20:00):
definitely not hurting for cash, not ry for cash. And
I will say, you know, I've been a little hard
on Barbie, but I do think it's can be like
an imaginative plaything. Like my Barbie has got into a
lot of fun scrapes. They learned a lot about playing
with My Barbies, about life and love and tearing the
Kendall's head off, which happened more than once. But um yeah,
(20:20):
I didn't know though that I was playing with a
prototype sex doll. Yeah, everybody's got a dirty secret, right,
But that's a subject for another podcast. Yeah, I bet
about old Lily wish that she was friends with Barbie.
Now m Barbie's profits for two thousand and eight Top
one point two billion. She kind of rules the world.
She does. Barbie is the Oprah of the dull world.
(20:41):
So there you have it. There you have it. And
if you want to learn more about Barbie's dirty past,
check out this article written by our very own Kristen.
And that's me What American icon was inspired by a
German sex toy. And if you have any comments or questions,
feel free to send us an email at mom stuff
at how stuff works dot com. For more on this
(21:04):
and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works
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brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop? Mom never told you?
From House to works dot Com. Hey there, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Kristen h Molly Molly. As we speak,
(00:22):
every second, two Barbies are being sold somewhere in the world. Wow,
that is that's astounding. That's a lot of Barbies. That's
according to Mattel, the manufacturer of Barbie. Yep, lots of
Barbies being sold. And Barbies, I think are sort of
the one thing that I mean, if you're in a
name like ten things you think of when you think
of women and their toys, I guess you come up
(00:45):
with Barbie. Yeah, Barbie's the most popular toy in the world.
She is the queen of toys. But truth be told, Molly,
I never owned a Barbie. That doesn't surprise me, Kristen, Yeah,
me neither. Um. My mom really wasn't into her busty figure,
so I got cabbage patch dolls instead, which kind of
looked like sexy potatoes. Yeah. I had Barbies. I got um,
(01:07):
I had about three, I think, and but I never
got Barbie. Closed from the store. I inherited all my
mom's Barbie clothes, which were hands owned by my grandmother.
So my Barbie, I think, was a little bit more
stylish than other Barbies with clothes from my grandma. Yeah,
they're pretty cute. A lot of Grandma was pretty uh
gretty hip. Grandma made a corduroy suit for Barbie that
(01:29):
she rocked like. It was like, give that girl a
job argue with a corduroy suit. Mommy, do you think
your mom would have been as into Barbie though she
knew about her, her her sexy predecessor. I am shocked.
I was shocked to learn about barbie sordid and dark
past has a sex doll. Let's talk about this. Let's
(01:50):
talk about Barbie's Barbie's secret past. Um. On July, we're
in Germany. It's after World War two, is in did
things are a little chaotic days, probably dark days. And
there's a German tabloid that's still in existence, actually called
(02:10):
what's it called Christian. I'm not a native German speaker,
so I apologize if I do not pronounce this correctly,
but I did look the pronunciation up on the internet,
and it is uh as close as I can get
build z tongue. And on that day, July, a cartoon
called Lily was featured for the first time. And Lily
was a saucy little dame. Okay, she was. She was blonde,
(02:33):
very busty, rarely wore much more than a bra and
some newspaper across her lab and she was basically a
gold digger. She was out for for money. She always
dated these fat cats who didn't treat her well, but
as long as they bought her clothes and diamond necklaces,
she was happy. And she always said little sassy things
(02:55):
that the German Men just loved. But really she had
to make do right. The war had sort of forced
her into a very poor state, and rather than you know,
be drugged down by it, she wanted to be provided for.
I think that's sort of a natural response after after
a war, sort of Scarlett o'harah, he will be with
(03:15):
fat cats is a natural response to wartime poverty. Maybe so, Molly,
so Barbie taught me. Whatever the case, Uh, Lily became
such a popular character that in nineteen fifty five they
decided to turn her into a doll, bring her into
the three D world of doll and she wasn't I mean,
she wasn't a doll in the sense that little girls
(03:38):
played with her. No. No, Lily was not marketed for
for babies. As we mentioned, it was sort of a
sex doll for adult men. I mean she was only
only seven inches long, um or eleven inches me. She
wasn't the full size sex dolls who might imagine today. Right,
We're not talking about like a blow up doll or anything.
