My husband is an ‘80s toy collector. He particularly collects He-Man and Transformers, and also Gundam. Occasionally, he would get Star Wars and other toys from superhero movies he loves. He is just a few months shy from being 45 years old and yet he walks into a toy store like it’s 1985 all over again. As a well-employed adult, he can now buy the toys his mom refused to get him even for birthdays or Christmas simply because they were not in the “gift budget”. He would always look back with resentment how he always had the unpopular secondary characters instead because they were always in the bargain bin.
On the contrary, I was able to get most of the toys that I wanted when I was a child. My mom spoiled me with Barbies because I was always an Honor Student. Unfortunately, tragedy came to our family and I had to grow up and forget about being a child in fantasy land. I just stopped playing and before I knew it, my dolls were being donated to some poor cousin who needed a toy.
It wasn’t until I was an adult when I realized how traumatic that was. When Barbie the movie came out, I plunged into YouTube to check out old Barbie commercials to get my fill of nostalgia. And then my husband urged me to start collecting again, like what he’s doing now. Hunting for vintage toys is like buying back our lost childhood. The idea tickled me but the first thing that stopped me was the thought – how many diapers and Andy’s vitamin supplements could I buy with that budget?
Then I felt a theory brewing in my mind. I checked out YouTube again to survey how many female Barbie collectors of my age have their own channels where they just talk about their dolls and the histories behind them?
Then I got my answer – almost none. I’m not even exaggerating. The very few female “toytubers” – a term for Toy YouTubers – on Barbie were mostly Millennials who started to have Barbies in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. The history part wasn’t fully there. These channels were not like the ones that my husband would watch where 40-something dads like him gush while giving a lecture on the historical and cultural zeitgeist of the toys. They could easily be conferred with a PhD in Toyetic Studies with their amazing knowledge on the topic. Toyetic, by the way, was a marketing term that became popular in the toy industry back in the ‘80s.
So I wondered, why can‘t I find the 40-something women like me who collected Barbies back in ‘80s? While many of these male collectors were able to keep their worn out action figures from their childhood, I saw many overplayed Barbies in thrift shops. These Barbies were obviously donated or thrown out. They are mostly naked with dishevelled hair or a really bad haircut. Some even have colored markers on the face as permanent bad makeup. Yes, Weird Barbie from the movie is inspired by real life.
Why were these Barbies thrown out? And I found this poignant answer on Reddit: It’s because girls and women are expected by society to outgrow and transition away from their toys. There’s an expectation that we should shift our attention from baby dolls to real babies and from Barbie dolls to becoming real-life versions of Barbie for our boyfriends and husbands. We are expected to take on the role of nurturing human infants and transform into the dolls we once dressed up as. All of this while managing criticism about our body sizes, shapes, careers, makeup choices, and wardrobe selections.
And this can be evidenced by history itself. Women are expected to abandon play and the concept of playtime because of household chores and other domestic duties. We’re not even encouraged to have hobbies unless they revolve around home and family – especially the children. This isn’t the same for men. It’s perfectly acceptable for them to hold onto everything from video games to action figures to bike riding. A whole toy industry was just created for this kind of market.
For me, Barbie is not just the toy I had to part with when we had to sell our house and we could not bring so many of our personal belongings to our transient place. I also said goodbye to my childhood when I gave away my Barbies. I don’t just miss my dolls. I miss the girl inside who played with Barbie and everything she symbolized to me. Barbie could be anything, and there was a time when girls like me believed I could be anything as well, before reality, tragedy, and the systemic pressures of patriarchal society intervened, taking away our toys, forcing us to grow up, and telling us it was all our fault anyway.
BIONOTE:
Jill Palarca is a licensed professional teacher specializing in Media and Information Literacy and is also currently the chairperson of Media Educators of Mindanao. She is mom to angels Meryl and Lyanna, and rainbow baby, Andrea.
