Thank you! I had copied and pasted this from a blog I wrote, which was why the ”;)” is still in there… it was just an informal blog I was writing, but you’re right, there is no need for that. I had started writing and didn’t expect for it to turn into such a long, involved story. I will definitely redraft and polish it a bit. Glad you enjoyed it, thanks for the comments!
Humor/Satire / The Thing We Did to Our Barbies (Analysis)
I spent my evening at the Junius Family Residence, a homeless shelter in Brooklyn, helping coordinate an upcoming Read-A-Thon for the resident children (happening on the morning of 8/8, ask me for details!), and I struck up an unexpected conversation with a mother of 2 children there. She expressed concern about her 8 year-old daughter’s mistreatment of her Barbie dolls. We’re talkin' ripped-off heads, necks covered in red magic marker or lip gloss to make the scene even more gruesome, and the then-headless, bloodied body wrapped in string and lassoed around her head as she runs through the park, screaming.
“I know she's been taking all the changes in our lives kinda hard, and I just worry that the way she treats these dolls is more than just child's play.” The mother explained, “I mean, that's how serial killers get started; they start with toys, then pets, and then they move on to people. I don't have money for a psychiatrist. Look at me, I can't even pay rent. I'm just worried about her. I don't know what to do.”
You can always count on me for an inappropriate response to any given situation because I started howling in laughter at the sight of the freckled, frizzy-haired little angel playing dominatrix with her plastic slaves, hurling them around her head and chucking them against the walls. Almost any little girl who played with Barbies as a child was complicit in their torture (just don't ask Cheney, he'll deny it- ha!). Don't believe me? Ask the nearest female if she indulged in a little S&M with Barbie. The vast majority of us have. It's almost a rite of passage as a young girl. Sure, some of us went to slight extremes with it, but that's another post for another day.
Anyone who says that little boys are destroyers and girls are nurturers ought to take a look at her dresser drawer full of bare-chested, headless, melted, burned, disfigured bodies. Admit it. We all had them ;)
I was a stuffed animal and random, inanimate object kind of girl. I LOVED and cared deeply for every stuffed animal I owned. They were my better half, my sole comfort. I would hyperventilate when they went missing, freak out and perform CPR whenever I'd wake up to realize that one had suffocated under my weight during the night. Teddy Ruxpin and Glo-Worm made my world revolve; I would have taken bullets for them, had someone been loony enough to shoot at a 9 year old. I also considered the bathroom sink and a heavy iron skillet hanging above the stove my other best buddies- but not for reasons you might think!
But Barbie? Barbie was disposable. Barbie was unrelatable. She wasn't soft, squishy, and vulnerable like a teddy bear. She didn't absorb your tears, blood, or drool. She didn’t look at you with giant, pleading eyes, promising to love you unconditionally. Barbie was a bitch. A back-stabber. A man-eating whore. Barbie had everything she could possibly ever want, but she still wasn’t satisfied; she wanted more. She had the Corvette, but she wanted the party caravan. She had the mini pool, but she wanted the larger, inflatable version. She had the black boots and red mini-dress, but what she really wanted those blue pumps and that exorbitant evening gown. And that smug little look on her face? Well, someone had to wipe it off.
I don’t know what it was, but there was something about Barbie that made it easy for us to mutilate her beyond recognition, humiliate her even further, discard her, and then beg our parents and grandparents for another, only to repeat the whole scenario. All in the name of good, harmless fun, of course.
Beheading. I knew there wouldn’t be any turning back, that they’d never have a neck after it was all said and done, but it was a compulsory behavior. I just couldn’t help myself. That “pop”, that little release of suction brought me great satisfaction. Any new Barbie brought into the group had to be initiated by decapitation on my command. Sometimes I’d just yank the sucker off. Other times, my sister and I would get a little more creative... ya know, make a game out of it. We’d use the door to the old Toyota as a guillotine, though it’d take take 3, 4, 5 slams of the car trunk before a successful execution. Sometimes we’d make a game show out of it: Who Can Snap the Head Off Barbie Without Using Their Hands? We’d throw them across the room, down to the floor, and slam them against walls, hoping the head would flip off on it’s own. It was more fun to see a head flying aimlessly through the air… through no fault of our own ;)
Of course, after the initiation, they all became our eternal slaves, or “no-necks”, as we called them. In order for the heads to stay on after they’d been hacked off, their heads had to be squished waaaaay down to the shoulders. The few fully-necked Barbies we had left, which were only intact because my sister wouldn’t allow me to fulfill my Supreme Duty, ridiculed the "no-necks" to no end, which started many epic fights… and ended in yet more “no-necks”.