She was just sort of a funny little bachelor gift
that guys would give each other. She would usually wear
(04:00):
saucy little outfits. Um, I've seen one Lily doll wearing
just a little little black nightie. And uh, if you
if you look at her face closely, she she has
these really uh I keep saying saucy. She has these
really pouty lips, and her eyes look off to the
(04:20):
side sort of. Um, she doesn't even make eye contact
with She kind of has bedroom eyes, right. And one
of the taglines was whether I don't know if you
want to say this in your German X, but one
of the taglines was whether more or less naked Lily
is always discreet? Yeah, she was obviously advertised as you know,
just sort of a funny little toy. And I read
(04:41):
this one account about how German men would sometimes put
her on their dashboard in their car, and and friends
of theirs would like to just pick up her skirt
every now and then. They're pretty easily entertained after the war,
I guess. Yeah, sex toys back then evidently were far
more dame than sex toys now. But anyways, a whole
lot of podcast So Molly, So let's say that you're
(05:03):
on vacation and you see this doll. You got a
little girl at home, and you have been kind of
frustrated that all she has to do is play with
like paper dolls and baby dolls. Yeah, the dolls marketed
for girls back then were um, like you said, other
paper dolls that would depict you know, women, women, older women,
curve or like Lily or the actual three D dolls
(05:24):
that they would play with were uh, mostly just kind
of pot bellied, pre pubescent girls. No boobs, no hips,
none of that. So let's say you're a woman who
wants your daughter to play with more than just you know,
these two extremes of the thing. You want her to
have sort of a maybe a relatable role model and
you're on vacation, you pick up a lily dollah, in fact,
(05:45):
you pick up three, and you go home and you
start a worldwide doll empire. Tell us how that happened, Kristen, Well,
Molly Uh, That exact scenario happened to a woman named
Ruth Handler. Now Ruth Handler happened to have just started
a company with her husband, Elliott, called Mattel. I like,
(06:05):
where this is guy? Yeah. Elliott and Ruth moved out
to California during World War Two and they got into
the plastics business and they started making plastic picture frames
and then somehow that spiraled into ukulele. The first big
hit was this plastic ukulele that they made, and it
was all these kids loved it sold a ton, and
(06:25):
so eventually Mattel decided to go into the toy business.
They wanted to take over the toy industry. And after
World War Two you have this boom in consumerism, and
as companies are looking for new ways to market things,
they discovered that kids are actually a whole consumer group
(06:46):
all to their own. And with the debut of The
Mickey Mouse Show actually in ninety five, that really sort
of set off this trend. Of advertising directly to kids.
So all of this is going on with sort of
the revolutionizing of the American toy industry. Mattel is taking off.
Ruth Handler decides to jet set off to Switzerland. And yes,
(07:08):
she sees none else then Lily sitting in a shop window,
and she thinks she's adorable. She doesn't think that she's
some some sexy little novelty for German bachelor men. No,
she sees a new playmate for her daughter. Yeah, she
has this daughter, Barbara, who um, I think maybe she
was ten or twelve at the time, and she had
noticed that whenever Barbara and her her girlfriends would play
(07:30):
with her paper dolls, they would always choose see adult women,
and she thought that that was their way of practicing
for adulthood, right like you would sort of, you know,
pretend to be a mom, pretend to you know, have
a girl playing house maybe things that they saw their
moms doing, and they were start of practicing that role
through their dolls exactly. But aside from like I mentioned before,
(07:52):
aside from the paper dolls, there were no other sort
of physical dolls that they could really take the clothes
on and off of, brush their hair all of that.
