i’m sorry but barbie is literally frankenstein

I keep thinking about how Frankenstein’s creature and Barbie are kind of the same person, which sounds ridiculous until you think about it for more than five minutes.

One is an eight-foot-tall creature assembled from pieces of dead bodies by a young scientist who becomes immediately horrified by what he has done. The other is a blonde plastic woman with permanently arched feet, a microscopic waist, and a Dreamhouse. Frankenstein is dark and miserable and full of death; Barbie lives in a world where every day is supposedly the best day ever. They were created more than two hundred years apart and for completely different reasons. And yet both of them begin with essentially the same problem: somebody else made them, decided what their bodies should be, and gave those bodies meaning before either of them had the chance to decide what they wanted to be.

I think that is why I can't stop putting them next to each other.

I first read Frankenstein knowing the basic cultural version of the story, which is probably how most people meet Frankenstein. There is a scientist, there is a monster, somebody gets brought back from the dead, lightning is involved, and eventually there are pitchforks. Except Mary Shelley's novel is so much sadder and stranger than the version of Frankenstein we inherited from Halloween decorations. Frankenstein isn't even the creature's name. Victor Frankenstein is the person who creates him, and the creature is never actually given a name. Even that feels important to me now. Victor gives him a body and gives him life, but he doesn't give him an identity.

Mary Shelley published Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818, when she was only twenty. I always come back to her age because twenty is so young to have written something that still makes people argue about science, creation, parenthood, responsibility, loneliness and what exactly makes somebody human two centuries later. Shelley was writing during a period when scientists and the public were fascinated by electricity and the possibility that it might somehow be connected to life itself. Experiments involving electrical stimulation of dead animal tissue and human corpses had captured the public imagination. The idea that electricity might reveal something about the mysterious boundary between life and death was not completely confined to fiction. So when Victor becomes obsessed with discovering “the principle of life,” Shelley was taking a scientific curiosity of her own time and pushing it somewhere terrifying: fine, suppose you figure it out. Then what?

That “then what?” might be my favorite thing about the entire novel.

Victor spends years wanting to create life. He neglects his family, his health, basically everything around him, because he is completely consumed by the possibility of doing something no one else has done. He even tells us that he deliberately chooses features he thinks are beautiful. He wants his creation to be beautiful. He selects what he believes are beautiful parts, constructs the body, succeeds in bringing it to life and the second the creature opens his eyes, Victor is disgusted.

I find that scene much more disturbing than the actual grave-robbing.

Nothing has gone wrong yet. The creature hasn't killed anyone. He hasn't hurt Victor. He hasn't even had enough time to understand where he is. His first offense is essentially being ugly in a way his creator did not anticipate.

There is something painfully familiar about creating an ideal body and then being disappointed when the real thing doesn't look the way you imagined it would. Which is where, somehow, Barbie enters the room.

Barbie is almost the inverse of Frankenstein's creature. Victor tries to make something beautiful and believes he fails. Barbie is explicitly designed to represent an ideal. Her body is so exaggerated that it is physically impossible, but that impossibility is part of the point: Barbie was never supposed to be an anatomically accurate little woman. She is an idea shaped like one.

When Barbie first appeared in 1959, Ruth Handler's concept was actually pretty radical in its own way. Most dolls marketed to girls were baby dolls, which encouraged girls to play at being mothers. Barbie was an adult woman. She could have clothes, careers, friends, a house, a car, a life. A little girl could play with a doll and imagine herself as the woman instead of automatically imagining herself as the woman's mother. There is something genuinely freeing in that. But then there is the body.

I don't think it is possible to talk about Barbie without eventually talking about her body, because we have been arguing about it for decades. Her tiny waist, long legs, large chest and proportions became part of a much larger conversation about what girls see when they look at representations of women. Barbie became both a symbol of possibility and a symbol of impossible beauty, which is such a bizarre contradiction when you really think about it. Here is a woman who can be anything, but first, apparently, she has to look like this.