No Barbie was complete unless her hair had been cut, curled (and subsequently singed off), dyed with expired food coloring, and covered in Sharpie tattoos. Many of them became the little punks my grandmother wouldn’t allow me to be. It is to Barbie that I owe my fleeting, but fervent passion for hairstyling. Braids, crimps, up do’s, we spent many afternoons wasting hand soap and mousse on doll hair. One doll’s hair ended up a singular, unmanageable knot, so matted, like one giant dreadlock, so we dubbed her “Crackhead Barbie”. She became the recipient of many gang bang sessions with Ken, the Troll dolls, and Cabbage Patch Kids, and was always the featured dancer whenever the rest of the barbies decided to hit up the strip club.
I remember taking a nail and hammer and driving a hole into each side of their heads so I could stick life-sized earrings into their empty skulls, which would dangle below their waists. I thought it looked hot. The nail and hammer trick didn’t work so well for the vagina, though, as that part wasn’t hollow. And their clothes never remained intact. Somehow, no matter what outfit it was, it was always sexier if it was in two (or three, or four) mangled pieces.
Barbie opened our eyes to sex. Straight sex, gay sex, lesbian sex, hell, even bestiality. At some point, I had found myself without a Ken doll to satiate Barbie's desires. One Ken was missing, and the other was missing a head due to passionate lovemaking (or maybe just a routine initiation ritual). Barbie, being the horny slut she was, demanded a worthy sex partner, so we spent days performing a sex-change operation on Crackhead Barbie. She needed the money, what can I say? It mostly involved chopping off her chunk of hair, and “sanding” down her breasts on the sidewalk. At some point we became fatigued with the breast-removal process and debated using the flat-chested Skipper doll instead. Skipper was too short to play the man, as were the Troll dolls, so we went ahead and used a square-boobed, A-cup, Crackhead Barbie. Grandma walked in on a hot and heavy lesbo Barbie session and everything went black. Cut to us confined to our bedrooms, reading and writing out passages from our bibles.
Most importantly, I owe my childhood sanity to Barbie. Barbie relieved my anxiety. She suffered all my pent up rage. She was an outlet for the violence and hatred that had once been expressed towards me. While grandma would run to the grocery store, Mandy and I would scramble to gather all the barbie heads, hang them by strings to the blades of the ceiling fan, and turn it on high. They’d fly off, ricochet around the room, sometimes hitting us, sometimes hitting a picture on the wall, and once even breaking the glass to grandmother’s fine china cabinet. But we still pissed our flannels from laughter every time.
I was a foot-chewer. As soft and velvety as those feet were, you’d think they were made for sucking. My mouth waters just thinking about a barbie foot right now. I’d gnaw on their squishy little feet until they were mangled. An oral fixation, I guess. That all stopped when I one day completely chewed her foot off up to her ankle, which revealed a skinny, white rod sticking out. Scared the living crap outta me, though I should’ve realized that barbies had bones, too. Nevertheless, I moved on to chewing off their hands instead.
Sometimes I’d force Barbie into the splits. Not the frontal, but the middle splits. Of course, their legs weren’t made to bend this way so they’d often end up severely disfigured, with snapped hips… or just no legs at all. Being a gymnast back then, I was insistent that the barbies be able to at least do what I could. Long, silky blonde hair? Snazzy car? Cute little red dress? Bright blue eyeshadow up to your brow line? Well, try and do the side-splits, you plastic, perfect bitch!!!
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thesnoopyone reviewed Version 1 -
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natalie272 reviewed Version 1 -
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Wipes away the tears of laughter
Wow, I think I just wet my flannels.
That was the most hilarious piece I’ve ever read! The stories are so true! They are actually a lot more sadistic than me and my sister, but nevertheless, the hilarity is immeasurable! You tell a story well, that is easily related to and delivers with fantastic comedic timing. The funniest part would have to be ‘Crackhead Barbie’. I think I almost fell off my chair. And when Crackhead Barbie got the sex change, coz hell she needed the money… I seriously lost the plot. Me and my sister had this old Barbie that we chopped off all her hair and dyed it brown… and she was a ‘no-neck’ also and she was kinda fugly, so we always dressed her in brown and she was the maid for all the other barbies LOL! I can’t say there was any gang-bangs – sounded like crackhead barbie had all the fun! Oh yeah, and I also chewed on the hands… mmmyummy. Fantastic read, I can’t wait to read more of your comedic stories in future :-)
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amber86 reviewed Version 1 -
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This is hilarous. I swear I was almost in tears; some from laughter, the rest from reliving my own Barbie toture days. You really captured how something that looks so sadistic to adults was perfectly normal to kids.
As far as critique goes, I don’t have much to say except I’d leave off the ;) at the end of the sentences where they are placed. The peice is already funny and clever, you don’t need it.
The other thing is that you might want to think about tying in another scene with the mother and daughter that you have at the start, it might just bring it all back together nicely.
Very enjoyable and laugh out loud funny.
adelapaz reviewed Version 1 -
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Use words for numbers instead of the numbers themselves. Cute short story but watch out for the run on sentences, there are quite a few. Also, the story has promise but not sure what the aim of it is…are you going to eventually add more? Is this more of journal type of writing? In other words, what’s your protagonist’s motive for writing this and sharing this with us.
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