Mutilation is Fun

Reporters seem to be surprised that little girls take joy in mutilating Barbie. I thought it was part of the cultural lexicon. Doesn’t everybody know a little girl with a balding, marker made-up Barbie? Why does it always take a University study to wake the media up to the truly horrendous, vital news stories? Apparently, researchers at the University of Bath interviewed the staggering amount of 100 children as part of a study on branding, and found out that girls aged 7 to 11 regularly torture Barbie because she reminds them of their childhoods, which they feel they have outgrown. (Who knew that I would get to 27 and still not really feel like an adult. I guess that explains why Barbie makes me angry.)

Or maybe it was waking one horrible morning to find the suitcase where my Barbies lived was a seething mass of plastic carnage. The decapitated heads and naked torsos were mixed in with the clothes, arms and legs sticking out at odd angles, creating a twisted Barbie orgy. It was the work of Chucklehead, my pesky little brother, who obviously didn’t get enough joy from destroying his own toys. Too traumatized to sort out the wreckage, I threw away all of the Barbies and never got to the stage where I decided that Barbie needed a ride on the microwave carousel.

Don’t think that Barbie doesn’t have it coming. I mean, she’s got that Dream House in Malibu, the pink Porsche and an effeminate male to take care of her. (You’d have to be pretty naive to believe that anything was going on between Barbie and Fairy Prince Ken. Though, God knows every little girl with a Barbie and Ken tried.) She has every career known to humankind and at least as much money as Oprah. We won’t even go into the endless wardrobe. Why, she has everything from Penniless Urchin to Queen Victoria in full regalia, to deranged Clovis Streetwalker. She never gains weight, she’s always ready for high heels, she never has to worry about putting on makeup or about her nipples showing, and her corn-silk hair is always shiny and manageable, until that fateful day that her owner/operator comes at her with a pair of scissors and a curling iron.

If I were the parents of one of those blossoming, young artists, I would be a little worried. Record companies went after children for downloading music; I won’t be surprised when Mattel (TM) announces a suit against teeny-bopper Barbie mutilators. My stance is, once that plastic Aryan princess is paid for, it’s no longer the sole property Mattel (TM), and owners of said Barbies, should be able to blenderize her all they want. Though I’d imagine it would be harder to make a Barbierita than to set her on fire, which, according to my Internet sources, is pretty difficult. As far as Mattel (TM) is concerned, I never ever tried burning Barbie at the stake for killing off the villagers' cattle and withering their crops.