So when Ruth Handler saw Lily, she bought three and
brought them back to the US to show give one
to her daughter, Barbara, and then you see other two
as models for a new doll for Mattel. And since
(08:13):
Barbara was sort of the you know, uh inspiration for
buying Lily, they named this new doll Barbie Barbie. What
do you know? Now, if you hold up a an
original Lily doll with the original Barbie, they look pretty similar.
Ruth Handler did have sort of a hard time convincing
the all male design staff at Mattel that they really
(08:35):
should go for put all this energy into making a
new doll, But once it finally happened, it was a
pretty painstaking process. They went over to Japan to the
factories too, because they wanted to craft this perfect doll,
and when they were deciding how to designer, they pretty
much kept the same figure as Lily, this very curvaceous bombshell.
It did take off I guess the original. It was
(08:57):
pretty pretty made up, had a lot of trollop paint on, yes,
sort of downplayed all of that, and um, but her
eyes still the original Barbie doll still had that sideward
sideways gaze. She debuted at the nineteen fifty nine New
York Toy Fair wearing saucy heels and a black and
white striped strapless one piece swimsuit and some very classy sunglasses.
(09:23):
And I think one of the reasons we should probably
mention here that she kept the kind of figure that
would let her wear this saucy spoast did she keep
saying is that when they were designing clothes for this
new doll, to get the clothes to fit right and
not just look like these shapeless move moves, basically they
needed to have curves for the clothes to fall on
(09:44):
because they were using real fabric used for real people,
and it didn't have sort of the give that tiny
people need, and so it was basically just to keep
the clothes looking shapely. So the funny thing about this
debut of Barbie, now the most buler toy in the world,
is that she really did not make waves at the
New York Toy Fair. The manufacturers or the boy store
(10:06):
owners really kind of couldn't care less at first about her.
I wouldn't imagine that it would be sort of the
thing to do to buy real, big, big booby doll,
well exactly, Mattel had a pretty pretty big task on
their hand of figuring out how exactly to market this
very busty doll. Because when they were serving before they
put her out on the market, but serving mothers to
(10:28):
see whether or not they would buy this for their daughter.
A lot of mothers were very concerned about barbies bus size.
They thought that it would that their husbands would be
a little more into Barbie than they should be. So
they brought in this advertising guru named Ernest Dicter to
figure out how exactly to dive into the female psyche
(10:51):
and get those women to buy their daughters Barbies. And
he came up with a pretty ingenious plan, right yeah.
Instead of sort of running away from this potential scandal um,
he said, why don't you use this as a teaching device.
Why don't you say, here's this very well dressed, attractive doll.
Don't you want to grow up and be well dressed
and attractive. Then learn these lessons about what an ideal
(11:12):
feminine appearances. So instead of trying to hide Barbies insane
bus line and hips, he said, emphasize them. Emphasize how
you look in a swimsuit, and as you can just
see from a line like that, this is the thing
that's gonna get Barbie in trouble much much later. And
it didn't take a long time for this marketing to
really take off. I think it by the by the
(11:34):
end of the first year of her being on the market,
little girls were buying Barbies everywhere. She was just flying
off the shelf. And at that point she was she
was marketed as a teen fashion model. So it's pretty
brilliant of Mattel because that way, if she's a fashion model,
fashion models need what clothes, clothes, lots and lots of clothes.
And it wasn't long before Barbie's boyfriend Ken came along.
(11:56):
He came around in nine and just like Barbie, as
a tribute to Ruth Handler's daughter, Ken was named for
her son. So basically, um, though many a girl has
probably you know, let Barbie and Can have their way
with each other, you're actually playing with um siblings. It's
a little incestuous and maybe I don't know, maybe that's
(12:16):
why Mattel never let Barbie and Can get married or
have babies. Well, I mean, Barbie did have quite a
few dream weddings as I recall, but I think they were.
