101 things to do with a dead Barbie

By Gwynne Dyer

'You can brush my hair, Undress me everywhere. I'm a Barbie girl In a Barbie world.'

LONDON (JP): After all these years, disco still sucks. Even tongue-in-cheek disco; you can't send up what's already camp. So I'm not very fond of the Danish group Aqua's global hit 'Barbie Girl', musically speaking. But I'm not outraged by it, either.

Outrage there has been, and in generous helpings. Around the planet, distraught parents of golden-haired little girls (somehow they're always golden-haired) voice their horror at the open suggestion that Barbie might have, you know, adult interests. And as to her boyfriend of some 40 years, Ken Carson, his intentions don't bear thinking about.

'You're my doll, rock'n'roll,

Feel the glamour and the pain.

Kiss me here, touch me there.

Hanky-panky.'

This is heavy stuff. So heavy that Mattel, Barbie's manufacturer, has called in the lawyers to sue the pants (if you'll excuse the expression) off of MCA, Aqua's record label. You can't let cynical pop-stars break little girls' hearts and corrupt their minds by having Barbie and Ken doing naughty things together.

I have news for Mattel and their lawyers. I happen to have a 5-year-old little girl (golden-haired, as it happens), and nothing Aqua has to say would surprise her. She already knows. She doesn't know all the gory details, of course -- but only because, like most 5-year-olds, she has decided she doesn't want to know.

It's my duty, when I'm not on the road, to play Barbies with Kate for at least half an hour every day. It has to be me, because I'm the only male in the house these days, and she's quite clear that it's got to be a man playing Ken (or Gerald, as she prefers to call him).

Sometimes Gerald and the favorite Barbie of the moment go on dates, and occasionally they get married. More often, Gerald is beaten up by Barbie's multitudinous girl-friends, who all compete furiously for his affections but get angry when he sticks with Barbie. Then Barbie wades in and saves him. (She knows karate).

Gerald also frequently has fights with Todd, his rival for Barbie's hand. (Todd, unlike Gerald, has real hair, and he would be quite handsome if one of the cats hadn't nibbled off his nose and toes).

And occasionally, Kate decides that Gerald and Barbie are going to 'have sex'. It's not very dramatic: just a bit of horizontal boogie with all their clothes on. But she glances at me slyly to see if I'm going to take the bait and go harrumph. I don't, of course, and the Barbies go back to fighting.

Where did she learn such a thing? Where every other 5-year- old who isn't deaf, dumb and blind learns it: from television, from her older sister, from hearing adults talk, from friends at school. It doesn't hurt, and it's no big deal. She isn't exactly 'innocent', but I never met a 5-year-old who was.

As for the Barbies, they're not innocent either. The reason Mattel has sold a billion of them in the past half-century (of which my two girls have accumulated about 70 -- it's an appalling sight when they're all lined up) is precisely that Barbies are not sexless. Unlike almost all the dolls that preceded them, they're woman-shaped.

Okay, I don't actually meet many women who have the proportions of a Barbie, and I would probably run screaming if I did. If you scaled a Barbie's hands, feet and head up to human size, then the rest of her would be eight and a half feet (two metres) tall with a 50-inch (1.2 metre) bust. But you know what I mean.

Yet Mattel is now taking legal action just because a pop group put out a song insinuating that Barbie does more than change her clothes five times a day. These people must get their sense of humor from the same place as Disney's lawyers. And they clearly have no idea of the variety of things that creative little girls actually do with Barbies.

Melissa is now 14, so she only plays Barbies these days when Kate wants to be amused. But when Melissa was little, she and her friend Miranda specialized in coming up with new ways to play with the things. They worked their way through all the standard ploys: punk Barbies (felt-tip pens produce a credible product), transvestite Barbies, body-piercing Barbies. And then one Christmas, they discovered the ultimate weapon.

You take all the punk Barbies, and the ones with legs and arms missing, and the ones whose hair will never be right again -- and you decapitate them. You mutilate the heads further, and cover them with felt-tip gore. Then you get a box of chocolates, eat half of them, and nestle the severed heads neatly in among the remaining chocolates.

Replace the top of the box, wait for sensitive elderly relatives to drop by, and then sweetly offer them a chocolate. The effect is most satisfying. And since they're relatives, they hardly ever sue.

I can't wait till Kate is old enough to try it.