# 24. In Which Midge, Barbie's Pregnant BFF, is Aborted.

My Own Private Feminism: Part 3 (of 5)

The only Barbie I ever owned was a ballerina, blonde and blue-eyed with a frilly white tutu and a tiara stuck permanently in her head. My ballet teacher, unhappy with how I had worn my hairband told me as she adjusted it: “We come here to look more pretty, not more ugly!” I was nine, and that was how I broke up with ballet - and Barbie.

If like me, your discomfiture with ‘Barbie as a feminist icon’ has been threatening to disappear into The Great Pink Fart released by the Barbie movie (she broke 50’s gender stereotypes, Barbie for President etc), here’s yet another tidbit that may help clear the air: Midge - the preggers Barbie - was cancelled, not because she had no vagina, ovaries, or uterus, but because she had no husband.

Midge was introduced in 1963 (the same year Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking The Feminine Mystique came out) to dispel the idea that Barbie looked like a sex toy. Odd, because Midge looked like… a pregnant sex toy. Which was not in itself odd because Barbie and Midge were modelled on the Bild Lilli doll which was based on a German comic strip about “a post-war gold-digging buxom broad who got by in life seducing wealthy male suitors”.

Lilli the doll sold in adult-themed toy stores and tobacco shops and caught the attention of Ruth Handler on her travels. Handler grabbed a few Lillis on her way back home to California where she co-founded Mattel (the first company to ever directly advertise to children). In 1956, Barbie was born in the USA, manufactured in East Asia and hardwired into the minds of little girls all over the world. Sometimes, and where appropriate, she is available in hijab.

Barbie’s sex doll ancestor, Lilli and inventor, Ruth Handler/ MessyNessy

Let us never cease from thinking—what is this ‘civilization’ in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them?

— Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938)

Though ‘Wedding Day Midge’, complete with husband Alan, made an appearance at some point, she was - fetus and all - eventually aborted in 1967, soon after the first oral birth control pill became available and just before the historic Roe Vs Wade judgment was announced by the US Supreme Court. Barbie was right there at the start of Feminism’s Second Wave and boy did she ride it. Too bad Midge wasn’t around to see. I think we would have learned more about what was coming for 90’s women from her than from all the rest put together: Hello skinny, supermom-CEO with thigh-gap, you rich, successful, happy MILF with a full head of hair!

I completely understand why Mattel loves Barbie so much. She’s a cash cow. But why are grown women in their 40s and 50s - the ones who have suffered most deeply from the beauty standards and social expectations that Barbie exemplifies - having sleepovers in pink pyjamas and pulling their daughters into the abyss with them? As if it’s not weird enough that a ‘career woman doll’ that claims to make a departure from traditional ‘baby dolls’ that trained girls ‘only’ for motherhood can literally not stand on her own two feet.

Fun facts: Anatomically speaking, it’s said that if Barbie were a human, she wouldn’t have space in her torso to fit vital organs let alone a uterus, and wouldn’t have enough body fat to menstruate. Also: Mattel recently released a $55 vintage Midge reproduction doll, giving collectors/entrepreneurs selling the original 1963 model for hundreds of dollars online a run for their money. It’s a doll-eat-doll world out there!

In other Barbie movie news: A few days ago it was reported that this was the first-ever film directed by a woman to hit the billion-dollar mark, drawing $459m in the US and $572m internationally (so far). Zugzwang! Market values - the only kind that makes a splash these days - have taught us well. Money is Power. Women have had little access to either, historically speaking, and so, therefore, obviously, Greta Gerwig is Mother Goddess. Feminism Weds Capitalism to Smash The Patriarchy. Or as Missy Elliot said best:

Girls, girls, get that cash
If it's nine to five or shaking your ass
Ain't no shame, ladies do your thing
Just make sure you ahead of the game.

Women have been making babies since the beginning of time. Mother Goddesses Left to Right: Tlazolteotl, Aztec goddess of sexuality, vice, purification, lust, and filth; Venus von Willendorf, Paleolithic fertility deity, Lajja Gauri, Hindu goddess associated with abundance, fertility, and sexuality; Midge, Barbie’s preggers BFF now available without a vagina, ovaries, or uterus, courtesy, Mattel!

Ain’t no hood like Motherhood.

Before Gen Z was born, their mothers were told that attachment parenting and extended breastfeeding were best and also that the community support and family structures that it took to achieve this without killing them were disintegrating. Also, mass education was based on an industrial model - a dinosaur that could not prepare their kids for the technological disruption that was coming. In addition, environmental collapse and nuclear annihilation were imminent. And so, along with freshly-minted primates, Gen X birthed what had been gestating since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution: The Age of Anxiety.

An idea reflected in the thoughts of J. Krishnamurti, Mark Vonnegut, Aldus Huxley, Henry Miller and more.

