There were so many, many things to celebrate in this week’s inauguration, but I’m only going to tackle the one dancing on my heart at the moment.
This week, the week Kamala Harris became the first female Vice President of the United States, my daughter asked for “all Barbies” for her birthday.
And, in an unexpected twist in the plot of my life, I am… kind of okay with it.
I wouldn’t have been ten or fifteen years ago. I was in middle and high school during the 90s, which means I swam in the frigid waters of body dysmorphia for my entire adolescence. In the 90s, there were two avenues to female attractiveness: you could weigh 85 pounds, or you could be Salma Hayek, neither of which were available to me for different but equally insurmountable reasons.
In my mind, Barbie was high on the list of places I learned that my body was not the ideal body, that no one was paying $12.99 to pretend they couldn’t find a pair of shorts at American Eagle that didn’t cut off the circulation to their lower legs. I can remember looking at my Barbie’s calves and wondering if those medieval stretching racks were such a bad idea after all.
Also on the list was, well, everything really. Seventeen magazine, The Grind on MTV, Abercrombie catalogs, Fashion Police, every Disney princess created to that point, the crappy misogynistic TV message boards I lurked on, every skincare advertisement accessible in any medium, and anything that aired on the WB.
Cold waters indeed. It wasn’t even that only Barbie-esque women were valued; it was that only Barbie-esque women were seen. In my memory, if women were in the public eye, it was because they were in the entertainment industry, and that made their looks fair game to late-night comedians (except Conan), fashion commentators, magazine columnists, and the rest of us, who stayed afloat by adapting to the temperature.
We all had at least one friend who ate baby food for lunch, right?
So you see that my plan was always to ban Barbie from my house, along with the Disney princess pantheon and the E! channel.
But now here we are. I find myself in 2021 with a five year old daughter and a female Vice President, and the times, they are a-changin’.
We all saw the number of women seated on that inauguration stage and the collective internet celebration of the way they appeared, despite almost none fitting the mold I was trained to aspire to. We’ve seen the all-female communications staff and the potentially record-breaking number of women nominated for cabinet positions in this administration.
And what I haven’t seen, at least in the parts of the internet I visit, is scrutiny of their ages, skin care routines, exercise programs, or waist-to-hip ratios. There’s even less of it than was volleyed at Hillary Clinton a mere four years ago, and I think it’s in large part because there are so many of them.
My daughter may never understand what that means to me and other women my age. I hope she won’t. I hope she will simply grow up surrounded by images of women of all sizes, ages, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. Images of women doing meaningful work that is valued far above the way that they look doing it.
There’s been a lot of talk of the little girls lately, of what our daughters will gain from Kamala Harris and this historic American moment. And undoubtedly, they are gaining a great deal—limitlessness, possibility, self-worth. But the grown women are gaining, too. We need role models as much as our daughters, and in these qualified and diverse women, I’m healing as much as she’s growing.
I’m seeing that my voice belongs, as RBG said, wherever decisions are being made. And that my most valuable or visible years are not behind me because of my age, or ahead of me because of a gym membership.
That brings us back to Barbie. She’s changed, too. There’s still room for improvement, but that’s my daughter’s current Barbie gang up there. For the record, they are packaged as Doctor Barbie, Wildlife Conservationist Barbie, News Anchor Barbie, and Robotics Engineer Barbie.
Three of them are “Curvy Barbies,” which is an obnoxious but necessary filter; if you just type “Barbie” into Amazon, you’re going to get nothing but blondes with scant room for both kidneys for the first several pages.
Just as if you type “political leader” into your cognitive search bar, you’re still likely to get an old white dude first and foremost.
But both are changing. I think if we steer straight ahead, we’ll arrive at a place where we won’t need to search for Curvy Barbies or female leaders at all. They’ll pop up without comment, and my daughter will never need to write a blog post about what she believed she couldn’t do.
Onward.
