Welcome to The Group Chat, a new series wherein the senior team discusses something relevant to the plot. And by “the plot” I mean the collective mileau of culture and current events that we’re all swimming in at any given time. This month: It’s Barbies because, well, whether you like it or not, it’s been pretty difficult to avoid talk about the upcoming Barbie movie. I asked the senior team how they played with Barbies as a kid (if they did), and to share their Barbie stories with us. Naturally, things got gay.

What’s your Barbie story?

xoxo,
Nico

Kayla: My sister and I were both extremely Barbie obsessed, and I’m glad our mother encouraged this obsession instead of turning it into a Barbie Is Not Feminist moment. She actually did two incredibly kind things for us pertaining to Barbies that stand out in my memory. My sister has Alopecia, and she lost all of her hair when she was a toddler. My mother ended up removing all of the hair from two different Barbie dolls so we could have a couple “Alopecia Barbies.” Even though she bought us a lot of Barbies through the years (once, for an elementary school project, my sister made a bar graph about our Barbies and I distinctly remember we had FIFTY TWO OF THEM), my mother thought the price of a Barbie Dreamhouse was absurd and instead MADE us a Barbie CONDO COMPLEX? She let us have an old plastic, huge shelving unit I assume she got through work (she worked in furniture sales) and we treated it like a multi-story Barbie home that we filled with a combination of official Barbie furniture and miniature furniture we made ourselves with the help of my mother’s crafting supplies and other scraps/samples from her job.

Carmen: Ok so first of all, your mom is an icon. Second of all, I also topped out at having over 50 Barbies as a kid! They took up over two shelves of my early-to-mid ‘90s bleached white wood bookshelf. But the real reason I am here! THE REAL REASON I AM HERE! is because my mother also would never pay for the price of a Barbie Dreamhouse, so she had her boyfriend at the time… build me one?

He worked in construction/architecture, and he went to Homo Depot (he was not a homo) to buy some plywood and built me a three story “Barbie Townhouse” — but did not buy any pink paint? He used the paint he had left over from his other jobs, I think. So her house had very plain and ugly “real world” colors like dark brown and gray! I know this is going to sound bratty as hell, but I fucking hated that house. 90% because I was like seven years old and I hated my mother’s boyfriend for not being my dad. But at least 10% because who goes through the work of building a Barbie house and doesn’t at least get some free samples of pink paint??

(I’m a brat. I know.)

Nico: Omg Carmen, I am picturing this, like, real-world-colored Barbie townhouse and laughing so much.

Kayla: I distinctly remember making a flat-screen television from cardboard and printing out a photo from Charmed so our Barbies could always be watching Charmed.

Riese: My Mom also loved having us make our own doll supplies for things she thought were overpriced, or finding similar products that were cheaper, like for my Samantha Doll! She also was like, very much anti-Barbie. All my friends had Barbies and I did not, which was absolutely tragic to me on every level. She said Barbie reinforced toxic ideas about how women were supposed to look. She did for Hanukkah one year get me Barbie-adjacent Black “Heart Family” dolls — they wore full outfits with high necks and were grown-ups with children which I guess seemed less problematic than a white blonde Barbie in a bikini going to surf at the beach with Ken? Anyhow they thrived in happiness on the bottom shelf of my bookshelf which is where I set up their whole apartment. I actually didn’t realize until looking them up for this conversation that Heart Family was a spin-off of Barbie also made by Mattel, I thought they were a different brand altogether!

Nico: The Heart Family doll clothes are SO 80’s, Riese. There’s a lot of lace happening.

Riese: Vaguely Mormon vibes, honestly.

Kayla: I feel like this is probably a cliche, but Barbies were absolutely my introduction to storytelling. I remember being young in the bath with a couple of Barbies — and Skipper, my favorite — and just going wild with my imagination, constructing whole serialized narratives for them with soap operatic twists. Also, my favorite Barbie hands down was my Mary-Kate Olsen one.

Riese: I think I did most of my storytelling with the historical paper dolls I collected, like these Dolly Dingle paper dolls? But I obviously did play with my friends’ Barbies. Mostly I remember my Cousin Carrie’s Barbies, because Carrie was so fascinating to me — I never felt like I knew how to be a girl or even like I was a girl, but Carrie had big blonde hair and a cotton-candy-pink bedroom and a bed with a canopy and she always had a boyfriend and she wore Guess Jeans and she was a baton-twirler and she had Christmas Barbie and Barbie Goes to Prom and like, whole crates of Barbies under her bed. When we played I sometimes made my Barbies naked not because I was a kid who liked being naked (I was in fact the most modest child to ever live) but because I wasn’t sure how to dress a doll with a body like that, you know? I didn’t know how to dress a woman. I was always latching on to girls who knew how to be girls, and those girls always had Barbies. My cousins got Christmas Barbies every year (I didn’t because my Mom said No Barbies for Riese) and their Moms (my aunts) had Barbie collections on display going back into the 50s. I was unsurprisingly more interested in the history of Barbies than the Barbies themselves. Obviously it was American Girl dolls that really captured my heart.

