Marcia's Musings: Barbie Land — Green Lotus Yoga & Healing Center

Thumbelina enchanted me not because I knew I wanted to be a mommy, but because I could not for the life of me figure out what was inside that doll to make her turn over when you face-planted her belly-side down with one arm tucked under at just a certain angle. The engineering feat staggered me – the actual doll not so much to my mother’s dismay. Let’s face it: I’d reached the advanced age of 11 in 1961 when Thumbelina hit the market. By then, Mom and I knew the truth: I more thoroughly enjoyed being outdoors working and playing on our farm than anything else, especially being stuck inside creating stories with dolls. I gamely played “pretend house” with Thumbelina a few times, then popped her back into her box where she resides to this day. This endeared me to my mom, who didn’t care in the end what I turned out to be if I could respectfully support myself and enjoy doing so. She was kind and easy in this way.

Still, Thumbelina’s early re-entry into her cardboard-and-cellophane world failed to dissuade Mom in her pursuit of finding the one doll – what I saw as a weird form of an artificial person – that might stick with me.

The very next holiday season, lo and behold, what should appear beneath the Christmas tree? Yes, Barbie, she of the brunette ponytail, classic strapless black-and-white one-piece swimsuit, feet that would become known as “Barbie feet”, and high heels to support them. (To this day, when a yoga teacher calls out the cue “make Barbie feet”, both women and men do so to quite exacting standards.) This doll – this Barbie – very nearly caused my first pre-teen eyeroll, though I resisted because, let’s face it, I never wanted to hurt Mom’s feelings. (I rolled them on the inside though, causing incredible if momentary regret.)

My friend Paula, who lived in town and was the granddaughter of the local newspaper owner and publisher, invited me over to play Barbies just once. This speaks to the dismal experience it must have been for both of us. To be honest, I loved hanging out with Paula whenever we could not only because she was smart, fun, and kooky, but also because I already fantasized about growing up to be Lois Lane, a newspapering woman. Hanging out with Paula’s grandparents, mom, and dad brought the journalist’s life into real time. It looked exciting and meaningful from the outside, as indeed it turned out to be years later when I became one myself. I noticed that when we created our Barbie story that one play date, we chose reporter as her profession, a red Ford Mustang convertible as her car, and a two-story house on a big tree-shaded corner lot with a wrap-around screened porch and a library-office. Unimaginatively, this architecture reflected Paula’s actual house, though I do not recollect a kitchen being included in Barbie’s home. We vehemently agreed on this: no Ken needed.

Paula and I never played Barbies again (c'mon we were twelve), and both of our mothers seemed okay with this, their own doll fix met. Years later, I realized my mother loved dolls so much simply because when she was young, they were rare items of beauty and fragility more to be displayed than to be handled.

I never retreated from my indifference toward dolls and gratefully received into my life a daughter who disliked them even more: “Put it away, put it away,” she screamed when she once received one while shielding her eyes as if in horror. “It looks dead.” I accepted this reaction with grace at the thought of not having to buy each season’s new “it” doll, though I would have done it for her if she’d taken to them. I did feel sorry for Mom, though, who must have hoped for a granddaughter who would provide a reason for her to continue to buy dolls. Later, Mom decided she could collect them just for herself. Believe me, it was a big step to treat herself in this way, and it earned great respect from me because, I thought, “Good for you, Mom. You’ve earned your own money, and you can choose to spend it as you wish.” My father, as it turned out, encouraged this line of thought.

When I think of and look at these two dolls occasionally, I realize why I kept them – to acknowledge within me the freedom to choose. And what were those freedoms? With Thumbelina, it was to wonder how things are made and work, why buildings stand, and bridges span, and how the bodies of children and adults move. The latter one may be part of the underpinning for the founding of Green Lotus and its many classes, events, and healing services, I think.

With Barbie, there emerged a more complicated relationship. She didn’t look like anything I witnessed in the strong flesh-and-blood women around me, and it’s only by some miracle that I didn’t start to body-shame myself. I know many others did in the years before we talked about concepts like the male gaze and how it distorts the way women view themselves. This sets impossible standards that maim and warp and cause real illnesses in both men and women and their relationships, however they come together. Especially in the first decade of Barbie’s existence, her white, white world left out everyone else, which matched reality, until the great movements of the late ‘60s and ‘70s caused Mattel, Barbie’s corporate owner, to succumb to the pressure to “show dolls more like me and my daughter”. I’ll get back to that in a minute.

