Barbie & Human = Relationship?

Do you like to play with Barbie? I know most of the girls like to play around with their Barbie when they were young. I remembered I had seen a little girl begged her mother to buy her a Hawaiian Barbie. Unlike them, I’m also a girl but hate Barbie and dolls. I did not play with it and afraid of it. I know this is very weird. I keep telling myself that it’s just a piece of plastic, though I felt haunted when I see it. I always avoid being close to it whenever I go to the stores.

I had been trying to get rid of that feeling but I could never success. However, I hated more and more after reading the story “A Real Doll” by A.M. Homes. In her story, A. M. Homes shows an absurdly relation between Barbie and an adolescent boy, Jenny’s brother, a girl who is Barbie’s owner. I was shocked when I was reading “A Real Doll”. In her story, Homes is giving a femaleness view through an image of Barbie. It is clearly presented in the writing. Barbie is portrayed as small and delicate, weak, helpless and controlled by others. Furthermore, she is portrayed as being physically sexual as well. From A.M. Homes’ perspective, Barbie’s physical experience of femaleness is through her sexuality. I wonder if A.M Homes was writing this story from her physical experience as a female and the abuse story line may be coming from the author’s own experience. She may be writing the story from her viewpoint on how women are viewed and treated in our society, how women have been classified by our culture.

In Homes' marvelously demented hands, Barbie talks audibly to the boy and the two become fast friends. They learn one another likes and dislikes; how Barbie hates it when Jenny, the boy's sister, chews on her plastic feet, for instance - and it hurts! Were Barbie human, her feet would be horribly deformed from so much girlish chewing!

Just as the two was seeing each other more often, they soon shared intimate secrets, dating between a Barbie and a boy turned out to romantically intense. And furthermore, they are sexually active as well. I was terrified and thought that the boy was crazy. I could not believe what I was reading.

Going back to the perspective of Barbie, I was very upset about her behavior. I don’t believe that women were so weak, and much helpless that she could not against other, and let people do whatever they like to her.