Riese: I think the Barbie I wanted the most was a Skipper, because Skipper felt less intimidating than Barbie and she had a gender-neutral name. Ken was cool, whatever, I understood Ken, nothing aspirational or mysterious going on there.

Nico: He’s just Ken.

Kayla: While we had over 50 Barbies, my sister and I had maybe…two?…Ken dolls. I think one of them was actually Eric from The Little Mermaid.

Riese: I definitely also had an Eric from The Little Mermaid figurine because I had a set of all the dolls from that film?? Eric in his white shirt and blue pants, Ariel on a rock, etc.

Carmen: Here I am, another one joining the Eric from The Little Mermaid hive!

Kayla: I had a Tara Lipinski Barbie that I was obsessed with for some reason even though I was more of a Michelle Kwan girlie, and she had these wind-up handles built into her sides so that she could be lifted and would spin! It was so cool. But I literally never let Ken or Eric hold her in the air to spin; it was always another Barbie or perhaps Teresa. I loved Teresa.

Anya: I am floored by all these different types of Barbies, I definitely didn’t know all this! I also think there’s a real business opportunity for Alopecia Barbies and that your mom should probably trademark that and go on Shark Tank.

Nico: Kayla, this is absurdly wholesome. I am also FASCINATED by this spinning barbie! I agree with Anya that there should be a line of Alopecia dolls!

Also, also, the making of your own furniture was Totally A Thing. Sometimes, dolls just don’t come with what you need! It sounds like your mom’s game was miles ahead, like wow, but yes.

Carmen: Okay, so, there are two Barbie stories that stick out most for me? One’s very serious and the other is incredibly horny. A fork in the road, and which path is best one traveled, who’s to say? But let’s do serious first.

So, I was a Barbie obsessed kid. There was no rhyme or reason for this obsession, my mother hated dolls, my closest aunts were the kinds of feminists who never would have bought me a plaything with a 39″ bust to match her 18″ waist, and I had no sisters. Barbies were probably the first thing that were entirely of my own, something innate about my femmeness that came from within me.

This was given to Carmen for her birthday just last month, in preparation for the Barbie movie.

It’s important to know this to understand what is still one of my worst childhood memories to share (because if you knew who I grew up to be, and yall do, you will immediately clock how embarrassing this is for me) but once when I was about two or three years old my mom took me to a toy store and took down a Christie doll — she was Barbie’s Black bestie — for me to have. I immediately, and resoundingly, had a temper tantrum in that store! And I mean, thee worst temper tantrum of my young life. The kind where you throw your little body against the dirty linoleum patchwork floor and wail. Where your whole tiny body shakes with every muscle within it. I did not want a Christie doll. I wanted a Barbie.

Because Barbie, white and blonde and blue eyed and an impossible body frame? “She’s pretty! I WANT THE PRETTY ONE!”

Miraculously, my mother did not grab me up right then and there — not that we were a spanking household, we weren’t, but again I’m talking about the magnitude of the scene I was causing as a toddler aged Black girl in a toy store over wanting the white doll, so I can only imagine what she was thinking. She let me cry it out and then she took me home, no doll in hand. And it was another few months before I was allowed a Barbie again. Straight up cold turkey withdrawal. (When we resumed Barbie buying in our household, a new rule was amended that for every white doll I was given or was bought for me, there had to be a Christie or Teresa doll, no exceptions, which certainly contributed to the massive size of my childhood collection.)

Nico: I have never forgotten what you shared about your mother’s parenting methods in this interview, and I have to say that I so deeply admire her intentional parenting.

Carmen: Ok! But! The second story is so much lighter!! As mentioned, I loved Barbies, which also meant that I had Barbies a little longer than most kids…. I probably didn’t put down the pink box for good until about seventh grade? Which meant that my Barbies got to live through the unfortunate onset of my puberty — the awkward intersection where you’re still not too old for dolls, but you have a lot of hormones to account for no place to put them.

