My children are grown now. My children’s children are grown. Yet I suddenly find myself bombarded from every direction by yet another generation of Barbies (surely, the great-granddaughters of the original). She is everywhere. She is eternal. She is the playtime version of the Mona Lisa. And in her Pepto-Bismol-painted world of pink, pink, and more pink, she is undeniably, unabashedly, a girly-girl.

Wait . . . what??!!!

Has Barbie been sleeping under a rock? Where is independent Barbie — the young woman who has had so many careers she must be 140 years old by now? Where is the Barbie who has had an ongoing relationship with Ken, yet proudly maintained her singleness? Has she never heard of Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique? Whatever happened to the Equal Rights Amendment? Or have I just imagined the last 60 years of ever-increasing, more and more strident demands of women for more and more equality? (Though how you can be more equal than equal is beyond me.) But I digress . . .

Not to worry. Since she was first “launched” in 1959, Barbie has never really gone away. She simply adapts to the times, and finds her way into the hearts of each new generation of young girls who want to be just like her — as did their mothers, and now their grandmothers, before them. And she manages, in all her femininity, to also be a contemporary role model for her young admirers.

There’s even a stunningly beautiful Russian version of our favorite femme fatale, like a vision from a Tolstoy novel; and there are Barbies in the traditional styles of numerous other countries. She is not only eternally young and beautiful; she is universal. And she is cool.

I haven’t seen the new Barbie film, which has just been released in movie theaters, so I can’t speak to any message it may be trying to convey. Perhaps it is telling us that a woman can indeed be both feminine and independent, which would surely be a good thing. However, I’m not quite certain what that outfit (below) says about Ken. Maybe he’s been Barbie’s gay best friend all along. And I don’t really care. I’m just fascinated and amused by the whole big, splashy, fun-filled thing, which seems to me to be the real point.

Because in a world filled with daily tales of horror and devastation, isn’t that, in the final analysis, a very good thing?

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
7/23/23