I mutilated my Barbies — and so did you. Here's why messing with this perfect little doll is endlessly alluring.
As the much-anticipated July 21 release of the Barbie movie approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own childhood Barbies — specifically, how I used to cut their tiny heads of hair, and also how I plucked the leg off of Ken just to see what would happen (it wouldn’t go back on), drew tattoos on another Barbie’s back, used nail polish as makeup that never went away and disrobed them all and refitted them in a wardrobe made of tissues.
Apparently, I was not alone in my penchant for Barbie destruction. “I hacked the hair on mine! Right down to the scalp, pretty much,” shared a colleague, with another reporting, “We tore off the face of ‘Kissing Barbie’ and turned her into a demon who would attack with her pucker. … With her skin off it was like an evil tongue.”
My teen told me that she and her friend “cut their hair and painted it with nail polish and drew on them with Sharpies and called them Blarbies,” and a New York City artist friend of a friend shared, “I was probably 22 years old and trying to get sober … I heated up nails to sear through the plastic and nailed them to pieces of wood … I painted my scars on the Barbies … Others were completely dismembered.”
On TikTok, posts related to “Barbie doll destruction” have a collective 2.9 billion views. A bar in San Francisco, meanwhile, has for years hosted an annual Halloween party dedicated to “Barbie mutilation.” Jessica Biel 'fessed up years ago to “mutilating them by pulling their heads off, cutting off all their hair, dyeing them with markers and sticking them on the Christmas tree lights.” And at least a handful of other artists use deconstructed Barbies as their medium, including jewelry designer Margaux Lange, who makes earrings and necklaces out of the ears, eyes and grinning mouths of Barbie, a subject matter she finds “endlessly inspiring.”
The destruction is a habit confirmed by Tanya Stone, author of The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie, who tells Yahoo Life, “Part of my research while writing [the book] came from hundreds of anecdotes that a wide variety of people sent me. Barbie bashing was a common theme and seemed to fall roughly into two categories — pure entertainment, and action that stemmed from something deeper. Many referenced it as a sort of punishment for Barbie looking too perfect. One woman simply said, ‘Barbie was just so bashable.’”
Theories about Barbie bashing
Lange believes that the “alteration/destruction of Barbie dolls in childhood” is “almost a rite of passage as a way to play around with altering appearance and/or releasing feelings in a perfectly safe, exploratory way,” and it’s something she did plenty of, with Barbie haircuts and makeovers involving Sharpies.
“Some of it is simply childhood entertainment — because one can, and the curious impulse of ‘what would happen if …’ is quite strong and perfectly natural for kids,” she says. “It can also stem from a desire to destroy Barbie’s perceived perfection and her representation of the impossible standards for women and girls. There’s something very cathartic about expressing frustrations with society’s expectations via altering an inanimate object that never stops smiling at you.”
A small 2005 U.K. study out of Bath University by Agnes Nairn, now professor of marketing and consumer behavior at the University of Bristol, examined the topic by interviewing kids ages 7 to 11 about various dolls.
"The girls we spoke to see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity, and see the torture as a 'cool' activity," Nairn told the Associated Press at the time, when her research prompted a slew of sensationalist “Barbie torture” and “Die, Barbie, die” headlines. "The types of mutilation are varied and creative, and range from removing the hair to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving.” She added that “actual physical violence and torture towards the doll was repeatedly reported, quite gleefully,” and that much of the reason was because girls saw Barbie as “babyish” and something “they had now outgrown.”
In response, a 2005 opinion piece in the Guardian by Anastasia de Waal, head of family and education at a U.K. think tank, said the conclusions “smack of academic overanalysis,” especially Nairn’s takeaway that part of the anti-Barbie sentiment was a response to consumerism.
“Seeing how a doll looks minus a limb or two doesn't denote ideological hostility, but rather a sense of curiosity — if a bit morbid (I am now intrigued about what happens when a doll is microwaved),” she wrote. “Methods of customizing dolls have become more innovative, not for any menacing reason but because dolls are now so damned durable. So if a toy collection consists mainly of Barbies … then many will get shorn/pierced/charred. Simple as that.”
Nairn doesn’t dispute that, telling Yahoo Life today how she learned through her research that the destruction came with “lots of different reasons,” including being experimental and “trying to make them … more individualized.” Kids would tell her, "Barbies? I’ve got a box full of them under the bed," she adds, "So, Barbie wasn’t special, Barbie wasn’t an individual, there were multiple Barbies. If you had a doll that was your special friend, I can’t imagine that you would deface it … and I don’t think Barbie fulfilled that role.”
Nairn (who says kids told her a microwaved Barbie smells like “pancakes”) says that “it would be really interesting to revisit” the study, given that we are 20 years further into not only women’s empowerment but diversity as offered by Mattel, such as with a transgender Barbie and those who have Down syndrome or physical disabilities — evidence that “individualism has continued apace.”
She remembers the “huge” reaction to her research when it was released, with “three solid days” of media calls. “It was around Christmas. But also, just this idea of little girls torturing their dolls really upset adults.”
An earlier, smaller and more-broadly-focused U.S. study looking at early adolescents’ views of Barbie found that the suburban girls, ages 10 to 13, reported three categories of Barbie play: imaginative, torture and anger play.
While anger play involved stabbing or stomping on a Barbie as a way to release anger toward a classmate or sibling, “a surprisingly common form of Barbie-related play reported by the participants was torture play. All reported damaging their dolls by cutting off the hair, painting them, or even removing appendages,” noted the findings, in which one girl discussed switching the heads on Ken and Barbie and another cut Barbie’s hair into a Mohawk and painted it with purple nail polish.
Such play didn’t occur with other types of dolls, the study found, since, as one participant explained, Barbie “is the only one that looks perfect.”
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