Barbie did do this for me, though. With her choices – of careers (astronaut, nurse, writer, athlete, dozens more); to not have a Ken, and, if she did, to choose to not marry or even live with him; of being able to own her very own house and car; to curate art, furniture, clothes, and experiences like travel, biking, yoga, for goodness sakes, and to change her mind and her direction, an idea rooted in me. I, too, might have choices, more than I could imagine or that culture of the day with its myopic lens pushed me toward, namely wife and mother.

As archaic, arcane, and even asinine as it might now seem, Barbie’s story ironically paralleled some things happening in my life: hearing a father’s voice tell me I could do whatever a boy did and watching my Uncle Garret defy his grandfather to attend a great university. I visited him there as a child and what I saw excited me, as did his insistence years later that I must attend college. Aunt Evelyn – only nine years older – did what was almost unimaginable back then. She left our small Iowa town, became a nurse, rented her own apartment, bought her own car, curated her own art, furniture, clothes, and experiences before eventually becoming a wife and a mother, too.

Flawed though she was and continues to be, including the environmental waste caused by all those gazillion of plastic dolls in landfills, Barbie laid down dots that connected me with real-life role models that rocked and changed my world. In Barbie Land I saw the importance of her community of friends and relationships, of the balance of independence and interdependence, and of living life as a direct experience.

This leads me to two things.

The first is the movie, Barbie. To be sure, it holds deep flaws as the entire Barbie history does, if we are honest. The most egregious of these, as the movie opens, is that Barbie Land entirely consists of an endless population of Barbies and Kens living in what appears to be a completely diverse and accepting society that is foreign to how we currently live in the real world.

The hole in starting with this conceit is that it obliterates the backstory of every character represented because it fails to explain how this came to be. It disregards the struggle of every person who cannot be seen as equal; who cannot live their fullest life; who cannot break the ceiling; who cannot get a decent night’s sleep because of fear or want, and whose vote isn’t counted (or even allowed). It glosses over the stories of those who cannot express their love openly and so live in secret and of those bound by a culture so scared of itself that it cannot treat others only from the framework of kindness, compassion, non-harming, and truth-telling, the teachings of yoga and many other paths. It is a miss – and a big miss, as my friend Lolita rightfully pointed out – not to explain how a gay couple; a lesbian couple; and people who are every different type of human came to live in this peaceful dreamscape and in a matriarchal society. Where in the real world do you see this happening?

My wish is that the film’s brave writer and director, Greta Gerwig, who does not shy away from controversy and exploration, will once again place her fingers on the keyboard and give us a prequels to tell the untold stories of so many that must be told. I hope, too, that in its misses, enough dots were laid down to connect to real people’s lives so they may be brave, bold, and bolstered as happened in mine many years ago.

The second point circles back to me. In 2000, I left Minneapolis and my position as senior vice president of Musicland Corporation to become senior vice president of marketing for Pleasant Company in Madison, Wisconsin, upending the lives of my husband and two children, ages 7 and 14. This may seem unremarkable as families do it all the time. What you may not know is that Pleasant Company was founded by the imitable Pleasant Rowland, creator of the American Girl historical books, dolls, games, stores, theaters, a well-written and honest girls’ magazine, and so much more.

No one in my inner circles could believe it because my history was well-known. “But she hates dolls,” they’d say. I didn’t make the move for the dolls; I made it because of the books about them, for the research, reporting, journalism, writing, the attention to the history of the lives of Samantha, Addy, Molly, Makena, Nanea, Kit, Ivy (Ling), Kaya’aton’my, Rebecca Rubin – all of them. It wasn’t about the dolls. It was about the backstories of girls from around the world, the stories that needed to be told.

Several months after signing my agreement to join Pleasant Company, Mattel Corporation bought it, and American Girl doll land reeled. I felt inside me a sense of sadness. American Girl and Barbie had little in common, and the companies’ cultures butted heads. I left a few months later to return to Minneapolis to help care for my ailing father and to support my strong mother. I would have stayed if not for that. I would have pushed Mattel to do what Pleasant Rowland always listed as the first goal at American Girl – research the stories first (they took years), then work on the dolls. Get the plays written, then work on the sets. Find the historical reference, then manufacture the accessories.

Mattel, if you're listening, this is what I advise you: Tell the backstory of all your Barbie characters with the integrity that was inculcated by Pleasant Company and the American Girl dolls. Plan prequels and sequels that can, through moviemaking, tell the stories. My god, you’ve started down a good path here. The Mattel I knew 23 years ago would not have been brave enough to make the movie you produced this year.

Keep going, Mattel, because remember: It’s not about the dolls. It’s about the dots.

Marcia's Musings