Barbie, Barbie!

When I was a little girl, the Barbie pictured above, circa 1963 or thereabouts, was the dream doll of most of us baby-boomers.  Girls, that is, although my brother would also participate in Barbie-play, via his G.I. Joe, who we deemed to be a much better boyfriend than that vanilla-flavored Ken.  For the times, she was quite daring.  She wore make-up, was anatomically quite developed, had cool clothes, including those sexy pumps, and was - in short - everything we thought we one day wanted to be.  I spent hours with my girlfriends in imaginative Barbie play.  My mother and grandmother were not quite approving, finding Barbie a bit too adult-like for their little girl, but there was little they could do about it.  My aunt gave me the Barbie one day after I had been sick, and my mother had to give in.

I was about eight at the time.  Although I was one of the last to get the doll, that was about the right age.  Much has been written about the evolution of Barbie, the way she reflects the changing role of women in the country and indeed the world, but this is the way Barbie looks nowadays, to the three-year-olds who receive her as "just another toy":



Quite a change.  Of course, she looks like she blends with the times, and she still has the traditional Barbie characteristics -- lots of make-up, cool clothes, simpering look.  But the age at which she is deemed acceptable for little-girl play -- three or thereabouts -- and the sexiness of her clothing, all make the concept of "age compression" a very real concern.  Most mothers I know blow off concerns about their daughters being corrupted by Barbie.  But as a baby-boomer who grew up with the doll, I can see that her evolution is very much in keeping with the times.  My question is, what will Barbie be next?

From "Playboy" to "Last Tango in Paris" -- The Mainstreaming of Pornography

A benchmark in “adult entertainment” was reached when Playboy was first published in 1953.  The idea that a magazine for “men” -- a magazine that celebrated nudity and was considered so lewd that it had to be sold in a thick brown wrapper, yet was able to be brought into suburban homes -- was a daring experiment that changed the way pornography was marketed forever.  That first issue of Playboy, which Hugh Hefner  created in his kitchen, sold over 50,000 copies.  The centerfold for that issue was none other than the iconic Marilyn Monroe, although her picture was taken from a pin-up calendar.  Interestingly,  Fahrenheit 451,  the classic  Raymond Bradbury science fiction novel, was serialized in three issues of the magazine.  The publishing of serious fiction in an “adult entertainment” magazine speaks to the very complexity of Hefner and the Playboy empire.  Yet I contend that it is this very dichotomy that made the beginnings of “legitimate” porn seep so stealthily into the mainstream culture.   Many people claimed, legitimately, that they bought Playboy for the articles, not the glossy, airbrushed spread of nude models.  This brought the magazine into America’s living rooms and made it a mainstay of American culture.

Two decades later, and along comes another groundbreaking cultural phenomenon, the Bernardo Bertolucci film Last Tango in Paris.   The film, starring Marlon Brando and the as-yet unknown ingénue French actress Maria Schneider, chronicles the affair of the 45-year-old American expatriate living in Paris (Brando) and the 20-year-old Schneider, who meet quite by accident in a Paris apartment, and begin an anonymous affair – literally anonymous.  They don’t know each others’ names, nor do they know anything about one another.  They are to meet at the apartment, where they experiment with sexual fantasies that include sado-masochism.  Wildly controversial from the onset, the movie is nevertheless beautiful to watch.  While watching images of the gorgeous Parisian streets, listening to the sexy jazz riffs of Gato Barbieri, who wrote the score, and caught up in the intensity of Brando’s acting, it is easy to forget what is really going on here.  A young girl, casual with her body as she may be, is nevertheless totally manipulated by an older man with emotional issues to resolve.  He leads her down a dangerous path, a path that so terrifies her that her only way out is to shoot him, just as he learns her name for the first time.

Both Playboy and Last Tango in Paris are artistic, and, some might argue, provocatively  intelligent, portrayals of blatant sexuality.  For most of us, sex is the hum underneath the reality of everyday life.  These vehicles elevate it to the first level.  But does the art of “pretty” pornography simply pave the way for the much more disturbing “Hustler”, “Penthouse”, and  hard-core pornography that so degrades not just women but all of humanity?   Where is the divide between “art” and “pornography” – when you take away the pretty wrapping, is it really any different?