This is all fine, sunny American world-building. They are tiny-waisted and fashionable, and her parents are robotic but still porn-star hot, something a toaster might masturbate to. Thirty years later, Barbie’s Dreamhouse Adventures (2018-2020) is my older daughter’s favorite show, because the dialogue is zippy and computer-generated Malibu is a place you want to be (if you’re a Republican who likes bright colors, which most children are.)īarbie and her friends solve problems! For example, they once found their way out of an escape room that they’d paid to enter, so that was impressive. When I was little I loved the plastic world of 1980s unreconstructed materialistic Barbie, I ran my fingers over her pink car and her smooth boobs, chaste but still somehow full of an awesome milk. Cut to Jiminy Cricket singing: “When you wish on luxuryyyy, there’s no telling who you’ll beeeee.” I’ve reached out from the predictability of my life and pulled in a piece of fabric from the capricious classes, the callous classes, the drunk, the fun, the mean, the libertine classes- the princesses. I’ve planted a plot point, I’ve put an exotic bulb in the vegetable garden. On the day I wear them, something will happen. Change: the pants promised a change, and even though they cost a stupid amount of money I was scared to walk away from them because everything would be the same, and known, and I want an unknown in my future. I play dress-up at home in these pants that are made in Italy and are cut so beautifully that they change the whole way I move. But I put these pants on in the fitting room and they made me look like my name was Vanessica and I kissed different people every night. Here’s a sad fairytale: One recent bleak winter’s day I bought a pair of comically expensive pants, even though the smart math says I should wear sweat-wicking leggings every day til I die. It’s no distant memory, that feeling-I still long for it, and every retailer knows it. They love it, they feel beautiful, and magical, and I remember feeling that way in my grandma’s dress-up box. Instead, I buy them nonstop princess dresses like I’m trying to betrothe them to a Hapsburg. I used to imagine my household of little girls full of gender-neutral things, hammers and burlap and firefighter suits.
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