So I saw the Barbie movie over the weekend. (And Oppenheimer too, but I am still reflecting on that and can’t talk too much about it and my feelings on it yet.) It’s been such a complex time in my brain since then. Barbie the movie was fine, a little dull to me in some parts, identifiable in others, and some really beautiful moments. But my experience is different than most people’s.
You see, Barbie is my tormentor. Barbie was the toy that everyone wanted me to have because I was born a girl. Skipper was thrust into my hand the Christmas I was three years old and I was supposed to love her. The truth is that I don’t remember that Christmas at all. But the story goes something like this:
My parents either decided to get me Barbie’s little sister Skipper that year or I asked for it. I don’t recall either way, although it’s doubtful to me that I ever would have asked for a doll. Other than my Cabbage Patch Kids, the dolls I was given lived in my closet or my brother’s closet when his room was half storage, half baby bedroom. Those dolls with the opening and closing eyes creeped me the fuck out. I usually put blankets on their faces the very few times I played with them because if I shifted on my bed too much, their stupid eyes would quickly start opening and closing. And I hated that. Anyway, my parents determined that I was going to get Skipper and they very kindly asked my father’s parents and sisters to please not get me a Barbie for our Christmas Eve celebration because they were very excited about Skipper.
My grandmother didn’t listen and that Christmas Eve I got a weird off-brand barbie type thing, a ton of Barbie outfits, and a case to start all things Barbie and barbie type. I despised this off-brand barbie because her legs didn’t bend correctly for her to sit in the big plastic van I had. It wasn’t designed for Barbie, but other than their heads sticking out through the moon roof, they fit…mostly. But not generic barbie. Generally I tied her to the top of the van around the other heads and she rode like a corpse on the van roof.
Eventually I got a “steretypical” Barbie with her freakishly pointy feet, tiny waist, long legs and torso, and ambiguous genitalia but perfect chest. Skipper looked like her daughter. I gave Skipper a rocking mohawk shortly after stereotypical Barbie arrived and got a spanking for ruining my toy. Now I didn’t think she was ruined because I ADORED her mohawk. She was punk Skipper!
The rare times that I played with Barbie were when someone asked me to play with them, like my mom or my dad’s sisters, or later on when my brother asked. They were third rate toys to me, so they lived in the basement, in that one pseudo finished area. I would bring down the blue van because that was a first rate toy which lived in my huge room with me. We also stored them naked, so the first order of business was choosing their clothes. My brother was the one who picked dresses and things for them. I usually put them in practical gear like shorts and casual tops because they were taking the blue van CAMPING! They each were placed on stair as their “bunk” and the van was parked at the bottom stair. Skipper played the part of the boy because she had a mohawk. Off-brand barbie was usually the mom and stereotypical Barbie was the teenager, who behaved shockingly similar to our babysitter from church that we saw about once a month when my parents went out.
By the time we dressed them, drove them to “camp”, assigned them bunks, and put them to bed with tiny sleeping bags, I was bored and usually asked my brother if we could just stop playing and go outside or do something else. i didn’t really enjoy dressing them, choosing outfits, making a perfect life and story and found it mostly dull. Sometimes he’d want to play a little longer and so they would take off all their clothes and “jump” from the stairs, which was now THE CLIFF into the water (or blue carpet) and that was it. I’d gather them up along with their clothes, shove them back into the case, and we would move on to something else.
It wasn’t until much later that I found out I wasn’t playing with Barbie like other girls. She didn’t marry Ken, have fun jobs, love clothes and try on all of her outfits. She rode around in the blue van, slept on a stair and then I threw her off the stairs onto the floor. Because I did not care about adult life, female life, clothes, or what I was supposed to be paying attention to around me. It wasn’t just that I didn’t pick up on the misogynistic messaging around, I did not want to. I did not think I was supposed to. I paid attention to my dad. I wanted to be like my dad. I had no desire to be like my mom or any other female relative. I didn’t want to do any job that seemed to be mostly female like teacher or nurse. I paid attention to which instruments had mostly girls playing them and intentionally did not choose one of those. I didn’t want to play a thing in a tiny, girlie case.
I wasn’t allowed to get rid of Barbie or the baby dolls when I was done with them, which is why they lived in the basement. My parents thought maybe one day I would want them for my daughter. Sure. I guess eventually they gave up on that idea and probably threw that away or donated it somewhere. My parents would sometimes get me things I loved and sometimes not. I had a good collection of Hot Wheels cars, a ton of Star Wars ROTJ stuff like Ewok village, and I enjoyed puzzles and other fun stuff like that. I read a lot too. But I never really took to girl’s toys. Outside I never played girlie games or jumped rope or anything like that. I just did not want to.
The Barbie movie has brought up so much of my past this week, but especially the discomfort of not fitting in later on, when I found out that not everyone was like me. That I didn’t fit in with the girls nor did I fit in with the boys. It was painful. Everything about those years was painful.
In some ways it’s a good things because I missed the memo on Barbie destroying body image. My mom would be the one who did that damage to me, along with my grandparents and extended family who had no problem commenting on my body directly to me and within earshot. But what no one understood was that my body image and self esteem were destroyed in puberty, when it started doing exactly what I did not want to have happen to me. It became the wrong body very quickly. And with that came the expectations and the uncomfortable gaze of males, including my neighborhood friends. Life pretty much sucked and i kept to myself. I got angry. I retreated for years. I started cutting myself to ease the inner pain.
This movie has opened up those wounds. Reminded me of what happened when I had to get rid of all of my toys. Reminded me that I don’t share the childhood of all the former girls around me. My childhood experiences don’t match theirs. And my later experiences don’t match the boys with whom I share younger childhood experiences until I was shut out of their world too.
I live in the nether by myself. I know other people similar me but they heard the messaging and they tried to comply and were moderately successful. I don’t know of anyone else who knew they didn’t fit the mold and whose parents forcefully tried to make them be someone they weren’t. Just me. I wish I had been encouraged to take pride in my uniqueness because it’s so hard for me to do that now. All I feel is loneliness. Sure, I can talk to anyone about Gen X culture and the toys that were big. Sometimes I can bond with guys about early childhood toys and that feels nice. But it’s rare. I don’t feel comfortable opening up to many people about how different I really am. But reading all the hype and assessment on the social implications of Barbie and the movie shows me again and again that statements like “Every little girl who played with her…” just don’t apply to me. Yes, I “played” with her but honestly she had a much bigger impact on my brother who thoroughly enjoyed the naked chests of Barbie later on. She’s just another symbol of what is different about me and what makes people hate me. Why couldn’t I just learn to love who I was expected to be? Why couldn’t I just follow along with everyone else and love Barbie?
I’m not interested in making kids trans or spreading some misunderstand gender ideology. I just want to stop feeling like I’m living a lie and I can be the gender I am inside my head. Sure my DNA will always say one thing and if some person sees my bones hundreds of years from now, they’ll see how I was born but honestly what does that matter? Why does it matter to anyone else what I do with my own body? Especially because the only options I see are to live genuinely…or not live at all. Pretending that I’m fine with what I “should” love being continues to slowly destroy me from the inside out. Some days it feels hopeless. There’s so much I want to do soon where I feel like I can’t change my name just yet. But there are things in the distance where I feel like I need to have matching names and what if the name change takes too long? I can’t buy plane tickets in a name I might not have a year from now, but I also can’t buy plane tickets in a name that may have little to no supporting data.
It was just a movie and it’s unraveling me again, so soon after I just got myself together after a year and a half of feeling miserable and sad about what wasn’t, what could never be, and what I was forced to endure. I am tired, so tired.
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