Barbie & Ken in Feminist Comedyland
by T.L. Kelly

Published in 'Exquisite Corpse: A Monthly Book of Ideas', Vol. 7, Nos. 6-9, June-Sept. 1989  

American wimmen born in the late boomer years (let's say 1955-1970) share a niche in the history of the wimmen's movement. We are the target audience for the New Feminist Comedians. A lot of the events that made feminism not funny went right on over our heads. While Marilyn Monroe was preparing to sacrifice herself in order to be resurrected as Norma Jean Baker, Goddess of Feminism, we were still sucking on our mothers' collapsible latex nursers. While our mothers plotted to overthrow our households and convert them to democracies, we were trying to stretch high enough on our tippy-toes to reach the dials on the TV. While our big sisters pioneered the sex revolution by sneaking out the window to meet their beatnik, bohemian and biker boyfriends, we raided their make-up tables and read their diaries and discovered the benefits of blackmail. When our brothers escaped our upheaved households to faraway exotic lands like Woodstock, Haight-Ashbury and Vietnam, we found refuge in their closets and discovered faraway exotic frontiers graphically depicted in Playboy, Penthouse and Biker Babes. We spent a lot of time in the closet during the turbulent 60s, and rightly so. Our role models were struggling to define new material. It was all for our own good and we would understand it when we grew up. But we were wise enough to know the dark when we saw it. After all, we watched TV. But we were children and children need role models. So just in the nick of time, in 1959 on the cusp of the Age of Aquarius, when we were just starting to ask why Mommy was different from Daddy, Santa Claus left a Barbie doll under the Christmas tree. Ruth Handler had us in mind in 1959 when she plied Barbie into shape. Her own daughter, Barbara Handler, for whom the doll is named, was just about to turn 18. Mrs. Handler figured she didn't have any time left to make Barbara understand that there was no future left for her in feminism (especially as a comedian because, as we know, feminism in 1959 was not funny. Not that Barbara wanted to be a comedian, but as it turned out, she never moved out of Los Angeles which means she's automatically a comedian). So Mrs. Handler did the sensible thing and forged Barbie as a beacon for all us baby fems who desperately needed something to entice us out of the closet. We had our latex nursers back for a few years. It was exactly what we needed to bring childhood back into perspective, never mind that Barbie had no nipples, no body hair, no orifices. She stood permanently on tiptoe and we could relate to that. And we could teethe on her fingers and pop off her head and she still smiled. When the 50s turned into the 60s, smiles were a rare commodity. It's common knowledge that lovable adorable cute toddlers turn ugly when they graduate from kindergarten and we were no exception. But for late boomers, this coincided with the time that feminism started getting ugly, and so we became The Objective. We needed serious role models before it was too late. While we fought with our teenage babysitters for the right to see what they were doing with their boyfriends on our parents' beds, our noble mothers took to the streets to find serious careers that challenged sexual stereotypes. We had figured out two important social customs from watching TV. Laughter and sex. They were two givens we could understand, and somehow we figured out that they belonged together. We had a few clues from what we read in our brothers' porno mags, but we were missing the tools to discover on our own the sexual cause that would create the laughter effect. Little did we know that Mrs. Handler had anticipated our prayers a few years before, in 1962. In her infinite wisdom, she created the Ken doll in her 16-year-old son's image. We were not going to be left unarmed through these turbulent times. With Barbie in one hand and Ken in the other, we snuck back in the closet to regroup. Feminists in the mid 1960s found nothing funny about their sex lives. The beatniks, bohemians and bikers they had failed to turn into sensitive partners mutated into another life form--hippies. As beatniks men were clumsy arrogant lovers but as hippies they were worse. They thought liberation meant taking sex out of the back seat of the car and putting it into a sleeping bag on the side of the road. The sex lives of the founding feminists are ripe material for the New Feminist Comedian, and since the nostalgia haze is still reeking o'er the land, we will probably be laughing a lot about the 1960s contribution to the overall sexual frustration of the planet. How ironic then that the mid-60s was just about the time late boomers (remember, in the closet?) were finding out the awful truth about sex and feminism. First of all, we got out our brothers' porno mags and confirmed our suspicions about poor, poor Ken. He had no dick, no balls and