© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 55
Just knee-high to a grasshopper, my daughter knows the classics. She can pick out the Star Wars video which features the ‘teddy bears’ without even looking at the cover. She knows that Spiderman is actually nerdy Peter Parker in disguise. And she knows many of the characters in the Lord of the Rings by name.
She shows a remarkable understanding of the world around her: recently, she called me Father Christmas, a remarkably pro-active move considering that Christmas is a mere six months away. Faced with this potential, I feel a raging urge to begin her on prime numbers, the Bernoulli sequence or to read to her from an edifying book on customer relations. But my wife frowns on that sort of thing.
I can look at her and see a hundred interesting and prosperous futures: plastic surgeon, actuary, plumber, whatever she chooses. Against this background, you can imagine my chagrin and confusion when she caught the Barbie virus.
We survived the onset of Barney, the fuzzy purple dinosaur. In fact, Barney has a lot of redeeming features in spite of the one-time craze for ‘kill / mutilate / be very rude about Barney’ sites on the internet. Barney’s world is happy and educational, filled with cheery songs, numbers, colours and object identification. Barbie caught me completely off guard though.
Barbie’s makers have done sterling work to rehabilitate her with shape changes, professional outfits and more press releases than accompany the launch of the sort of software that you know is going to crash your computer the first time you boot it up.
Unfortunately, in spite of it all, the only sort of personal growth that I can notionally associate with Barbie is the learning that a frilly pink blouse looks awful with a lime green mini skirt, unless the makers have released an ‘I-Wonder-What-She-Was-Thinking Eighties Look Limited Edition Barbie Set’.
And in spite of adding bulk to the doll’s once ‘perfect’ figure, I still can’t figure out how to use Barbie to demonstrate the wonders of plastic surgery without attracting accusations of major psychosis or perhaps becoming a candidate director for the next Rob Zombie music video.
We have done the Barbie videos. We have avoided the underwear. I have not yet seen a lunchbox on the supermarket shelves, though my daughter will probably spot one sooner rather than later. I guess the dolls and the outfits are on their way. Ouch! Double ouch!
On the other hand, as much as Barbie becomes a part of her social circle, I will be required to spend. I don’t want her becoming a social outcast.
You probably remember the ‘outsider’ from school. He or she was defined by his or her parents. While everyone was getting carried away with the latest craze, this was the one who came to school with a healthy portion of sauerkraut in a lunchbox because ‘mommy said it is healthy’.
This is the very same kid who, after years of not watching TV, listening to polka music and wondering why nobody shared his interest in collecting matchbox-sized porcelain animals, ended up biting the heads off live chickens and mainlining tequila to prove to everyone that he was cool and with it.
OK, so maybe he became a rock star and now has his very own collection of ‘Post-Apocalyptic Gothic Groupie Numbered Edition Barbie’ look-alikes with genuine Botox and silicon enhancements, but so what! I still want my daughter to have a life before she starts wondering where to get a record contract.
The point is that kids need to define themselves and belong, and like adults in later life, they do it by having things that associate them with groups. Consumerism is with us in a soul defining manner, and it starts in early childhood. As proof, look at the confusion and uncertainty of the one kid, in the group, who hasn’t seen the ads for the latest toy.
It’s inescapable: if you want the security of belonging, you need to keep up with the Jones’ and you have to start young. That being said, I haven’t cleared space on the shelf for my daughter’s future Barbie collection.
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