Barbie girl

I was a teenage runaway, a joyrider, a drug dealer, a terrorist and a murderer. I had sex with scores of men (including all of Duran Duran - simultaneously) whilst never having spoken to a man who wasn’t my father; I turned a gay man straight and a straight man gay; I was detained in mental institutions; I had organ transplants; I was buried in a sand-pit; I was reincarnated as my own twin sister; I performed a strip act in a nightclub; and I lost my head when it was flushed down the toilet. I have even died of ignorance (as in that ’80s advertising campaign). And all this before my eighteenth birthday.

So how did I manage to perform these amazing feats? Well, it was all thanks to Barbie. Yes, Barbie. The glittery pink creation that all sensible modern women detest.

Whenever anyone talks about Barbie nowadays, their tone is peculiarly apologetic. It’s always the same: they tried so terribly hard to avoid it, but their daughters have simply inherited a Barbie-loving “pink gene”. These women talk earnestly about gender stereotyping and act as if Barbie were single-handedly responsible for anorexia and unnecessary boob-jobs. Germaine Greer, for one, claimed that Barbie has taught any woman whose vital statistics aren’t 38-18-34 to “despise her body”.

But such criticisms are missing the point. For Barbie isn’t just a pink’n’blonde monstrosity who teaches girls to shop and starve: on the contrary, she can teach us everything we need to know about life and love.

My sister and I had, between us, probably the national average of Barbies (around eight apiece). But our Barbies didn’t hang around looking pretty and having tea parties. Oh no. We chopped their hair off and dyed their stubble with felt-tip pens (and were disappointed to discover that Domestos didn’t bleach polyester hair). We pierced their ears with dressmaking pins, gave them chains from their ears to their noses, and added nail-varnish nipples for good measure – to the horror of our mother, who first spotted said nipples as we undressed our Barbies while playing nicely at Great Auntie Joan’s house. One had polio (caught from a too-close encounter with Ian Drury – as in the Blockheads) – and a Swizzles sweet wrapper, an elastic band, and a bit of plastic from dad’s tool-box became a calliper. Another had cholera (thanks to my reading The Secret Garden and never getting beyond the scary cholera bit). When we got really fed up with them, we resorted to crashing a Weebles aeroplane into their house (oh, we were so ahead of our time). A number of them went mad; one had her hat run over by a London taxi, and subsequently developed a fetish about exposing her bottom. Only one retained all her (long, blonde, curly) hair and limbs, and she, “Sheri”, was the token looks-obsessed bimbo who was on a permanent diet of cocaine and vodka.

Had they known what I got up to at home, my school friends would probably have thought that I was suffering from some weirdo form of arrested development. To my mind, though, what I was doing was learning about who I was and what I wanted – without any of the hideous consequences. Other girls snogged horrid teenage boys, had secret abortions, drank themselves sick, and dabbled in drugs – but I didn’t need to do any of that, because I had Barbie. She showed me how demeaning it was to have sordid liaisons in alleyways, how boring people are when they’re drunk, how wonderful it is to be in love, and how heart-wrenchingly miserable it is to be dumped by your (married or gay) boyfriend. I was testing out those different identities that the other girls – whose politically correct mothers had banned Barbie – were trying out on their own minds and bodies the minute they had the chance. “Be who you want to be”, said one rather sickly Barbie advertising campaign. But I’d say that Barbie lets you be who you don’t want to be – without any of the consequences.

I never went down the sex-with-random-strangers path, unlike many of my Barbie-free friends. I don’t go in for body piercing; binge-drinking somehow passed me by; and I’m not unduly concerned with my looks. I have no desire for an eighteen-inch waist or breast implants (and if anyone could ever do with them, it would be me). I have a splendid marriage, two lovely children, and am even considering getting an Afghan hound (well, Barbie had one). And while some might credit my parents with having brought up a happy and well rounded individual, I’d say it was all thanks to Barbie. For she let me try out every possible relationship and mode of existence, all in the safety of my own home. And for that, I shall be forever grateful to her.