All the world's a stage and all the men and women are merely players.

[sagarikawilliams]

All you had to do was push a button and the dolls came to life, started to sing songs and dance, their slim arms flailing about in automaton sync with their feet. The dolls sang everything from nursery rhymes to upbeat Bollywood numbers. And every time one of those dolls stopped singing, we’d prod them inside out, banging their bodies, trying to get them to work again – to continue entertaining us, to keep on controlling them. Not to mention the fact that these pretty dolls came in various sizes, but they were all like similar triangles – each line, each angle perfectly corresponding. And each executed their acts in exactly the same fashion, like a choreographed and well practiced dance recital. We loved dressing them up in scraps of colourful and glittery clothes – our very own fashion models to primp and peel when we desire.
How pliant and vulnerable those dolls were, squeeze them just a little tight and our hands dented their perfect, fictile bodies. How compliant they were, playing the roles we wished them to – beauty queen, college girl, mother of two, wicked witch – they acted out every character we wanted them to impersonate, all the while, smiling with their fake lipstick-tinged full lips. We sang “I’m a Barbie girl / in the Barbie world / Life in plastic / is fantastic” and made them shake it to the beat, acquiring a strangely sadistic sort of pleasure in our authority over the lifeless, speechless selves.
Now I realize how much the Barbie dolls resemble today’s women.
Women whose waists shrink like a sweater left out in the rain. Hunger wrings their bodies out as they squeeze into pairs of skinny jeans, like a lemon pinched out of its juice, its rind and threads the only remnants. Torsos tucked into scraps of cloth that are barely visible. The veins protruding in their arms look like roads on the map to acceptance. With knob-like knees and elbows that send shudders through their bodies every time something brushes them. Their hip bones demarcating boundaries assumed to be crossed at first sight. Their collarbones so deep one could drink out of them and ribs that jut out of and stretch their paper skin as if they’re trying to escape the waxed cream-lathered prison.
Women counting calories like a stingy miser tallying his hoard. Heads reeling and mouths slack open, panting, from recurring nightmares of the needle on the weighing machine drifting towards the right; they suck their breaths in as they pose for a photograph. Fashion magazines become their mirrors of ‘Erised’, and their way of shrinking at the sight of reflective surfaces, a mirror of their self-confidence. Star-gazing and fun night-outs long-forgotten, beauty sleep wins the race. Buying clothes without trying them on seems like the dumbest idea because all the mannequins are perfect slim figurines with their porcelain skin and legs that go on forever. Having to suffer the humiliation of not being able to buy something beautiful because it only comes in small sizes. Daydreaming about the day they will wake up and discover, to their utmost surprise, that overnight they’ve transformed into a thinner, prettier and more likeable version of themselves and not being able to sleep at night for fear that that might not happen in the morning.
The only way a girl can feel secure in this world is if she has the perfect physique. The only way she can be accepted is if she complies with the norms. The only way she can survive in this dollhouse is by playing along with the other toys, at the hands of the stern and unforgiving puppeteers that orchestrate this internationally celebrated act.