I am so sorry to my Barbies for the last 18 months of our relationship. So much naked plastic smashed against even more naked plastic. So many inflexible limbs just thrown about recklessly. So little understanding of the world.

Nico: I do have to say that Barbies are maybe one of the WORST ways to learn about realistic human anatomy, and yet they are maybe one of the toys most subjected to hormone-driven sexual experimentation by toy proxy.

Riese: Right, like the idea of “Barbies scissoring” is an image that already exists in my head. I never did that with my dolls because I don’t know, I was a chaste child, but I know I’ve seen pictures somewhere of Barbies Scissoring. it’s like, in the zeitgeist.

Anya: For some reason, I don’t think Barbies were a big part of my childhood — or at least they didn’t make enough of an impression to be something I recall at a pivotal moment like this, when I’m trying to reflect on the import of Barbies in my life! To my recollection, I had one (1) Barbie, and the only defining characteristic I remember about her was she changed color in the bath. I remember when I took baths she was often there with me, changing colors like she does. I also am pretty sure I removed her hair and drew stuff on her head (yes she was that kind of Barbie and I was that kind of kid). But honestly, I don’t remember caring that deeply about her! I’m so sorry, Mattel. I’ve failed you.

Carmen: Ok but Anya this is literally the gay prototype. Kate McKinnon Barbie Realness.

Anya, you must choose.

Anya: I did have a lot of stuffed animals, though. The ones I remember are a dog (I think) named Princess and my favorite stuffed animal of all time — a cat named Sad who may or may not be here in Brooklyn with me right now as we speak. I do crack up every time I imagine my four-year-old self announcing that I have named my new stuffed animal “Sad”.

Nico: Why were Barbies also always bath toys? Also, lol Anya, I named one of my toys, at about age three or four, “Detour” because I thought it sounded creepy. Do you remember why “Sad”?

Kayla: SAD SOUNDS LIKE AN ICON!

Riese: I love this for you, such Eeyore energy.

Anya: Sad is absolutely an icon. I remember going to this toy store in San Francisco called The Imaginarium which was incredible because it had one human-adult-sized door and one human-child-sized door so you felt like you were getting your own special little PORTAL into this magical place. I saw Sad there and the way her mouth is shaped, she really looks like she is not smiling. I remember seeing this stuffed animal and being like, she gets it… she’s seen things… and I thought the name “Sad” best captured this animal’s wisdom. Four-year-old me was really not down with toxic positivity!!!!

Nico: I’m obsessed with this door situation.

Kayla: It feels relevant that I have a stuffed calico cat named Academy Award Nominee Kirsten Dunst, but I call her Kik or Kiki for short.

Nico: So, for me, the first, most visceral memory that stands out to me when it comes to Barbies is inevitably having to confront the fact that at any given moment, there were multiple Barbies of mine that could be found naked and tied up in the plastic bin. They were hog-tied, or just their wrists were tied, or their ankles were tied, or they were twisted and tangled up in enough string, twine or shoelaces so as to almost form a cocoon. Some people find kink later in life, and I guess, some kids just hit pre-puberty and are like I’M INTO ROPE. I’ll let you guess which one I was.

Riese: NICO

Nico: As far as Barbie games go, once again, on the bondage path, I was irrevocably and immediately impacted by the Xena: Warrior Princess episode, “Locked Up and Tied Down” which not only opens with Gabrielle giving Xena a massage, but which then involves various people being chained up and also flesh eating crabs. Now, no Barbie of mine was going to suffer a fate that terrible. That was Ken’s job. Specifically, that was the job of one of two Ken dolls I had, either the Beast doll from Beauty and the Beast, or a more generic brown-haired Ken who I’d modified by piercing his ears with a sewing needle and inserting glitter glue and scraping up his biceps with said same needle to give him tattoos (I definitely did at give him at least one heart pierced by an arrow tat).

Carmen: Sorry to interrupt your flow a little bit, but damn this is so gay and I am delighted. Please continue.

Nico: Hahaha thank you Carmen! When it was time for flesh-eating crabs for Ken, Barbie, their imprisoner and tormenter, would tie the Kens to the floor, where they would have to await their death. I’m sure this can be analyzed but why would you. I of course also played house, wedding, school, war, all the usual Barbie games.

Kayla: BONDAGE!!!! BARBIE!!!! I’m in awe! Like…I think I mostly have logistical follow-up questions such as how did you have so much access to rope as a child? Was it actual rope or more like yarn? Were you good at tying knots and if so where did you learn this skill?

