I’ve started playing with my Barbie dolls once more. I’ve missed them. Forgotten what great fun it is to stretch a (plastic-)skin-tight t-shirt over unbending arms and immovable wrists, squeezing tiny shoes on feet permanently angled for 8 inch (to scale) stilettos, so that when you put ‘her’ in trainers or onto her snowboard, she either falls over or the footwear comes off. I love my Barbies.

It’s been probably about 20 years since we consigned our stock to the loft with a good riddance note, scattered the odd extra limbs we had knocking around into the box and bid it farewell. And then someone gave Lila a Barbie to play with.

So out they came once more. The next generation. And it is generational. Which I kind’a love.

When my girls were little Mel gave them her Barbie. From the ‘60s. It had hardly aged. NEITHER HAD MEL!!!! (he hastily adds). And yet it was different from the new ones we collected in the nineties. Because Barbie of old had been a little girl and the 90s one had, quite literally, ‘grown a pair’. They had breast-shaped plastic bits. They had little curves. They hadn’t so much ‘aged’ as been Beyonceed. Not completely because that would require much more plastic, but in that general direction.

In the box was also a pair of black shoes. Men’s shoes. Yet no sign of the Ken wot once owned them. As Lila said: ‘where Ken don?’ (Lila don’t do ‘g’). And that’s is a key question. Where the fuck is Ken??? I’m sure he was there when we left him in the loft locked up with 15 gorgeous, plastic women. Did they eat him??? Or did he do the proverbial runner?? Typical mannnn! He’s don.

But then I thought that this whole Barbie and Ken thing is a bit ‘binary’ for the end of this particular decade, its a bit stereotypical of the 60s to 80s mindset. And really, Mattel should be upping their game, modernising, upping their options and coming up with something in between Barbie and Ken on the gender scale. We didn’t have a gender scale back then, but we do now. We need a trans-Barbie/Ken. Barken. We need gay Barbie, camp Ken (though he’s always been a bit camp really) and we need a gender neutral version. Otherwise WHAT ARE WE TEACHING OUR CHILDREN!!! What terrible messages are we giving them about a boy and a girl falling in love, getting married and having children!!! WE MIGHT AS WELL GIVE THEM AK47S!!!!!

And that was all very funny, until I googled Barbies and came up with the above picture. The Ken Merman. Honest to god, I didn’t make it up. But its the answer to all the dreams of anyone into satire. A man without a nob. The feminist’s dream.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx