Throwing Barbie a Curve

A friend of mine calls it The Barbie Burden.

None of us looks like a plastic Barbie doll, but deep down in some sugarcoated recess of our psyches, we feel that we should . Looking good invariably comes down to looking like somebody else.

She has big hair and a teeny-tiny waist and just enough hips to put a slight curve in her jeans.

It’s tough, this image. Even Jane Fonda, the scuttlebutt goes, has had her breasts surgically enlarged.

American women come in a wide range of sizes and colors, topped off with brown, blond, red or black hair--and sometimes rather amazing variations on the same.

Yet from 1959 on, nearly all of us (Mattel says 90%) grew up with Barbie, most likely a very blond one, with her frilly, tacky, somewhat tawdry get-ups in tow.

And we loved it, of course.

We didn’t know from bimbos back then. We were Barbie (although I tended to identify more with Skipper myself.)

Now my 4-year-old daughter loves Barbie too. No surprise here. Last year, Barbie was the top-selling toy in the land. Why? “ Because , Mommy!” my daughter says.

I have my own ideas. Barbie and her clones spell beautiful everywhere we look, on TV, in the glossy ads, everywhere but where it really counts: In the mirror, where most of us are uncomfortably alone with ourselves.

I saved this dismal news in my files last year:

A survey by the Times Mirror Center for People & the Press, which is operated by the owner of the Los Angeles Times, found that only 30% of American adults were happy with their looks, and 42% consider themselves overweight.

This is not good. No wonder teen-agers are alternately starving themselves or sticking fingers down their throats after they’ve eaten a meal. Task forces on self-esteem are sprouting like weeds.

Cathy Meredig, a Minnesota computer consultant and mother of a 6-year-old son, has been thinking about all this too. So have Cathy’s friends, women who are bright and successful, women who grew up in a Barbie world. None of these women would be mistaken for a fashion mannequin come to life, yet they’d all love it if they were.

Cathy, who is 38, figured something was askew. She did some research and found out that children start developing their ideas on body image at the ages of 3 and 4, which, not so coincidentally, is entry-level Barbie time.

So Cathy came up with the idea for a better-than-Barbie doll. She calls it the Happy to Be Me doll, which doesn’t have the cachet of Barbie (or even, say, Kittie or Trixie , or . . .) but Cathy says the idea is for children to name the doll themselves.

But here’s what makes Cathy’s creation unique: She’s for real! Almost, that is.

Whereas Barbie’s proportions translate to the human equivalent of 36-18-33, the Happy to Be Me doll (Cathy, maybe you’d better work on that name) rounds out at 36-27-38. Cathy’s doll also has a shorter neck and bigger feet.

In other words, we’re talking about an average woman, a woman that little girls might even vaguely resemble one day.

“The idea is that she is in her early 20s, before children,” Cathy says. “The reason I did this is I honestly believe that a major negative stereotype can be changed.”

So far, Cathy says, she hasn’t sold a single doll. Three toy manufacturers she initially approached about producing the doll said it wouldn’t sell.

“With the first two, it was strictly a business decision,” she says. “I could understand that. With the third, he said, ‘The average American woman wouldn’t understand this.’ He said it was too educational. And then he told me that the secretary to the president of the company looks like a Barbie, so it wasn’t true that women don’t look like Barbie dolls.”

I talked to Cathy from a hotel room in New York. When news of her venture--in which she invested $100,000 of her own money--got out, CBS flew her east. She says that at least from the media, interest is great. Woman, however, seem to grasp the concept better then men.

Cathy says the first shipment of 300 dolls (suggested price $9.95) is due to arrive from Hong Kong this week. They have long, reddish-brown hair and bendable arms and legs. The eyes are green. They are not unnaturally big. If this one takes off, dolls representing other races could be in the works.

Cathy says her market research with the daughters of friends showed that the kids happily played with her doll without any comment on body type. It was their mothers, she says, who really oohed and ahhed.

I haven’t seen the Happy to Be Me doll for myself, but Cathy has offered to send one out as soon as they arrive. If my daughter doesn’t like it, I figure I can play with it myself.

In the meantime, anybody got any great ideas for a ‘90s kind of Ken?

Dianne Klein’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.