That is one reason the opening of Greta Gerwig's Barbie is so clever. Barbie already lives in perfection. She wakes up beautiful. Her clothes fit. Her house is perfect. Her friends are perfect. Nothing hurts. Nothing ages. Nothing sags. Nothing smells. Nothing bleeds. She doesn't even have to walk down the stairs; she floats from the top floor because little girls don't actually make their Barbies use stairs.

Then, in the middle of a perfect party, she asks if anyone ever thinks about dying. I love that moment because it is so stupid and so profound at the same time. Of course the beginning of becoming human is realizing you're going to die.

After that, her perfect body starts betraying the rules of Barbie Land. Her feet go flat. She gets cellulite. Suddenly these completely normal features of an actual human body are treated like a crisis. And that joke works because we already understand it. We live in a world where the natural things bodies do; aging, wrinkling, gaining weight, losing weight, growing hair, developing stretch marks, changing after pregnancy, changing because you're simply getting older are constantly presented to women as problems requiring intervention.

I wish I could say I watch that and feel intellectually above it. I don't.

I know what it feels like to look at my body as if it were a project I have somehow fallen behind on. I know how easy it is to stand in front of a mirror and mentally separate myself into pieces: stomach, chest, arms, legs, face, waist, ass. This part could be smaller. That part could be bigger. This needs to be toned. That needs to disappear. It is actually strange when I think about how casually I can do that to myself. I would never look at another person I love and reduce her to a list of corrections, yet I can look at myself and immediately become a contractor surveying a renovation.

And I don't even know exactly where all of those preferences came from. Some of them probably are mine. I think women are sometimes denied that possibility in conversations about beauty, as if enjoying makeup or wanting to change your body automatically means you've been brainwashed by patriarchy and have never experienced an independent thought. I like beauty. I like clothes. I like feeling pretty. I like taking care of myself. I have fitness goals because there are things I genuinely want for my own body. I don't think every desire to change yourself is secretly an act of self-hatred. But I also don't believe I invented all of my preferences alone. None of us did.

Beauty standards existed before we were born. We entered a world that had already decided which features were desirable, and then those standards changed while we were growing up. Bodies that were mocked during one decade became the bodies people paid surgeons to imitate in another. Thinness becomes fashionable, then curves become fashionable, then an extremely specific combination of both becomes fashionable. Faces have trends now. Eyebrows have gone from thin to thick and back toward thin again within my lifetime. Even the parts of our bodies that grow naturally out of our skulls somehow manage to become outdated. It is objectively insane.

Maybe that is what makes Victor's disappointment in his creature feel so familiar to me. He chose the parts. He constructed the standard. Then he blamed the creation when reality failed to match the image in his head. The creature has to live inside the consequences of Victor's expectations.

And this is where Frankenstein stops being a story about a scary monster for me. The creature doesn't begin cruel. He begins confused, abandoned and desperate for connection. He learns language by secretly watching a family. He reads. He becomes painfully aware of himself. He wants companionship. More than anything, he wants somebody to look at him without recoiling. But the more human he becomes internally, the more he understands that his external appearance prevents other people from recognizing that humanity.

There is a devastating irony in that. Becoming more self-aware doesn't make his life easier. It makes him capable of understanding exactly how rejected he is.

Barbie experiences a gentler version of the same awakening. She begins as an object and gradually develops an interior life. At first she is Stereotypical Barbie. That is literally her identity: the Barbie you picture when someone says Barbie. But once she starts thinking about death, embarrassment, fear, aging and imperfection, she becomes less successful at being Barbie and more successful at being a person.

Both stories make consciousness hurt.

There is something very female about that sentence to me.

Growing up as a girl is partly the experience of becoming conscious of being looked at. When you're little, your body mostly just carries you around. You run with it. You climb things with it. You fall and scrape your knees and get back up. Then at some point you become aware that your body is also being perceived. You learn what kind of body you have. You learn what clothes supposedly “flatter” it. You learn which parts are desirable and which ones you're expected to disguise. Someone makes a comment. You see a photograph you hate. A boy says something. Another girl has something you don't. You compare. You start watching yourself from the outside.

I don't remember the exact moment my body became something I could fail at, but at some point it did.

