The Proud to Be Artificial Barbie

Brace yourself for the new Barbie, a collector's edition called Lingerie Barbie. Barbie is wearing a garter belt connected to a frilly two-piece set of ladies undies. She is whiter, taller, and snobbier than she's been for years-and more carnal, with a sexual semiotic cue for every generation: a Cindy Crawford mole, stiletto high heels, an I-Dream-Of-Jeannie hair and panties and stockings with a seam down the back.

Aimed at the adult market of Barbie collectors, she appears on the penultimate page of a catalog that features mostly $85 dollar figurines (as opposed to the $15 dollar price for a regular Barbie), Abandoning the hyper-happy, smiley California girl Barbie of recent years she bears the heavily lined, half-lidded bedroom eyes of her earliest incarnations.

The last, great observation about Barbie was that the original doll Mattel created in 1959, if expanded to the scale of a real-live woman, with measurements of 39-18-33 on a frame 9 feet 10 inches tall, would be unable to stand on her own. Given the place Barbie came to hold in our culture, that 80 percent of the nation's ll-year old girls would be on a diet, or that plastic surgery would become a routine healthcare expense, seems to us now to follow logically.

None of this could have been imagined by Barbie's inventors. Ruth and Elliot Handler had watched their daughter playing with cut-out paper dolls and wanted to allow her, and all our young women, to imagine life as a grown-up. But it turns out that while outwardly empowering our daughters to seek career success and adventure, the Handlers' creation was subtly crushing their target audience's sexual confidence. Yona Zeldis McDonough, writing in The New York Times Magazine, remembered that at age six, "I inchoately understood Barbie's appeal: pure sex." The cramp was that Barbie pushed the standard of sexual fitness impossibly high.

Nothing points this up better than the fact that porn stars commonly "sample" the Barbie image by dubbing themselves Barbie: Barbie Blake, Barbie Eden, and the inevitable Barbie Dahl. Pouring the plastic into their bodies, they create a Barbie-like effect, absolving them of the need for clothing altogether. One film vision, whose 18 surgical procedures produced a breast cup size of 58 F, told an interviewer, "I hate reality. I want to be wholly artificial."

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