Elegy For the Bratz Girls
With "Barbie" hitting theaters, a reflection on my preferred playthings
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I literally think I owned only one Barbie doll, and I barely ever played with it. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even like it — I just know that I had one because I was a girl and I loved playing with dolls so my parents bought a Barbie doll for me at some point, because what else are parents supposed to do? Whether or not owning a Barbie was at my own insistence, I know for a fact that I did own one Barbie doll. Maybe even two, but definitely one. I don’t remember what my Barbie looked like or what her name was, or what clothes she wore. She has since faded into near-complete obscurity. When I think of the Barbie doll I owned, I can only see her pretty blank face and slim, blonde, immobile figure discarded on a shelf off to the side somewhere in my room, maybe even up in the attic, so that the real work could take place with the dolls I actually liked.
With Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie nearing its theatrical premiere, the first non-poorly animated, non-direct-to-video Barbie movie starring Hollywood A-listers (and the kickoff to an entire Mattel cinematic franchise), many have been reminiscing on growing up with those iconic little dolls that fueled eating disorders and self-esteem issues everywhere since 1959. Loving Barbies, hating Barbies, destroying Barbies; whether Barbie was a “girlboss” or a “bimbo” (yes, a real argument I had the misfortune of coming across online). Whether you kept your Barbies or gave them away, or passed them down to a daughter, relative, or other small child in your close orbit.
Scrolling past these bits and bobs, I felt left out of a conversation that has defined the childhoods of so many women everywhere. Those long skinny legs, teeny tiny waist, broad shoulders, turkey neck and big ol’ head. But for whatever reason, the image, proportions, and overall “vibes” of the Barbie just didn’t appeal to me as a child. I loved to play with dolls and figurines. I was an imaginative kid, and one of my favorite things to do was to play-act emotionally fraught scenarios and interpersonal relationships for my toys — whether dolls, cartoon figures, or plastic animals — in my room for hours on end. But I found Barbie incredibly boring, a feeling in opposition to the usual complaints in regards to her “extreme” and “unrealistic” build. Barbie was an icon, but nevertheless my interests lay elsewhere.
For you see, those interests could be found in the Bratz dolls — dolls with what some might argue is a more damaging reputation for impressionable young girls than Barbies. Unlike Barbies, which have been around for over 60 years, Bratz stepped onto the scene in the early 2000s. This coincided with an all time low decade for women’s self-image, with the rise of the low-rise to show off bony, assless hips or be called a “beached whale” by PerezHilton.com. Bratz were like Barbies if they did bumps of cocaine and been ahead of the curve on Instagram face. Barbies had notoriously giant heads compared to their frames, but Bratz dolls’ heads were like fucking planets orbiting around the little constellation of their bodies. They had gargantuan filler lips and sultry bedroom eyes coated in heavy makeup; the same little tiny noses as Barbie, but a shorter neck, shorter overall frame, wider hips, and even tinier waist (their male counterparts look like, regrettably, the kind of guys you see on the L train). They looked messy, gaudy, and a bit trashy — the kind of girls Perez Hilton might have made fun of.
And, well, I just loved the look of the Bratz dolls. I owned at least four or five, probably more, of varying looks, styles, and ethnicities. I felt that their clothing choices were more interesting, their looks were more unique and varied, and, as a kid who had an affinity for horror and Halloween, I liked that they appeared a little evil. A little mischievous and naughty — ultimately, of course, they would go on to be harangued for encouraging girls to look and dress promiscuously. But others have argued some positives, that Bratz dolls actually encouraged girls to be comfortable about their sexuality. Additionally, in her essay, “The Triumphs and Drawbacks in How Bratz Dolls Paved a New Path for Femininity and Sexuality,” author Corinne Vient writes “Unlike Barbies, Bratz dolls were not marketed in association with certain homes, families, or careers of any type, and therefore, appeared to have no domestic or professional responsibilities.”
There was definitely something in all that that drew me to Bratz dolls beyond their surface appearance. Along with my lifelong tendency towards the sin of Sloth, appearance-wise, I did feel a certain kinship with Bratz — weirdly, their body type (short legs, big ass, little waist) reflected mine more closely than Barbies did. Though, I didn’t want to necessarily look like Bratz dolls; as a teen and to this day, I never liked wearing a lot of makeup. I don’t prefer to dress very promiscuously, though I dabble. Maybe they encouraged me to feel bad about having a big nose, but then again, literally everything does. Still, I was enthralled by my Bratz dolls, and I thought they looked pretty. I did like how they look. There’s probably something there in my time spent playing with them, making them argue and fight over one another, that rooted into my self-image issues — I won’t act like the Bratz dolls were a bastion of good for my future.
Nevertheless, in my rosy, child memory, in the most basic terms, I preferred Bratz to Barbie because they looked so fucking weird by comparison. Sure, they were unmoored by careers and families — two things that definitely didn’t interest me, in the slightest, as a child. But Bratz dolls looked like real fucking freaks. They were pretty, but they were genuinely monstrous. The wholesome, warm visage of Barbies was so unappealing to me; so bland and flavorless, without texture or true distinction. So homogenized and in the most tedious way. I wanted to play with toys that had some character. And as “Instagram face” as Bratz dolls are, they look 10 times more genuinely mutant, bizarre, and horrifying than Barbies do. They’re heads are swollen, their lips inhuman — their feet are like a men’s size 14. Barbies look like deformed models, but Bratz dolls look like sexpot goblins. Barbie’s formerly conjoined twin that she had kept hidden up in her attic, got out and became a slut. Whatever playing with Bratz may or may not have done to my future self-esteem, they did give me an appreciation for interesting faces. Aware of my own, “harsher” facial features, perhaps that’s also why I gravitated towards Bratz; perhaps they even helped me.
I also think Bratz dolls are at least slightly more honest. Barbies had the gall to hide their vision of how women should look under the innocuous sheen of a cute, smiling, WASP face — a face that symbolized the ideal, wholesome, all-American woman. Modern Barbies are attempting to retcon her overwhelmingly white, blemishless past, and offer children of eclectic backgrounds the chance to play with a doll that actually looks like them. While a noble cause for the present-day (and hard to know if its effects can help much, what with everything else young kids, especially girls, have to contend with during adolescence now), Barbie’s face is still there lurking underneath these diverse variants — regressive tendencies being repackaged and sold as progress. In this way, Barbies are still just as dishonest now as they were back when they were meant to be a paradigm for what women should look like. In the end, Bratz dolls are how we actually turned out.