Sometimes a doll is just a doll.Ī small city of tents, trailers and thousands of visitors appears almost every August in the Utah desert to watch cars, motorcycles and anything with wheels rocket across gleaming white sheets of salt at speeds of 400 mph.īut wet weather has forced the cancellation of Speed Week for the second straight year and revived a debate about whether nearby mining is depleting the Bonneville Salt Flats of their precious resource. But I also don’t see them as necessarily damaging to young psyches. Ultimately, I don’t think all those Barbies shaped my daughter’s worldview in any meaningful way. Barbies are hardly “feminist icons,” no matter how hard Mattel marketed President Barbie or Astrophysicist Barbie. I didn’t buy them Barbies just had a habit of walking in the door. “I just thought they were a little bit much – the body shape, then all the clothes.”My own daughter, now well into adulthood, had lots of Barbies: six, to be precise, recently discovered in varying degrees of disarray in a box in the basement.

We were a Barbie-free household.“I didn’t really believe in Barbies,” she said. So, as I often do, I tested my memory in a call to Mom.

I remember, as a kid in the 1960s, playing with Barbies at friends’ houses but not having Barbies of my own. “Barbie” the movie – reviewed here by the Monitor – is really an invitation to think about how we raise our children, and about expectations. It also invites introspection about our own childhoods.

When I tell people a generation younger that I went to the “Barbie” movie, the response is often, “Why?!” To which I respond, “Why not?” What better way to escape the Washington heat – and politics – on a Sunday afternoon in July than with a live-action fantasy about an iconically kitschy, mass-produced doll? Plus, I wanted a good laugh.But I soon discovered there was more to the film than a frothy pink romp through Barbie Land (and beyond) and many jokes at the expense of poor Ken.

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