But Barbie. Mattel has always been very careful to keep
Barbie's single, never really had I mean, you've had Barbie
in a wedding dress, but she she's had so many
careers in her in her lifetime, right, I think that
(12:39):
Mattel was trying to show, you know, you don't necessarily
need the man Ken was always an optional accessory. Um,
but you could have a lot of careers you could have,
you know, it could be a doctor, a veterinarian, a
race car driver, a McDonald's cashier, shoot for the Stars,
really Dallas cowboy, cheerleader. And one of the first big
makeovers that that Barbie underwent was the release of Malibu Barbie,
(13:01):
the first Melaibu Barbie in nineteen seventy one. She was
a little tanner, she had more of the platinum blonde
hair that we think of when we think of Barbie today.
And for the first time, she looked at you straight on.
No more of those sideways, tawdry glances. Barbie was looking
at you right in the eye. But eventually, Kristen, what
Mattel had to look right in the eye was the
fact that it wasn't always going to work to sell
(13:23):
Barbie as this sort of female role model. Eventually someone
did the math and figured that with Barbie's thirty eight
eighteen thirty four measurements, she may not have been able
to menstruate. I mean, she is a skinny girl. She
uh she, you know, to be fair, it's sort of
an unrealistic body image. And so if your ad campaign
is built around teaching girls, you know, look like Barbie,
(13:45):
learned to grow up like Barbie, then that's that's a
ton of red bells right there. There are bells, red, red,
red flags. It's a ton of red flags. Right. And
in Ninete Mittel downsized Barbie a little bit. They gave
her a little plastic surgery, but she's still just as
cravacious as she ever was. He's a busty girl, right
(14:08):
And U this this whole connection between negative body image
in Little Girls and Barbie has been referred to as
the Barbie syndrome. But I gotta say, Molly, and trying
to figure out whether or not this Barbie syndrome exists,
the research is a little lacking. Really. There hasn't been
a lot of the the articles about how you know,
(14:30):
Barbie is evil and she's promoting bad self esteem. Were
mostly anecdotal and opinionment base. The one study I think
in two thousand came out in two thousand four found
nixed results when they were surveying girls from six to
eighth grade about their views on Barbie. Some liked her,
some didn't, just kind of just it was a mixed bag,
(14:52):
nothing conclusive about whether or not she was actually chilling
girl self esteems. So it's it's possible that you could
play with barbies and not be completely sure you played
with destroid. Yeah, I played with barbies, but there was
a there was a definite moment, and I hear I
hear anecdotally that this is sort of true across the board,
where you kind of you start torturing your Barbies as
(15:13):
a way to uh, you know, you know, sociologists will
have a field day with this. But I think that
it's been described in some ways is sort of renouncing
your childhood and putting all of that away and saying,
you know, now I am no longer playing with dolls,
I'm no longer buying into dressing up all the time,
and I'm moving forward. But what are they moving forward to? Kristen,
have they been I'm still not convinced that they haven't
(15:35):
been damaged by Barbies. For example, Kristen, here, I've got
this for you. What do you make of the barbie
who said math class is tough? Molly? Okay? That was
that was bad. Mattel definitely had egg on its face
after that. But they pulled that barbie from the shelf,
and um, you know, yeah, I mean all of Barbies pink.
(15:55):
Everything in her life is pink. It's all about clothes,
she's got the car. Everything is very consumer oriented for sure.
But do you think that maybe Barbie epitomizes a certain
gender role. And let me give you an example. There's
this big thing called the Barbie Liberation Organization and this
was based on New York City. And what they would
do is they did buy Barbies that had the voice boxes,
(16:15):
and they buy g I Joes that had voice boxes,
and they'd switched the voice boxes. So, you know, one day,
a little Johnny opens up a g I Joe that says,
let's plan our dream wedding? Or will I ever have
enough clothes? Zany Environnie would say, you know, eat crap
and die, or vengeance is mine and it was meant
to show that Barbie really is kind of um imparting
(16:38):
these sort of unbair gender stereotypes onto a girl. So
if they think that, you know, they have to grow
up and care about a dream wedding and buy pink
convertible and live in a dream house, absolutely I think
that you can't. You can't get away from the fact
that that Barbie definitely stands for stereotypical generals. But to
Mattel's credit, Barbie has been CEO of a company, president, astronaut.
