Evangelical Barbie?

Anyone else remember the Heart Family?

We were almost asleep a few nights ago, chatting about the Barbie movie coming soon to our favorite neighborhood indie theater. I was telling my husband that I want to go see it again, as the first time I was SUPER jet-lagged after my flight home from Rwanda the previous day, and I may have dozed off during some of the now much-discussed highlights.

Photo by Sandra Gabriel on Unsplash

Somehow the conversation turned to the weird and wild intersections of feminist and conservative objections to Barbie.

You know, for example, some feminists worry that Barbie and her literally impossible bazooms perpetuate unrealistic ideals about female bodies that further objectify women.

Meanwhile, some of the evangelical moms I grew up around (including my own) had a different set of worries, which went something like this:

Barbie was immodest. Barbie was materialistic (rather than focused on serving the Lord). Barbie was unchaste!

(Whatever the Barbie movie might have hinted about the two of them not really knowing what to do with their non-parts, we all knew exactly what those hot-pink stilettos were intended to make Ken think about.)

I was telling my husband that while I was allowed to play with my friends’ Barbies when I went over to their houses, in ours, my mom steered clear of Barbie in favor of her sister, Skipper. I guess she was more innocent and wholesome (no bazooms yet)?

So my husband said, “Yeah, I guess there wasn’t really an Evangelical Barbie, was there?”

And I was like, “No…Oh but WAIT, there kind of WAS!”

Enter the Heart Family, circa mid-1980s. As I recall, I was unhappily Barbie-less, trying to settle for Skipper, when somehow Mrs. Heart came into my life.

She was like Barbie’s sensible older sister: high neckline, brunette instead of blonde, definitely not shacking up with Ken, and married with a couple of toddlers in the back of the Heart Family’s practical family car.

As this article from the Museum of Play put it in 2013, the Heart Family was about FAMILY:

“Although no one ever mentioned where the Hearts came from, nor were the family members ever given first names, the resulting focus emphasized the family as a whole, not the individual characters themselves. The lack of names made the figures slightly more generic, encouraging children to select their own names when playing with the figures, perhaps even drawing upon their own family for inspiration. In doing so, children related to the characters in a way that they didn’t with Barbie or Ken.”

When my Mrs. Heart came along - probably sometime around the late 80s, when I was still in grade school - I was excited to have a new doll, and she seemed like a definite upgrade from sad little Skipper. But she wasn’t Barbie.

Either way, it wasn’t long before I outgrew all of it and no longer cared which Mattel dolls I was handing off to my younger sisters.

Now I’m a mom - to boys who’ve never had any interest in any of this and are too old for dolls even if they did.

But if I did have kids who were into Barbie, I imagine I’d hand the doll over with a warning: This is just for fun. This is not real life. You don’t have to look like this, and please don’t be scammed into thinking that you do.

Just be you. Get extensions and wear heels if that’s fun for you. Or chop your hair if that makes you happier. Please do follow the lead of all the creative, brainy Barbies over the years and pursue your professional dreams.

And as the mom of a teen who’s weeks away from his drivers’ license: it’s also okay to take a page from Mrs. Heart’s playbook.

Personally, I’ve never wanted a Corvette - although I can’t deny that Barbie’s is really sweet. But I’ll never regret the very brief period of my life when I felt truly fortunate to buckle two little ones in the back of a sensible family car.

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A final note: My book, The Exvangelicals, with more reflections like this, is available for pre-order now. Pre-orders are hugely helpful in building support for and interest in the book, so thank you to those of you who already have pre-ordered or are about to. More details here!