I wonder how many men and women (of a certain age) like me owned Barbie dolls and Action men as kids? Barbie was released as the first wave of rock ‘n roll was about to splash into the 60’s, G.I. Joe appeared in ’64 and Action Man exploded onto the scene at the birth of psychedelia in ’66.
As the counter-culture began to permeate the adult psyche and our parents were ‘digging’ Elvis and the Beatles, a generation of soft and malleable minds were being inculcated and politicized into believing that Velcro headed skinheads and ‘plastic blonds’ with perfect figures – plus their wealth of outfits/accessories/gadgets – were the narrative blueprint for a successful and fulfilling ‘grown-up’ future. A future of consumerism and disposability.
Action Man and Barbie were the scalar or fractal representation – nay holographic projection - of imagined and future embodied selves.
Action Man’s machismo and plethora of weapons and tools, becomes the ‘responsible’ hard-working/warrior family man in a war of attrition with his debts, devastating the landscape with his DIY aesthetic and circular saw.
Barbie and Sindy’s Platonic ideal of womanhood becomes the ethereal standard of beauty, and the engine of insecurity and anxiety for the modern femme – “Have I got enough outfits? If my Bum looks big will Ken still love me?”
Incidentally, I used to burn my sisters Sindy with my dad’s lighter, which is a kind of primitive cosmetic surgery. Wow, the paternal hegemonic significance of that!
Look at all the Hollywood stars of the last 10 years, the action heroes especially have an uncanny similarity to Action Man; they’ve got no character, they’re too pretty and they haven’t got any balls.
The Bohemian sensibility represents a melting of the archetypal/artificial plasticity of action figure gender roles, a great nay to the ideology of prescribed uniforms, accessories and weapons/tools/gadgets.
We must ‘break the mold’ (fnaar), and not be afraid of being a bit lumpy and peculiar like vegetables and other organic forms which transgress the homogenous, cold hard plasticity of modern consumer existence.
The Illuminati plot in the 60’s to counter the Counter-culture and inculcate traditional gender roles and the normalcy of mass consumerism/militarianism into a generation of confused and fragile young minds, by the insidious means of realistic gender specific action dolls has been largely successful.
The Bohemian has always stood between Action man and Barbie, a third sex, unashamedly organic and with the proud physical and psychic scars of a life lived outside the toy box.
I managed to find a new door of perception from the the plastic puppet schemata, by imagining Rolling stone Bryan Jones faking his death in the swimming pool - by the clever use of a doppelganger - and then being reembodied and skinned into blond, bearded perma-culture Action man. Did anybody else escape their 'square' destiny like this?
Maybe girls melted Barbie into Mama Cass?
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