Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, Emotion 1966

How to make a 紫砂壶 zishahu (Chinese boccaro teapot/ Yixing clay teapot)

because I see these two vastly different takes around a lot, and as a Doll Person(TM), I have my own thoughts on the matter

Barbie was created by a toy developer named Ruth Handler. a toy developer who was constantly being told by the men who dominated her field that little girls only wanted baby dolls they could mother. no matter that she’d seen her own preteen daughter eschewing baby dolls for paper dolls of adult women- girls must want to play at mothering, because that was all they were going to do when they grew up, right?

my own mom had a first-issue Barbie in 1959, when she was six years old. to her, Barbie was revolutionary. “Here was a doll,” she’s told me, “that you weren’t playing Mama with. Here was a doll who had a life and a career outside of the home. I’d never seen anything like that, and I loved it.”

the career was modeling, and Barbie did indeed look more like a fashion illustration than a human woman. all of these things were true at the same time- the independence and the traditionally feminine trappings thereof

Barbie was far from the first fashion doll intended for children- that honor went to the French lady dolls of the 1850s-90s, another type pioneered by a woman in a male-dominated field. and like Barbie, her great-grandmothers were fraught with controversy. but that’s a topic for another day

Barbie has been many things over her half-century of life. an astronaut, a president, a doctor- and a beauty pageant queen. a character who appears in videos about coping with depression- and a toy that once came with a tiny diet book that simply said “Don’t eat.” she’s come in a variety of races, but it took until 1980 for Barbies of color to actually BE Barbies, not just “Barbie’s friends.” she was created by a woman who saw that her daughter wanted to play out an independent future for herself, but that future took the form of a modeling job (not inherently bad, but not particularly challenging to the status quo of women’s employment at the time)

Barbie’s legacy cannot be neatly summed up as good or bad, empowering or oppressive. she’s complicated, as is our cultural relationship to her

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