When I was a year out of college, in 1998, the book “Adiós, Barbie” was published, and it contained an essay I wrote. The book is an anthology of young women’s perspectives on body image and identity. My essay is titled “At Home in My Body: An Asian-American Athlete Searches for Self.” I wrote about growing up biracial — Filipina and white — and having strangers try to define me by walking up and asking, “What are you?” I also talked about how I started to define myself as an athlete in college. My sport was rowing.
When I was little, I had never seen an Asian version of Barbie. Barbies didn’t look like me. And neither did most NCAA rowers — the sport was overwhelmingly white. But my teammates and I bonded over gradually realizing that what our increasingly strong bodies could do was more important than what we looked like, and I felt accepted by the group in a way I never had before. I grew more confident, owning my identity as an Asian American athlete.
The book release was exciting. I was working at my first “real job” as a copy editor in northern Virginia. My co-workers noticed when it was written up in The Washington Post and brought in copies of the paper. The book was used in women’s studies classes all over the country. I was thrilled that I had contributed to an anthology that was helping other young women think about body image, race and other factors that add up to who we are and how we see ourselves.
Barbie’s trade dress included “the distinctive pink color used by Mattel for the BARBIE trademark and/or on BARBIE products, the BARBIE doll’s leg and foot featuring toes on point, the doll’s distinctive high-heeled pump shoes, the doll’s distinctive scallop-shell hairbrush and the doll’s distinctive heart-shaped charm necklace,” the court judgment read.
I’m thankful that Mattel didn’t end up quashing the book entirely. But it was disappointing to see Mattel go after a small feminist press and squeeze $10,000 out of it. Seal Press had given “Adiós, Barbie” a chance and brought it to readers who, like me, were at the beginning of our careers and were starting to assert and define ourselves — and our feminism — after growing up with Barbie as the standard.
I’m not vehemently anti-Barbie. I had a handful of Barbies when I was little, although I remember my mom encouraging me to play with other dolls too — ones that represented more of our diverse world and more realistic human proportions. I have two daughters, and when they were younger and wanted to play with Barbies, I let them, but I never bought any. The Barbies and their accessories were always hand-me-downs from family and friends.
I didn’t discourage my daughters from playing with them, because their play revolved more around designing and making clothes for them out of whatever fabric they could get their hands on, rather than wanting to be them. To my daughters, Barbie was a mannequin for their fashion creations, not an idol.
When Mattel sued Seal Press, nobody actually thought “Adiós, Barbie” was going to hurt its product. By the time the corporation filed the lawsuit, the book had been out in the world for a year. The decision-makers at Mattel just knew they had ample corporate and legal muscle, so they decided to flex it.
Mattel argued that Seal Press used the trademark and elements of the “trade dress” “with the intent to trade on the enormous goodwill Mattel has earned in its Barbie products and to deceive and confuse the public into believing that ‘Adiós, Barbie’ is or was directly sponsored by, approved by, or otherwise associated with Mattel and its official licensees,” the complaint said, according to a 1999 issue of Feminist Bookstore News.
The accusation that we were trying to deceive or confuse the public doesn’t seem like “enormous goodwill” to me. Someone who walked into a bookstore and saw “Adiós, Barbie: Young Women Write About Body Image and Identity” on the cover of the book would think it was sponsored by Mattel? I don’t think so.
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