I never had a Barbie Dreamhouse. I had 19 Barbies (and one Ken) who lived in a cardboard box mommune, splurging on trips to the Tropical Pool Patio set whenever I felt like filling it. My local Dreamhouse was upstairs, at the home of my friend Kate, in a room I can picture in high definition. Through my seven-year-old eyes, the mansion seemed massive: four feet tall at least.
Today, I learned that wasn’t just a trick of my seven-year-old eyes. It really is four feet tall.
This year, Santa will be putting a Dreamhouse under the tree for my four-year-old daughter– though, good luck to him getting it up the stairs. (I should not have built the thing in the basement.) It’s the only gift she put on her list, along with “five random Barbies.” The phrasing of that ask—the just-get-it-done-ness, the I-don’t-care-who-they-are-they-just-better-be-Barbies vibe—was unsurprising to me. My daughter has never been a toy-oriented kid; she’s the type who would rather spin in circles, put on shows, and make piles of important scraps of paper. But Barbie didn’t start, for her, as a toy. It started as a movie, the rare blockbuster whose bonkers box-office return ($1.4 billion globally) doesn’t quite capture its cultural impact. If you can remember three things about 2023 10 years from now, I guarantee Barbie will be one of them.
Since seeing the film in August, my daughter has lost her mind with joy at Barbie-themed birthday parties, stopped the whole family to point out the Barbie font on things in the wild, and listened to the Barbie soundtrack on repeat (she still fails at using a cup about once out of every three attempts, but she knows how to get Alexa to play both the standard and “Bad Day” versions of Lizzo’s “Pink”). She loves to recreate Margot Robbie’s record-scratch moment from the dance scene. Sometimes she does this in public, and let me tell you: Having a four-year-old shout, “DO YOU GUYS EVER THINK ABOUT DYING?” in the store is a very handy way to tell who has seen Barbie and who hasn’t.
When I asked her whether she was sure she didn’t want to ask for something non-Barbie for Christmas, my daughter said, firmly, “No. I like Barbie.” I asked her why. She thought for a minute, then said, “Because she’s funny and I like her house and I like her friends.”
These, honestly, are pretty good reasons to like anyone. They also speak with clarity to how Barbie the movie has shifted access points for Barbie the doll. You know what my introduction to Barbie was? My next-door neighbor telling me that upstairs, she had a doll with boobs. I can still see the acid-blue eyes and Easter-pink lips on her Barbie, who did indeed have quite a set. Instantly, all dolls were divided, for me, into boob and non-boob categories, and there seemed to be no question about which genre was preferable. I asked for Barbies for my next birthday (five), was told no, we were not a Barbie house, got one anyway from a friend at my birthday party, and glimpsed my parents across the porch. They both wore polite faces (my dad’s was slightly less polite) that said, We are smiling because the people who bought that are here, but we will confiscate it later! The look I returned to them said, Over my dead body. Love, the f—ing birthday girl.
All the while, the rented Minnie Mouse impersonator stood in the driveway on her 10-minute break, smoking and watching yet another fan of hers being wrestled away by Barbie. Because we all know how it is: Once you have one Barbie, you may as well have 18. Soon I did, and I became the seasoned dispenser of boob-doll knowledge. When a younger cousin came over, some months later, and tried to put a tube dress on Skipper, I laughed and informed her that Skipper didn’t “have the chest to hold that up.”
I’m pretty sure that moment was my Barbie-skeptic parents’ nightmare come true. And while I don’t remember longing to look more like Barbie, or longing for her to look more like me, I’m also not naive enough to think that she had no effect on my burgeoning ideals. A very small category of toy is “toy grownups”; it’s action figures and Barbie, and the action figures have acknowledged superpowers or enhancements. Barbie is marketed as normal: a normal woman with a purse. Especially if you hit the pre-career-Barbie heyday—none of mine had a job, unless you can get paid to be Totally Hair—it was no less reasonable to assume you would grow up to look like Barbie than it was to assume you’d have a purse. If you’ve only seen 19 women naked and they all have thigh gaps, guess what seems inevitable?
I know all this already as I stand on the precipice of my kid’s Barbie era. I think about her answers—funny, house, friends—and wonder: Are these first, deep impressions of Barbie enough to make this a net-good experience, one that ultimately expands her visions for her own future rather than narrowing them? I also asked her, just now, if she thinks Barbie is pretty, and she said without hesitation: “Yes. I want to look like an angel Barbie.”
“Wait, what?” I said.
“What?”
“You want to look like an angel Barbie?”
“Don’t talk about it anymore,” she said, which is how she ends conversations these days.
So, that was creepy. Almost creepy enough to make me backtrack on all of this, except returning a Barbie Dreamhouse that’s already built is more like the set-up for a viral TikTok prank than something you can actually do. And I think that part of motherhood is learning that nothing good for your kid ever comes purely. There are always worries. If I hadn’t let my daughter see Barbie the movie, or if she hadn’t really liked it, I wouldn’t have to deal with my lingering nerves about Barbie the doll. But my other kids are old enough, now, for me to know that kids don’t get inspired every day. Sometimes, when something lights them up, you have to let go of your own relationship with that thing, trusting them, your guidance, and the time that has passed to make their turn go more smoothly.
Plus, okay—the house is great. It took me almost three hours to construct, though 2.5 of those were me second-guessing my alignment before I pressed a sticker down. It has a pool and a pool for the dog, which the Tropical ’80s set would never, given that in the ’80s we tied our dogs outside. It has an elevator, a widescreen for gaming. Speckled terrazzo countertops, an oven beneath them that lights up. A toilet that flushes, a palm tree on the second floor. A two-story curving slide so wide I’m not sure my daughter won’t try to go down it herself. Heads up to other Dreamhouse parents putting off assembly: The slide is sneakily the hardest part because you do it last, so your eyes are fried, and the ends all look the same. “You bitches better like this slide,” I hissed out loud, mid-install.
What bitches, you say? This, I labored over. This seemed very key. One thing I can thank the movie for is that, even though its treatment of jobs was tongue-in-cheek, it ingrained in my daughter the expectation that every Barbie is something. So for the “five random Barbies,” I chose: an ice cream shop owner, a panda rescue doctor, a farmer, a gymnast, and, of course, Margot Robbie. (The gymnast is actually a Stacie, which means she won’t have the boobs to hold up anyone else’s outfits, but I’ll keep that to myself.)
I felt a little misty as I set all the final details of the Dreamhouse in place: the exceptionally tiny silverware, the realistic ferns. I know it’s partially because the Dreamhouse will never be as pin-neat as it is now, but it’s also because I’m hopeful that the new Barbie dream is a better one. Disallowing for their student loan payments (panda medical school can’t be cheap) and the creeping price of that teeny milk in the fridge—and hypothesizing that this Dreamhouse is in a township where land is cheap and taxes are low—I really feel like this could be where five friends live, and I love the idea of community and friendship as a dream. It’s independence and choice-making and I know that my little girl is going to love it, because when I eavesdrop on her now, playing with the stuffies she’s nearly grown out of, all her make-believe starts with the same line: “So—how was your day?”