Sarah Haskins is insightful and hilarious.
Contributors to Women's Voices For Change have been thinking about Barbie too.

Laura Baudo Sillerman has an essay about Barbie's 50th here.

Dr. Pat Allen talks about Barbie and shopping with her daughter in law.

Re: the Pat Allen piece--Yay! Rich ladies go shopping for overpriced, person-of-size-biased designer clothes that fit their perfect bodies! And they buy a lot! And wonderful mother-in-law Pat has her very own Barbie (instead of, you know, a real daughter-in-law). Seriously?

I had a Barbie who was supposed to be a mom. Her pregnant belly was a magnet that stuck to her so that you could remove it and put the baby inside. More often than not, my friends and I would have her give birth to a baby that was fully clothed. In hindsight it felt . . . weird.

I always cut Barbie's hair and tried to turn her into a soldier launching into a battle. Fuck Barbie, she made me feel insecure about my dark skinned looks.

i always made all the barbies have sex with each other. ha!

i don't think i ever aspired to be her though, i always really liked to play with them because they had cool clothes and because they smelled soooo good. i still kind of like them... i guess its my guilty pleasure.

Nylon Magazine had an interesting article on barbie's 50th birthday. it was kind of like sarah haskins approach but without the sarcasm.

Dude, my Barbies had fucking orgies.

I thought my sister's and I were the only ones who did this. We would shave their heads, mark on their bodies or disfigure them in other ways. We were not allowed to have male dolls because my mother thought it would send the wrong message. However, my female Barbies had sex with each other, fought each other and would always end up meeting a devastating end. There wasn't a Barbie I owned that didn't die in a horrible way.

Okay, we all need to share our crazy Barbie memories. My favorite was my cousin and I tying her Barbies and Kens to the dog chain and tossing them over the sea wall so they could "bungee jump". It was fun until Ken's leg fell off. Then I'm sure there was some sort of surgery to reattach it.

I had a ton of Barbies as a kid, including several of the ones featured in this short (Olympic Gymnast Barbie and Troll Barbie, I'm looking at you). Except for Gymnast Barbie (which I always played with more like an action figure, given the then-novelty of her flexible joints), none of my Barbies stuck with the jobs or hobbies originally ascribed to them. Their lives were very similar to the soap operas I used to watch through slitted eyes while my babysitter thought we were napping. I had one of the original-style Barbies that had been my mom's and she was the catty, elegantly dressed "villain" of the Barbie soap opera.

My Barbie play-house was always pristene, however. Beyond the soap opera aspect the fun in the dolls for me was in their potential as "building" toys. Swapping around outfits, making houses out of weird locations (under my bed, in cabinets, in the vehicle toys my brother and I had), etc. was weirdly related to the play I did with blocks, Lincoln Logs, and Legos, and I'd often incorperate the two (especially since my play-house was of the "fold and fun" variety with a lot more than "some" assembly required). Looking back on it it's depressing to realize that--as a doll whose clothes you are encourraged to change--Barbie was one of the few "tactile" toys aimed at my demographic beyond different kits that you could use to make different bits of jewelry or accessories.

i once got a ken and cried. i wanted barbie.

My little brother ripped the legs off my Ken doll and I really wanted a new one. Instead, my Dad built Ken a wheel chair and installed an elevator in my Barbie mansion to make it handicapped accessible. Then I pretended that Ken had his legs blown off in Vietnam.

Ahhh, memories.

For a really long time I thought that I was the only one who made her Barbies have sex with Ken &/or each other.
I cut the hair of a few and made them look very 80's punk and there was this one Ken I had that I covered in scars and tattooes and he was the villain. Usually, he'd stalk the other Barbies in their dreamhouse.
This is a weird thing for me: I had blonde hair when I was little and I have blue eyes but I never wanted the blonde and blue-eyed Barbies. I always wanted her friends, so I had a Black one, the Hawaiian one with the color-change bathing suit, and a whole bunch of red-heads and brunettes. I had a few of the blonde ones but the not-Barbie Barbies always seemed more special. Also, my Ariel and Prince Eric dolls lived with my Barbies. I loved her red hair.

oh my god, I totally had Troll Barbie. I completely forgot she existed!

I loved my Barbies. I never wanted to look like Barbie because when I was little, being an adult felt so far off that I didn't really think about what I would look like. Most of the time, playing barbies with my friends would end up us picking out outfits and building homes for them for the entire afternoon, then actually playing for five minutes before my mom called me and told me to come home. Once my friend and I attached barbies to the ceiling fan with scrunchies and turned it on full-blast... good times.

I recognized almost all of those Barbies. How sad.

And I thought I was the only one who did Barbie mutilations! I used to give her bondage clothes using electrical tape, haircuts to make her punky, and after one Passover, I turned my Ken doll into Moses, with a huge black beard of sharpie scribbles and a stick broke off from the backyard. I also turned my barbies into Brian Froud style fairies, making outfits for them using white tissue paper and big vats of food coloring, painting their skin. Or else dying their hair using my dad's shoe polish or mom's hair dyes.
Good times. Good times.