(17:04):
I mean, you know, at least at least she's got
a job. She's a working woman. She's always been a
working woman. She has a working woman. She's not like
the Lilies of Old who just waited for Ken to
come around. And as we mentioned, she never married Ken.
She dumped Ken actually in two thousand. Before she dumped Ken,
she's like, I'm tired of dating my brother. This is weird,
been weird for long enough, and as of now, I
believe she's still single. I think that there was a
(17:24):
surfer dude for a while, but he was just a rebound. Well,
whatever the case, whether whether Barbie really has the stronghold
over over girls in her self esteems there there are
some new girls on the block who are threatening to
take over Barbie's territory. Really, are they just as evil
as Barbie? Um? Well, let's say that they are not
as uh there as prim really? Uh? Have you ever
(17:47):
heard of a little little doll line called Brats with
a z o? Chris, and I know how you feel
about brat I gotta say, Brat's they just freaked me out.
I don't know, why do they freak you out more
than just a Barbie? And I'm naturally proportionate Barbie, right,
They're definitely they aren't as curvaceous as Barbie. But Brett's
just have a little more sauce, if you will. They've
(18:10):
got a lot more makeup on. They're wearing tiny tops,
and I don't know, they just look they just look
a little racy to me. Call me, call me a prude,
but grandma, I know, I'm kind of my grandma sometimes.
But girls love them. Brat's were flying off the shelf
and Mattel kind of got freaked out, and in two
thousand six, Matel filed a suit against the Brat's doll manufacturer,
(18:34):
m g A Entertainment for alleged copyright and intellectual property
rights violations because a designer, I believe at Mattel, who
was working on working on Barbie at the time, then
went over to mg A Entertainment and started working on Brats,
so they thought he was giving some some secret information
(18:54):
over they might actually own, and Mattel Mattel won the suit.
And I think right now brats are not currently being manufactured,
but still you were probably behind this whole suit, Christian,
because I know you have hatred for Brat's in your heart,
but that's not going to help you get rid of
all the other wannabes. I mean, there are Hannam Montana dolls.
They're high school musical dolls. You're not going to get
(19:16):
away from dolls. And I gotta you know, we gotta
say that Barbie did also follow up on Brats with
the mycene Barbie. What was that Barbie? It kind of
looked like a brat's version of Barbie, and people people
made criticize matel for that. They kind of pointed it
and laughed. And I guess maybe it's just generational. We
grew up with them, Maybe we grew up with more
(19:37):
properly dressed Barbies, and it's I mean, I never had
a Barbie with a halter topped to you. Well, I
never had a Barbie at well my Barbie maybe because
my grandmother made the clothes while she was snazzy. Don't
get me wrong, she didn't have like a one piece
from suit. She didn't have a bikini, whereas I think
that now Beach Barbie or whatever their name for beach
Barbie is, probably probably has a bikini. Yea. Well, Barbie's
(20:00):
definitely not hurting for cash, not ry for cash. And
I will say, you know, I've been a little hard
on Barbie, but I do think it's can be like
an imaginative plaything. Like my Barbie has got into a
lot of fun scrapes. They learned a lot about playing
with My Barbies, about life and love and tearing the
Kendall's head off, which happened more than once. But um yeah,
(20:20):
I didn't know though that I was playing with a
prototype sex doll. Yeah, everybody's got a dirty secret, right,
But that's a subject for another podcast. Yeah, I bet
about old Lily wish that she was friends with Barbie.
Now m Barbie's profits for two thousand and eight Top
one point two billion. She kind of rules the world.
She does. Barbie is the Oprah of the dull world.
(20:41):
So there you have it. There you have it. And
if you want to learn more about Barbie's dirty past,
check out this article written by our very own Kristen.
And that's me What American icon was inspired by a
German sex toy. And if you have any comments or questions,
feel free to send us an email at mom stuff
at how stuff works dot com. For more on this
(21:04):
and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works
dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out our
blogs on the house. Stuff works dot com home page
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