therefore no good reason to keep that Dan Quayle smile on his face. We had grown to accept Barbie's inadequacies because she had permanently tattooed on her eyelids that turquoise blue eye shadow we all associated with true womanhood. But to hand us a castrated Ken was an insult to our intelligence. We were way past kindergarten by then , not too far away from puberty and a new attitude was taking root inside of us. (It was only feminism, though we worried it was something malevolent we'd conjured up of the Ouija board.) To make matters worse, no matter what we did to contort Ken's rigid limbs to fit around Barbie's unyielding thighs and put them in a prone position, either Ken's leg would pop off at the socket or he would slide off Barbie's gravity-defying tits. The awful truth about sex and feminism and why our mothers and fathers lived in separate households and why our big sisters were moving back home was graphically depicted in this pitiful demonstration. Ken and Barbie had apparently been created to eternally frustrate one another. No matter how hard we tried to force them into gratifying positions, they would not bend. The New Feminist Comedian can count on us to be there in her audience for the same reason that the real Ken Handler has targeted us as the market for his new book, "The Ken Doll Talks." We are supposed to be in our sexual prime (when you finally stop scheduling time for sex in your life and start scheduling life around sex) but we are still confused. There is a part in each of us that is still in the dark, still in the closet regrouping. We are not women who love too much, and we are not the Pepsi Generation. We are not the women of "Thirtysomething", nor are we the girls who just wanna have fun. We are displaced refugees of the Feminist Police Action. We are still looking for our role models. We have hope she might be found in the material of the New Feminist Comedian. Unfortunately, she will also be the target of derision in Ken's new book. Ken is now a real estate investor in New York. He is middle-aged, married, balding, and has daughters of his own. According to a press release from Ken's publishers, his sister, Barbara Handler, thinks the Barbie doll is a bimbo and Ken is "Malibu." The Handler siblings are sick and tired of being mistaken for their plastic clones. A recent story in the L.A. Times announces that Ken has written the definitive book about his family, who has suffered a leisure lifestyle that includes a lot of golf and tennis on account of the millions of dollars their namesakes bankroll. Our image of Mrs. Handler as a saint who gave us manna from toyheaven has been shattered due to the disclosure that she is now in the breast prosthesis business. If Ken talks about what we did to him in the closet, we are all in deep shit. Because after we got over the initial shock that Ken and Barbie would never fit together, we found other uses for the 11&3/4 inch long Ken doll, with his smooth round non-toxic head. We were not ready for puberty and neither were our mothers. As liberated as they hoped to be, they still could not bring themselves to call a vagina a vagina. Add to that the stark mating grounds of the early 1970s where we had a choice between disco-dancing or streaking as foreplay. It didn't take long before back into the closet we went. Back to our Ken dolls, who were reliable, steadfast, gratifying, unscented and washed off easily in the bathroom sink. If we'd known that Ken would one day write his life story, would we have treated him differently? Would we not have eventually replaced him with battery-operated vibrating objects that came to represent how faceless and featureless our self-exploration has become? That feminism and gender confusion and role model denial and sexual frustration all bore down on us at the same time may be a valid excuse for the way we abused Ken, but it is not likely he will let us off the hook that easily. The truth will come out that we are all guilty of making Kens of our men, as is evident in this personal ad from a Big Name Academic Tabloid: "EVERYTHING YOU WANT you'll find in this perfectly packaged SWM, clean, attractive, slender build, good listener, yielding, sensitive, nurturing, playful, non-smoker, non-drinker, sixties-sort-of-guy, able to relocate, please no children. Box 62." We, the late boomer wimmen whose most outstanding contribution to the cultural evolution of the planet is that we helped disco die, need you, New Feminist Comedian. We need you to lure us out of the closet by making us laugh. We understand laughter. Somehow we know it goes with sex and feminism, but we need a demonstration. We need a role model. We are on the brink of our sexual prime and we need to let go of our toys. Forgive us SWM. Forgive us Ken. We knew not the archetypos we were creating there in the closet. Perhaps Ken's new book will act as a redeemer on the collective guilty conscience, and we can all finally forgive feminism for fucking up our sex lives.