That might be why I find the idea of the creator's responsibility so interesting. Victor's greatest mistake isn't necessarily creating the creature. It is creating him and then refusing responsibility for what he created. He wants the glory of making life without accepting the obligation that comes after life exists.

He makes a body and then punishes that body for not pleasing him. Humans do this constantly, just less literally.

We invent beauty standards and then punish people for failing to meet them. We create categories and then criticize bodies that don't fit neatly inside them. We sell women an ideal and then sell them products to correct the distance between themselves and the ideal. We praise individuality while somehow producing millions of people who are insecure about the exact same five body parts. And the cruelest part might be that eventually we learn to do the policing ourselves. Nobody has to stand beside me at the mirror and tell me what is wrong. I already know the script.

I think Barbie understands this particularly well because the movie eventually stops pretending perfection is actually desirable. Barbie's transformation isn't about learning how to become an even better Barbie. It is about choosing to become human. She chooses the body that will age. The body that will hurt. The body that will eventually die. The imperfect body is not the tragedy. It is the price of getting to actually live.

That idea hits me harder than I expected from a movie about a doll.

Because I spend so much time thinking about what I want my body to become that I sometimes forget what an unbelievable thing it already is. And I don't mean that in the cheesy “love every inch of yourself” way because I don't always love every inch of myself. Some days I don't even particularly like every inch. I don't think I need to lie about that to prove I've achieved some enlightened level of womanhood.

But I know enough about the human body to know how absurd it is that any of us are walking around at all. There are trillions of cells coordinating themselves into a person I casually insult because I don't like how I look in a pair of jeans. My heart has been contracting over and over since before I knew what a heart was. Neurons are firing while I write this sentence. DNA is being copied. Proteins are folding. Cells are dying and being replaced. My immune system is making decisions without consulting me. Somewhere inside me, mitochondria are doing their ancient little bacterial thing so I have enough energy to complain about my stomach.

That doesn't magically erase insecurity. Unfortunately, knowing how extraordinary a body is does not prevent you from wanting a different one. I can understand cellular respiration and still hate a photograph of myself. Humans are talented like that.

But maybe the goal isn't to force myself to believe my body is perfect. Maybe perfection was the stupid part all along.

Victor Frankenstein wanted to create the perfect being and created misery because he couldn't tolerate the difference between his fantasy and reality. Barbie begins as perfection and has to abandon it before she can become fully alive. One story gives us a creature whose creator cannot love him because he is imperfect; the other gives us a creation who eventually decides imperfection is worth choosing. And somewhere between those two stories is this uncomfortable little truth about being a person: a body was never supposed to be a finished product.

It changes. It gets sick. It heals. It gains things and loses things. It carries evidence of where you've been. Eventually it ages, if you're lucky enough to get that far. There will probably always be something about mine that I want to change, and I actually think I'm okay admitting that. I don't need to turn every insecurity into a beautiful lesson. Some days I want to be prettier. Some days I want to be thinner. Some days I want curves in different places. Some days I feel completely fine until I see myself from a bad angle and suddenly become aware that I possess a physical form.

Very spiritual of me.

But I'm trying to notice when wanting to change something quietly becomes believing I would be more worthy if I changed it. Those aren't the same thing.

Not that beauty is meaningless, because I don't actually believe that and neither does the world we live in. Not that we should never change ourselves, because humans have decorated, dressed, trained and altered their bodies for basically as long as we've had bodies to decorate. And definitely not that loving yourself means waking up every morning delighted by your reflection.

I think it is something smaller and harder. I don't want to become Victor Frankenstein standing over my own body. I don't want to spend years constructing some imaginary perfect version of myself and then look at the living girl in front of me with disappointment because she didn't turn out exactly like the picture. I don't want to become both the creation and the creator who rejects her.

There are things I want to change about myself. There probably always will be. But this is still the body that gets to be here while I do all of it. It gets to read books and run and eat and study and get sunburned and cry and heal and grow older. It is going to change whether I approve of that or not. Barbie chooses that.

The creature never gets the chance.

And maybe that's the difference I keep thinking about. Both of them discover that being alive means inheriting a body they didn't choose. One is hated for his. The other eventually chooses hers anyway.