I used to give my barbies to my older brother. He nailed them to trees along a path through the woods, with them pointing the way. It was fun.

In HS, a friend thought it would be totally hilarious hang a McDonald's toy barbie from the rear-view mirror of my car. Not because I would be upset...but because it seemed like something I would do.

He was right.

Poor strangled barbie was hanging in my car until it went to the junk yard 8 years later. She had been 'decorated' a bit by various passengers though...

Wow...along with everyone else, I definitely thought I was alone with the Barbie sex.

I had the Shamu Barbie, except mine had brown hair. Though now she's bald because I cut all her hair off after it got gross in the bathtub. (Scuba Barbie is meant to swim, right?)

Other than a few that got sold in garage sales or thrown out because my mom felt they were too grotty, many of my Barbies fell victim to my pre-teen and teen science experiments, including a 10th grade chemistry product on potassium. Poor, poor announcer Barbie learned the hard way why you don't play with matches.

Mad props to my mom though, as she would only let my sister and me have Barbies that had ambition -- scuba divers, veterinarians, astronauts, etc.

My Barbie didn't really bother with all that sex and work stuff. Instead, since she was one of my only human(-ish?) toys, she got to be the superhero that zoomed around and flew! Driving cars was for less superpower-inclined toys.

I had a highly prized (by me at least) Indian Barbie, complete with sari. All I did was keep her looking pretty. Now I look back and wonder how much of my fascination with her was the budding sociologist in me wanting to learn about other cultures, and how much was just basic colonialism and me not understanding cultural appropriation and eroticization of "the other." Somewhere in the mix is also the fact that she was one of the few brown-haired barbies I could find.

My sister, in retrospect, was cooler than I was- her Barbies were always narrowly escaping natural disasters. I remember coming home one day to find all the Barbies attached to a jump rope so they appeared to be climbing up the bannister of our front steps. When questioned, my sister told us all that they were escaping a volcanic eruption.

My sisters and I did the sex thing with our barbies, making them have sex with Kens, with each other, putting on strip shows. One of my sisters had an MC Hammer doll (complete with purple parachute pants and shades) and I remember walking into the play room and seeing that my male cousin had stripped him and all the barbies and put MC Hammer in the barbie convertible with all the barbies around him. Then he sent them all flying down the stairs to their deaths.

I recall there being a barbie death camp too (again, set up my cousin), where we devised different ways of killing the barbies, from hanging to getting trampled by My Little Ponies.

All my barbies ended up in one or more of these situations: Bald, dismembered, melted, or caught in the space between the walls from when we were remodeling.

Nobody else played Barbie Hammer? You know, where you swing 'em around by the hair and then let go, and see whose flies the farthest?

We also played "Avalanche" in the sandbox. I don't remember whether or not she escaped or perished.

Did anyone else have the Barbie dreamhouse from the 80's? The one with the elevator. I loved pulling the elevator up as high as it would go and then slamming it down.
I also had the Barbie ice-cream maker that made horrible horrible ice-cream.

When I was younger , I shied away from "girly" toys. As a kid I had a doll phobia and still can't bring myself to turn my back on one.

I don't remember who gave it to me (certainly not my mom, who was officially Against Barbie), but I had one of those Barbies that was a giant head you put makeup on. There were gaudy blue, green, and purple eye shadows and pink and red lipsticks. I remember smearing all the makeup colors all over the face because that was WAY MORE FUN than carefully applying it to eyelids and lips. Then I would grab the thing by the hair and start swinging it around and throwing it on my bed repeatedly. I don't think I had any regular Barbies.

For the most part, I much preferred toys and stuffed animals that weren't human, such as Smurfs, teddy bears, dinosaurs, and puppies. I did the usual anthropomorphic stuff - played school and house and army (complete with military rankings explained by my dad), made them loving and cuddly sometimes and other times set up hunting and fighting campaigns and had them attack each other (this was usually done with the dinosaurs). My brother had tons of Matchbox cars and action figures that I dropped off 'cliffs' and smashed into each other and into walls.

Judging from the other stories posted, it seems like kids tend to play the same games (exploring violence, sex, adventure, etc.) no matter what kind of toy it is - girls who had Barbies did it with Barbies, girls like me, who didn't have Barbies, did it with other types of dolls/creatures/cars.

Oh wow, some of these Barbie stories are hilarious. It almost makes me wish I had had one.

I played with my Barbies exactly how the commercials intended me to. I had two - a vintage one passed down from my mother, and another more modern one... I don't remember what she did in particular. I dressed them both up in different outfits. I also had Stacy and Ken, and I had this pink wheelie suitcase that had all of their stuff in it. I was never more enamored with Barbie than with any of my other toys though. I used to read to her and my other stuffed animals. It was probably pretty precious in retrospect.

I have to say that this video was really great!! Plus, I am always trying to show things to my younger brothers about feminism and after showing both of them this video. They were both talking about it to their friends and talking about how they think its a bad image that Barbie puts across to young girls. They also mentioned that they would pick better toys for their young daughters! Hey, it's a start!!!

i have a whole collection of barbies from my childhood. i would not take any money for it. I would like to get a this collection book. i will have to find one. silver charms