When my boys and their classmates were not yet five years on the planet, they knew the difference between ‘good touch’ and ‘bad touch’. The data said that all children, male and female (at least up to a certain age) were equally vulnerable to predators. Not only that, we now must slip between the pages of Good Night Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, conversations about gender identity, sexual orientation, race, caste, and class privilege. ‘Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better’ said Maya Angelou. She was right. We were listening.

But we were charged with helicoptering and coddling. Hovering and smothering. Not giving the kids room to breathe, to grow, to learn from their mistakes. All true. But consider the options presented to us in the ‘post-truth’ environment we were bequeathed. On one side the not-so-wise old men and women of the global village that had over-protected their daughters, unprotected their sons, wrecked the planet and caused untold suffering to themselves and others by ignoring their mental and physical health. And on the other, the nebulous ‘Them’ of the Parenting Section with the population of a small country.

Each generation tends to see the one after it as weak, whiny, and lacking in resilience.

- Johnathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind

A few years ago, my older son - about eleven at the time - asked me genuinely perplexed: but why do men think they are better than women? To him, surrounded by females who loved him, protected him, fed him, read to him, taught him cool stuff, and not a single creep among the men closest to his heart, misogyny was a mystery. I mumbled. I stumbled. I applied the Feynman Technique (if you can’t explain it to a child you don’t understand it yourself) and I realised it was a mystery to me too.

Yes, I had long accepted that misogyny existed, that we had to Smash The Patriarchy through acts personal and political but I could not see it clearly. I knew it was there only from the effect it had on everything else. How it sucked everything into its gravity and absorbed all the light. Misogyny was a black hole. But what giant stars had collapsed for such an abyss to have formed in the first place? And why - considering Women’s Liberation, the most successful social movement in the world affecting 50% of the population - was it not taught at school? Could it be for the same reason that Climate Science isn’t either? Because by and large, schools exist to create a literate, obedient workforce that will oil The Machine, not an enlightened global community that will topple it?

This rabbit hole took me back to the first time that as a child I slammed into the Status Quo. To quote myself: “I was not taught feminist rage, and I was not shown misogyny. I did not read about The Patriarchy. I felt it first-hand.” It stirred me from my stupor and towards my parent’s bookshelves where I met Betty Friedan, Simone De Beauvoir, Shere Hite, Erica Jong et al. My introduction to Feminism sprang from lived experience, my own, and then that of white, middle-class (mostly) American women.

As a product of British colonialism that’s hardly a surprise. Indians with any means make sure their offspring master the English language, and so for me and countless other Indian women, Western Feminism was the gateway that took us on a journey from Betty Friedan through Gloria Steinham to Intersectionality. Our Own Private Off-White Feminism led us right back to ourselves.

I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other… allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.

―Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Around the same time that my son asked me about misogyny, a mom-friend called, distraught. There was something off. Her twelve-year-old son didn’t play Fortnite with the other boys online and constantly sketched - horror of horrors - Niki Minaj! What does it mean? How would this affect his life? What would the other children think? Say? Do? We knew she would have to work hard to make his little world - the one that she could still control - a world in which drawing girls with pink hair is as admired as firing the right weapon for a perfect gunshot to the head in a video game. Their saga continues. He’s holding his ground. She’s the ground beneath his feet. Under the Patriarchy, everyone is under assault. We’re being beaten pink and blue.

We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.

- Gloria Steinham 

But we held each other’s hands and we bumbled through, and soon enough came #MeToo. Now we had to talk early about consent. But how early was early? In utero? On tricycles? At the first hint of moustache? A new fear engulfed us. What if it’s too much too soon? What if it’s not enough? Someone’s fourteen-year-old son was accused of sexual harassment by a female classmate. Someone else’s fifteen-year-old daughter sent her boyfriend a disappearing photo that didn’t disappear. The lines were getting blurry. Who to protect from whom?

A flood of flashbacks: That friendly uncle. That affectionate boss. Those opened doors, that protective arm, that chair pulled out. Were those indignities? Rapey, even? What the hell is going on? How must we teach our boys to be? Parents of sons have ‘the talk’. Birds and bees long flown, now it’s about the ‘icebergs of filth’ that float towards them online. We have been warned by none other than Bille Eilish to protect our children’s chances at real-life intimacy in their real-life future. Conversations thicken. What’s right? What’s left? What’s woke? What’s broke? Modern parenting is a freaking minefield.

Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman-Hughes 1972 and 2014 

Coming Soon to Wit’s End: My Own Private Feminism Part 4: I am tired of labels. I am tired of always watching where I tread. One wrong move and I could be cancelled. Have my leg blown off. I call a family meeting. I look into their eyes. I am what I am. You are what you are. They are what they are. We are not jars of peanut butter. We need no labels. Could the problem be not that there are too few pronouns but that there are too many? We are all equally capable of suffering and equally capable of love. May our Feminism be Humanism. May our pronouns be Us/We.

Read My Own Feminism Part 1 here and Part 2, here.

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If there is something you would like to add to this conversation, feel free to do so in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you :) Tara.