Poe's Barbie Secrets

My friends and I never played that Barbie was a teenaged fashion model. She and Ken were always married with a large family, usually in the Antebellum South, with period clothes we made ourselves and plots borrowed from heavily Little Women or the Honeybunch series. (Lots of diphtheria).

My brother could sometimes be coerced into playing Barbies with me, but he wasn’t much fun. He would always have Ken strip her naked, then beat her up with the Barbie Sports Car, or hanging her from the curtain rod. He now confesses that he found Barbie a huge sexual turn on.

I have to confess we girls were rather titillated by her big breasts and highly-defined butt. (The first Barbies are spooky-looking with those tiny vampire eyes; you can tell she was originally a hooker doll designed to amuse businessmen.)

Then they came out with Ken who had genitals--minimalist, but genitals nonetheless. (Looking back, I wonder what the Handlers were thinking, coming out with such sexy dolls for young children.)

At age eight or nine we had virtually no knowledge of sex, but ever so often my girlfriends and I would, as we called it, “play dirty with our Barbies.” In these dramas Ken would kidnap Barbie, strip her naked, and force her to do the most humiliating things we could think of: he would keep her locked up in a drafty stable, ride around on her like she was a horse, using "bearing reins" that held her head painfully high, then make her to drink a quart of sour milk.

After that we’d go back to the wholesome mom and dad stories, now set in the South Sea Islands or ancient Greece.

I noticed about twenty years ago that Mattel put jockey shorts on Ken and gave Barbie smaller breasts, plus big eyes and a wholesome smile. Now they even have a Carol Burnett Barbie, dressed for the famous Went With the Wind skit, a curtain rod stuck on her shoulders.

I like the idea of a funny-looking Barbie. Sorta gives goofy girls like me the hope that we too will someday become fashion icons.