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Give Pink a ChanceBarbie takes on Europe—and wins.

By Moira Redmond
Updated Monday, July 1, 2002, at 11:12 AM ET
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty

Barbie is a girl with a Reputation: She's big-breasted, man-mad, and a bad role model. No wonder she is an unwanted guest at some birthday parties, where mothers of 4-year-olds frown at the sight of the dreaded pink box. Barbie's long been in trouble with feminists, educationists, and snooty middle-class parents.

And yet, she's still selling by the millions. When I revisited Europe this year after several years of living (and raising a daughter) in the States, I realized why. Barbie's only problem is an American inferiority complex. In the rest of the world, Barbie is seen as one of the USA's great exports. She is brash and colorful and plastic and American, and she makes proper European craftsmanlike toys seem dull or flawed in comparison. Here's a rundown of the competition:

  • The German firm Playmobil makes expensive plastic people. They're very nice toys. But count how many of the figures are women and how many are men. Then check out what the handful of women models are doing—playing tennis, being nurses. The much more numerous men are busy slaying dragons and driving tractors.
  • The same thing goes for the ever-popular Danish Lego building sets. One reason Harry Potter Lego was so welcome was that it included a female figure, Hermione—big news in Lego's mostly male universe.
  • Brio wooden train sets are aesthetically very pleasing, crafted with care, and have high prices to match their high quality. But children want electric trains and flashy colors and get bored with Brio very quickly. If ever there was a toy bought because the parents like it, this is it, and the neglected boxes in the playroom—representing many hundreds of dollars of investment—are a sad sight.
  • Or consider those lovely wooden dollhouses from Europe. They come with families that look strangely old-fashioned—women in knee-length skirts and aprons doing housework. Barbie doesn't do housework and her mansion is an outrageous, nouveau riche dream, not a boring Swedish chalet.
  • Among the many popular British toys that come from TV series or books—Thomas the Tank Engine, Bob the Builder, Thunderbirds—there are no substantial female characters, nothing for little girls to identify with.
  • The only real competition for Barbie in England is the "Sindy" doll—and she is such a close copy of Barbie that there were lawsuits from Mattel (Barbie's manufacturer). Sindy struggles on, but she cannot be sold in the USA, and she cannot compete with Barbie for the hearts and minds of British girls.

In Seattle, where I raised two kids, mothers say proudly, "My daughter was never interested in Barbie. We don't really care for pink, and we prefer non-stereotyped toys." (Their daughters are always the one who spend the entire play-date at someone else's house fiddling with Barbie's hairdressing salon, while the dolls' owner gets the toy trucks out.) But Barbie is a feminist, the best kind: She's self-actualized, gorgeous, and gets on with life. Ken is an irrelevancy—far less important than Barbie's friends, interests, and careers (which range from dinosaur hunter to doctor to film star).

Barbie is cheap and cheerful. There are many Barbies for under $10, and you can usually find one (currently Surf City Barbie) on sale for $4.99. But, the complaints continue, what about the cost of the clothes and accessories? Well, any child who saves her allowance can buy herself a boxful of Barbie getups at a garage sale: Girls grow out of them and they last forever. And at the risk of sounding too Little House on the Prairie, the two generations of girls with whom I am most familiar made things for their Barbies. Of course they liked to buy pink plastic junk, but at home it's easy to make clothes and shoebox rooms for Barbie: You don't even have to be able to sew, you can glue clothes together.

The age of Barbie users has fallen drastically. Girls used to play with them into their early teens, but modern girls are ready to give them away by around 8. I'd defend Barbie for any age group, but it is especially hard to imagine her doing any harm to these little ones. They're playing with a glam big sister who looks good, has fun with her buddies, does wild and exciting things, comes in every race and color imaginable, and has a great job (paleontologist Barbie wore the neatest shorts as she looked for fossils). European families have no problem with their daughters emulating a happy, confident, good-looking, American girl. Patriotic homegrown parents could learn to love her too.

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Moira Redmond is a freelance writer and a former Slatester. You can e-mail her at .
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty. Photograph of Barbie doll on the Slate home page by Ho/Reuters.
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Notes From the Fray Editor:

Barbie brings out the best, at least in the Fray. Uneasy or unsettling nostalgia collided headlong with pithy feminism (or anti-feminism). No one had any solid nominees for morally superior female figurine toylines, but there were some superior one-liners.

Notes From the Fray:

What does Moira Redmond think happens at age 8 when girls outgrow their pink-pleather clad "Earring Magic Barbie" dolls? Do they abandon the bustier-wearing miniskirted "fashion doll" in favor of climbing trees, playing sports and exploring the mysteries of science? Or do they begin to beg their parents for the latest Britney Spears CD and low-rider pants from The Limited Too where once they had requested seemingly endless iterations of Barbie and her blandly multi-cultural gal pals?

I don't think Barbie is the end of civilization as we know it, but I do think that damned doll has helped to inspire some truly hideous tween-age trends, and that is a crime I simply cannot forgive.

-- miss mae

(To reply, click here.)


Alas. How I hate to disagree with Moira, and so soon, too, but—

"But Barbie is a feminist, the best kind: She's self-actualized, gorgeous, and gets on with life." Phooey. What does 'gorgeous' have to do with feminism? I always thought that one very welcome tenet of feminism was that women shouldn't have to be gorgeous to be worth something. That's exactly the problem with Barbiekins, she teaches the opposite, as do all the other hypersexualised female 'role-models' there are out there these days. JonBenet Ramsay came from somewhere.

-- Kassandra

(To reply, click here.)



[If Hasbro] stopped making the dolls because there was a backlash, that GI Joe shame goes hand in hand with our Barbie guilt. We make our playthings cultural totems. Taking a patrician attitude toward certain toys allows you to emphasize what is proper and what is not. Turning a nose up at Barbie may satisfy our egalitarian, non-sexist sides; staring at GI Joe through narrowed eyes can convince us we're better than the people who bring us war.

Maybe it's justified. I saw GI Joe as a plastic man who didn't survive long in sandboxes.

-- BML

(To reply, click here.)


When my sister would come to visit it usually fell upon me to entertain my niece. Often I would play Barbies with her. This would almost always consist of me holding up one of the dolls in the right place while my niece dictated the action and did most of the dialogue. What struck me was how violent Barbies adventures were. She was always fighting evil Barbies and always ended up tied up in some villains death trap, from whence she would escape and turn the tables on the villain. It was almost exactly like when I was a child playing with my GI Joes except with fabulous clothes.

-- pablo

(To reply, click here.)

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