It was summer. A summer of Renault 5 without air conditioning or power steering. One of those places that was reached by consulting a voluminous road map or asking by rolling down the window with the crank. The five of us (fathers, daughters and grandmother) went with the windows down. In those times of Transition it was also hot. A lot. And the girls played with dolls. Like now. Although I want to believe that this type of toy no longer understands genres.
Like my cousin and my sister, both older, I had my own Nancy, that mannequin doll that Famosa launched in 1968, the most desired of all. Until that hot summer at the end of the 70s, when I discovered Barbie Superstar on the window of a toy store in Puigcerdà, dressed in a fabulous long pink dress, pink shoes with vertiginous heels and an equally pink ruffled boa.
That marked a before and after in my childhood leisure life, and also in Nancy’s. Because many of us girls surrendered to the more adult figure of Barbie when she arrived in Spain almost twenty years after she was created by Ruth Handler, an entrepreneurial woman and president of Mattel. But that Barbie had little empowerment. Her self-esteem was supported by her statuesque physique and her long blonde hair. She taught us to dress according to the occasion, launching us into a consumerism that still fills our closet. And it is that the past marks, although we do not want to.
Barbie has had no choice but to adapt to the times and Mattel has created dolls dressed as a doctor, a scientist or an airplane pilot in favor of equality, and also Barbies of all colors and sizes. Welcome be the change, not even to reconcile with that doll from our childhood.
But the old image is hard to clean up. That is why now comes a blockbuster film that goes further and that puts its finger on the sore spot of patriarchy. Sarcastic and funny, she shows us how pink and happy a Barbie matriarchy would be. But not even the dolls are so naive. The real world is still sexist and discriminatory. And this is how Margot Robbie’s Conscious Barbie shows us, a film with a protest message and, make no mistake, also a commercial one, because we can now rest easy and give the doll away without regret: today’s Barbie is a feminist. Bright. Like her dresses.