Nico: I grew up in the country with ample access to rope, oddly? Like, I was provided my own spools of rope for play as a child because, of course, kids need rope. I remember just having this nylon rope in my wooden toy box that my dad (who had been a carpenter at one point) made for me. It wasn’t the softer actually-for-bondage kind, but the kind for various jobs around-the-house. In one instance, a group of friends and I devised our own pulley system, with our own rope, to get an abandoned wire spool up into a treehouse to use as a table. Rope was everywhere in my childhood! I also had yarn, thread, sewing needles, shoelaces, and endless cloth scraps to play with.

As far as tying knots goes, that was also something that adults sometimes indulged us in and that the kids taught each other. I remember, for example, morbidly, figuring out how to actually tie a noose and teaching the other kids. Some other kid taught me how to tie a slipknot. Knowledge! It’s beautiful!

Carnal knowledge! It’s beautiful!

Heather: The year my sister and I got the Barbie Dream House, Barbie Corvette, and Peaches & Cream Barbie from Santa, we also got an Atari 2600 with Asteroids and Cookie Monster Munch. I asked my dad recently how in the world this was possible. We were poor. He said he must’ve gotten some kind of bananas Christmas bonus that year at the factory where he worked making phone booths, or maybe it came from the local church, or maybe it came from his parents. Either way, it was magical. My sister gravitated toward the Barbies and I gravitated toward the video games, and that makes perfect sense because she loved femme stuff and I loved sports and nerd stuff.

I would have probably never picked up a Barbie if my sister hadn’t made the brilliant move of forming a town that included the Barbie Dream House and She-Ra’s Crystal Castle. She asked me to build some infrastructure with Legos, and then she used her saved up allowance to buy a Ken doll who had a black tuxedo with a pink cumberbund, which she said I could put on any Barbie I wanted. (I was nuts for tuxedos, even as a five-year-old.) Some days we put on elaborate fashion shows with Skipper and Catra. Some days we had wild adventurers where poor Ken would drive off a bridge in the Corvette and She-Ra and Barbie would have to do search and rescue missions in the lake (the bathtub). Sometimes poor Ken would get kidnapped by Skeletor and sometimes Barbie would rescue him and sometimes she’d just leave him to fend for himself in Castle Grayskull.

Carmen: I am living for this Barbie/She-Ra crossover that Netflix was too cowardly to give to us. But we deserve.

Nico: I have not once been jealous so far in this conversation until this moment when I learned that you had a Skeletor doll.

Riese: Same but also the She-Ra doll, I wanted one of those so bad!

Heather: One time, after our terrible neighbor Ivy came over and played Barbie/She-Ra with us, my sister’s favorite Barbie outfit — the California Dreamin’ blue and pink polka dot mini-dress with matching leg warmers and yellow sneakers — went missing. We thought for sure it was Ivy because we hated her because we always helped clean up at her house and she never helped clean up at ours. So we made an elaborate Home Alone-style plan to break into her house and steal it back. We drew up a map and everything. We were gonna go in dressed like Batmen because I had a lot of Bat-accessories (again, homemade by my great-grandma).

Carmen: Heather, I’m screaminggggggg.

Nico: If two children broke into my house dressed in home-sewn Bat-gear — well, I can’t figure out if I would be terrified or overcome with a giggling fit. Let’s not test that though…

Heather: Luckily, before we could commit a felony, we found the California Dreamin’ getup under the bed.

My great-grandma was not overly impressed with how Boob-y Barbie was, but she helped us make clothes for her anyway, including an Atlanta Braves baseball uniform. Barbie beat out poor Ken for the starting pitcher job, but he watched and cheered her on from the bench.

To be honest, I was kinda scared of Barbie the way I was scared of all beautiful women because I knew there was something going on with me that wasn’t going on with most girls. It was lesbianism that was going on, but it was the 80s and I’d never even heard that word or encountered the idea of being gay. I just knew I was different somehow, and I was already weird enough. I didn’t need some other oddity to add to the mix. So, like with most everything I was thinking and feeling, I kept it to myself and to my playtime with my sister, the only other person in the world I could trust. She knew somehow that boobs both fascinated and freaked me out, so she made a point of talking about them constantly like it was no big deal. And she kept doing that until I was 27 and finally came out to her.

Nico: I agree, Heather, that Barbie’s just, extreme boobiness was so disconcerting for a queer kid! The boobs are in your face, like freaking torpedoes! Impossible to ignore! And you just have to play and pretend like absolutely no one is fascinated by women’s bodies themselves.

This meme thing is easy-peasy-banana-peely.

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