THE EVOLUTION OF BARBIE.

The Evolution of Woman to Barbie then to Techno-Barbie.

If girls were like boys, Barbie's little cars could be taken apart.  Their tyres would be inflatable, changeable and come with lock nuts, and their mufflers could be taken off and replaced.  Barbie would also be able buy accessories such as spoilers, chrome exhausts and mag wheels.

Mrs Barbie, her mother, would own a shed in which Barbie could store assorted car bits and pieces such as three spare engines, a couple of car doors, a bonnet, a spare windscreen, numerous tyres stacked in a pile that harbour a range of deadly spiders, various thinners and enamels, an engine lifter and bits and pieces whose use even Barbie has forgotten, if she had a brain that is.

When I was a young girl, I never had the slightest desire to take anything apart.  That was my father's forte.  He managed to turn a bicycle he thought I had stopped riding (well I was at boarding school, how could I ride it?) into a boat trailer.  He turned my two working toy phones connected by a wire into an alarm bell for my grandfather who lived in a granny flat on the property (also while I was conveniently at school).  He was clever at that sort of thing but failed to ask my permission and made me feel bad for suggesting that he should have.

It was no use complaining because somehow I always ended up feeling that I was being selfish.  There was also the fear they would find a boarding school even further away to which to send their one and only child.

When my son was little, as soon as one of his toys broke he wouldn't play with it anymore.  Then something happened at around the age of ten.  He took his bicycle apart.  Thankfully it was not reincarnated as a boat trailer.  After all, we didn't have a boat.  Miraculously it became a bike again.  He was just teaching himself its mechanics.

Then came the Volkswagen Beetle and my version of Mrs. Barbie's shed.  That strange instinct peculiar, it seems, to the male of the species, gestated in him.  He began to take engines apart and put them back together, and they worked.  Men have a strange affinity with things mechanical.  There are some women who do, but mostly we just like our cars to keep working and ignore their protestations.

I often wonder how man the hunter became man the mechanic.  Men no longer have to hunt leaving the women behind with the babies, as happened centuries ago.  How did the hunter become the fixer?  How does the pursuit and kill of a warm blooded animal compare to tinkering with a basically metallic object that, while it can 'run' in a sense, doesn't require you to chase after it unless you forget to put the handbrake on when it's on a slope.  Nor can you eat it, which was the aim of the hunt, after all.

There is only one possibility that I can think of and it is the tool.  Hunting tools came first. They required making, sharpening and maintenance.  I can just see the hunter coming home and, when everyone is fed, his woman asks him to help with the children.  Oh, no, so sorry, the hunting tools need some work; can't have them getting blunt and all.  It followed that when farming took over, those tools came next; ploughs, carts and threshers.

I believe men decided to find anything to do to avoid helping with the baby.  They became so good at it that it eventually found its way into their genes.

This masculine trait has merits of course.  For example one day my car was side-swiped by an old fellow who took off without leaving his name.  A witness said that he thought the car was a Ford sedan.  It had left a piece of tail light behind.  I showed it to my son and told him the witness had said it had come from a Ford.  No, he stated with authority, it had come from a such and such year model Toyota Corolla.

I was, as you can imagine, fairly gobsmacked.  He was not training to be a mechanic but a Veterinary Surgeon.  He was right.  With the aid of the police we tracked down the poor old fellow who had hit my car.

If anyone thinks the genders are the same, they need brain surgery.  We may have equal rights, at last, but we are different.  It would be very sad if we were not.  "Vive la difference", as the French say; those lovely, perverse people who have genders for every noun.

My parents did one or two things right.  One of them, as I was an only child, was not to fashion me according to my gender.  In truth I don't think my mother cared all that much and dad was always at work.

However, as a girl my passion was for dolls.  I also loved comic books much to my mother's chagrin.  If she hadn't thrown them all away, along with my teddy bear, I might now be worth something given the value of old comics.  She read books.  I waited until I was twelve and forced myself to read one.  It didn't, after all, have pictures.

The better part of my first ten years was spent up a tree where I made castles in the air.  I was a real tomboy but I still loved dolls.

But never did I get the urge to take apart my bike or my car when I had one, or my dolls.  Nor did I know any girl or woman who did.  My future husband, father of my mechanically minded son, worked on his Volkswagen every weekend to fix things that were broken or didn't sound right.  His friends did the same to their cars and so I decided this was a guy thing.

My son's old Volkswagen now resides under his house.  His actual shed, amazingly, is pristine and you wouldn't find his car bits in there.  The under croft of his house is for that.  I sense his son will inherit the VW and by then it may really be worth something.  But cars, like everything, are changing.  You need to be an electrician to fix one and I think the only thing the Volkswagen will be good for is as a collector's item.  There'll be no point in tinkering with a car that is purely mechanical and can't teach you anything about fixing a next generation model. 

I feel we need our natural gender outlets in this world to reinforce our identities but soon we will not able to take things apart let alone allowed to climb trees.  What then?  How will we channel our masculine and feminine traits?

In the future dolls will probably talk back to you, do their own hair and choose their own wardrobe.  Heaven forbid, they might even demand an allowance.  They will probably have computer chips embedded in them that imitate brains, so they may even take you to court if you infringe on their freedom of choice or store them in a box.

Imagine this: "Barbie doll takes owner to court for stereotyping her as a female fantasy figure."  I should be so lucky!  But if the gender lines do start to blur in the future and she starts asking for a bicycle and a tool kit, watch out and get her a matching shed or she'll use yours.

END.