Barbie, by Kevin

Collecting Barbie dolls is brilliant. Some people say that it is not brilliant, but they are wrong. What collecting Barbie dolls is, is either buying or stealing the various dolls brought out by the Mattel Corporation in their Barbie range. Barbie is a lady doll principally targeted at pre-teenage girls and homosexual men in order to acculturate them to social norms such as shopping, bulimia, and bitching about others, but for some strange reason the doll has also acquired a phenomenal popularity among antiques dealers, bodybuilders, masseuses, interior designers, and librarians. Interestingly, according to statistics, 90 percent of collectors of Barbie dolls and Barbie doll–related ephemera and accessories are women, with an average age of 40 and an I.Q. of over 65, which undermines the stereotypes both of Barbie collectors as weird inverts and of women as lacking business sense and being unreliable with money: A 1965 mint condition Midnight Red Barbie sold for a record £9,000 in Sotheby’s a couple of years ago. If the owner had invested the £1.30 she paid for the original 43 years ago elsewhere, such as in gilts or Krugerrands, it would now be worth £1.45. Which just goes to show, doesn’t it?

There are hundreds of different Barbies, brought out by Mattel in an attempt to meet the insatiable demand for novelty among collectors. Each time a new Barbie is released or “born” (although she is born as a fully grown non-menstruating woman), there is mass hysteria among the collecting sorority, although I do not mean to use the word “hysteria” in a sexist derogatory way to imply that the collectors’ minds are in some way dominated by their wombs and that the birth of Barbie in some way represents for them an irrational opportunity to revive their own failing fecundity or else to fill a yearning hole in their lives formed by the absence of their own flesh-and-blood children. On the contrary. This hysteria is much more like the bloodlust of crazed, one-breasted, Amazonian she-warriors determined to dominate the ultracompetitive, cruel, and unforgiving Barbiesphere, as the world of Barbie collecting is known. Besides, if you have been doing mathematics for any length of time, you will have worked out that one in ten of those hysterical collectors are men, and men do not have wombs, so how would you account for their berserkery? It is not like Barbie is a real lady and they are mad after her because they want to have sex with her. Barbie is nothing like a real lady. For one thing, you cannot splay her legs like you can with a real lady. Also, if you lick her between her legs, she tastes of polyethylene resin, not fish sweat and wee. And I have the Miss Nude Universe Barbie.

The great thing about Barbie doll collecting is the Barbiefest, which is the bi-annual get-together of all the leading Barbie collectors, distributors, accessories designers, marketers, and clinical obsessives, who gather in a location usually somewhere in Brighton (but also once, and notoriously, in Milton Keynes, which was supposed to have kitsch value but which also coincided with an MK Dons home match, with the result that the fest was packed beyond capacity and human endurance) to share information, compare collections, swap gossip, generate unsubstantiated rumours, exchange phone numbers and photographs of one another dressed up as Barbie (the men) or Ken (the women), and get horribly drunk during the daytime and then start a fist fight outside the convention centre with a small girl and her parents over the significance of Batgirl Barbie.* Attendees also get the chance to bid for rare and highly coveted limited or special editions, such as Valentino Barbie, Space Walk Barbie, Abu Ghraib Barbie, and Ladyboy Ken. It is almost impossible to put a price on these items before they come to auction. This is because, by definition, an auction involves putting a price on items. Afterwards, it is much easier. Usually they go for about £350.

During the many years that I have been collecting Barbies, I have had many fascinating and unusual encounters with a diverse range of people from all walks of life and involved in all manner of professions, trades, and businesses. That has nothing to do with collecting Barbies, but I mention it just so that you know that I am not one of those sad, deluded, emotionally stunted shut-ins who comprise the majority of Barbie doll collectors, Barbiefests notwithstanding. No. I am one of the sane clever ones who regard the process as purely a business enterprise, a sound investment option when everyone else is putting their money in the bank or in property, like the fools they are, reading their newspapers and listening to so-called financial experts and advisers on the radio wireless and television and following the herd like the dumb animals they are. I fully expect that, sometime soon, western capitalism will self-destruct, poverty, pestilence, disease, and despair will cascade through society in an ever-accumulating vortex of horror, and all that will be left of civilization will be me and my Barbies, concealed in my secret underground lair out in the woods behind the campus. And when everyone else is dead and decomposing in the fields or in their cellars or on the toilet, it will then be down to me and my Barbies to start the human race all over again, from scratch. And a good thing it will be too. This time we will be able to get it right.




(Kevin MacPherson is Halifax Building Society Chair of Cognitive Dissonance at the University of Reading and Writing.)





* See also Geraldine Buttock’s article “Hol(e)y Unacceptable! Batgirl Barbie: Cashing in on Crass Consumerism or Commenting Ironically on Career Options for Women in the 21st-Century Post-Postmodern Marketplace?” in the forthcoming issue of The American Journal of Barbie Studies, University of Minnesota Press.