berenzero:

nicenfroosh:

my story about childhood Barbie toys is slightly different from incognito-jewels.

Like her, as a kid, the Barbie doll’s unrealistic and idealised proportions didn’t actually register with me, I just saw them as toys and dolls, not something I should aspire to be like. I thought it was funny they didn’t have “katjes” (Dutch word for kitty, which I used as a kid for vag… trust me it made for some confusing times when I heard people calling kittens vaginas in the Netherlands… sorry, tangent.) and would get pissed off that they couldn’t stand on their own.

But they also weren’t my first toys of choice. I’d always played with Tonka Trucks, Transformers and Playmobile and Lego. I had Star Wars and Superhero action figures and a bunch of those little Smurfs figurines. I roared obnoxiously around the neighbourhood on my Hulk-themed Big Wheel tricycle, green and purple streamers flying. I’d create sprawling obsatcle courses across my bedroom and send my HotWheels dinky cars down them from the top of my bunkbed. My interest had never even been piqued by the pink drenched aisle of the girl’s toys section in stores.

I was blissfully unaware that my toys were not quite the societal norm for little girls.

Until the day my mom decided to buy me some Barbies. I was 6. She gave me three of them, two blondes and a brunette, each dressed in a fluffy or sparkly pink dress of some sort. I said the obligatory “thank you” but was crestfallen inside. I’d been wanting a G.I. Joe action figure and thought I had left some pretty obvious hints, like clippings from magazines and drawings with I LOVE GIJOE scrawled across them all over the house. I sat and stared at them, picked one up and decided to make the best of them.

After a while I guess my mom decided to check on me so she walked into my room and immediately freaked the fuck out. “WHAT. ARE. YOU. DOING?” she shrieked at me. I was so shocked I just started crying. You see, I had taken the Barbies, chopped off all their hair, drawn all over their faces and clothes with black and green marker and had been melting the legs of one of them on a lightbulb. My mom must have thought I was possessed… or psychotic. or both.

I finally explained through hiccups that they had joined the army so I had to give them crew cuts and change their clothes into camouflage, and that the one Barbie who’s legs I was meting got injured in the war so she was now a decorated war vet. My mom just made an exasperated sound, blew my nose, lectured me on the dangers of melting stuff on lightbulbs, and then let me get back to my playing.

The next day I got a G.I. Joe and the Barbies were never seen again.

(I should have prefaced this by saying I grew up on a military base, so playing soldiers at war wasn’t as odd as it seems)

Awesome lady is awesome.