The Long Strange Odyssey of a Living Doll

We interrupt the drumbeat of sex, sex, sex in the White House for a word about sex, sex, sex in the toy box: Barbie turns 40 next month.

Barbie, what can we say? While others your age stand in front of the bathroom mirror wondering whether it’s too soon for that baseline face lift, you stand buck naked in my kids’ playroom, a tribute to mankind’s timeless fixation with bodacious gazongas. And yes, we heard about that new, flatter-chested Barbie they added in ’98. A nice gal, but let’s face it, hardly what Barbie’s all about.

No, your mystique, now and ever, is that you, alone among toys, quietly--creepily, even--helped turn American girlhood into something that’s now relentlessly PG-13. So here you are at 40, childless, job-hopping, unmarried--and, interestingly, down 14% from last year’s sales figures.

We love ya, doll, but you gotta wonder what that means.

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It can’t have been easy to be Barbie, these last few conflicted decades, in a culture that’s as nerve-racked as this one when it comes to all Barbie stands for. One decade, you’re as big as Ann-Margret; the next, you’re every feminist’s favorite whipping girl.

For a while, when our teenager was little, there were two kinds of parents--Barbie and non-Barbie. Never before or since have little girls’ birthday parties been so political. One wrong move and you were either a too tense harpy with issues about the objectification of women, or you wanted some poor child to grow up to be just like Barbie--a shallow white mantrap obsessed with buying stuff.

Then came economic boom times, and stuff-obsessed, shallow white mantraps were hip again, and you couldn’t drive past a Toys R Us without mysteriously taking on Barbie dolls. That her manufacturer, Mattel, had by then come up with Barbies of color and careerist Barbies didn’t hurt. Somehow, it wasn’t so hard to buy your kid what appeared to be an 11 1/2-inch exotic dancer if the label said “Doctor Barbie” and her skintight mini-dress was covered by a lab coat.

But that was all about the way adults viewed Barbie. Less noted was her relationship with kids. Nobody discussed how you just knew, if you were a little girl, that she had a dark side, that you didn’t dress Barbie in a blanket and pretend to be her mommy. How, at a level you couldn’t articulate, Barbie made you feel uneasily, secretly--maybe prematurely--grown-up.

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It’s still a little dicey to speak directly about those uneasy feelings, though there’s probably not a household in America without a naked Barbie floating around somewhere. We’re nervous about sex, which is why we can’t stop talking about it and selling things with it and accusing each other of it and writing about it in newspapers. The landscape of today’s kids is littered with it, compared with the Barbie-buyers’ world of yesteryear.

Billboards. Movies. Video games. Prime-time promos for steamy miniseries. Radio shock jocks. That recent episode of “The Simpsons” where (no, I’m not kidding) Homer and Marge make love in various public places in an effort to spice up their marriage with sexual variety. Mail-order catalogs. That riveting ad during the Super Bowl for the Victoria’s Secret Internet fashion show, featuring a parade of models who looked, well, like Barbie dolls.

It can’t be a coincidence that, in this environment, Barbie sales are flagging. When you’re up against Tyra Banks in a merry widow, I don’t care if you aren’t pushing 40, your work’s cut out for you. And frankly, most kids wouldn’t bother to be shocked and fixated even by Tyra. They’re too inundated. There’s so much sex, it cancels out.

So whither Barbie? Mattel says she’ll celebrate her 40th year by introducing a new gang of nose-ringed girlfriends and donning a tattoo. Louche Barbie. Hey, whatever. It seemed to work for Cher.

Personally, I wish she’d grow up a little, get a family, make up her mind already about Ken. Biological Clock Barbie, with Real Life-like Stretch Marks. Sales would be dismal, but talk about an old Barbie girl’s revenge. . . .

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Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com