Barbie Creator Wanted Ken Doll To Have A ‘Bulge’
Photo 148627252 © Fotokon | Dreamstime.com
Much debate about plastic genitals ensued in the boardroom where Barbie happened.
Ruth Handler, the inventor of Barbie, felt the doll needed a companion. So, in 1961, two years after the toy icon was introduced, Mattel gave Barbie a boyfriend. The male counterpart was named Ken, after Kenneth—the son of the doll creator and her husband Eliot Handler, who was also the co-founder of Mattel (note: for the convenience of the rest of this article, ‘Handler’ will solely be used to identify the Barbie creator, the star of this story).
Handler fought to give Barbie breasts, and Ken, a “bulge” at the least, she wrote in her 1994 autobiography Dream Doll. And while the powers that be granted Barbie her boob job, they were less convinced about bumping up Ken’s crotch.
Handler wanted the dolls to appear more realistic, but the all-male design team argued that Ken’s groin was to be “as smooth as Barbie’s,” Handler chronicled, as cited by Insider’s Grace Dean.
Executives were worried that adding girth to Ken’s lower half would upset mothers. However, they also considered how flattening the bump could make him look like “some wounded Hemingway hero,” former Mattel children’s advertising executive Cy Schneider penned in his 1987 book Children’s Television: The Art, the Business, and How it Works.
Mattel consulted psychologist and marketing expert Ernest Dichter, who specialized in Freudian psychology, to inform the design of the dolls. Dichter described that the main play mode for Barbie and Ken was the dressing and undressing bit, and that meant how Ken looked beneath his clothes mattered.
The psychologist questioned if children knew that Ken was Barbie’s boyfriend or if they even understood what a boyfriend was, or if they saw him as their fathers or brothers. With these in mind, would it be healthy to see him naked?
To the hesitance of concerned executives, Mattel went ahead and ordered Ken prototypes with varying degrees of a bulge. The only version approved by male designers was the one with barely a bump.
Eventually, Ken was given the slightest knob, albeit to the reluctance of the Mattel board.
To be clear, Handler never wanted Ken to have an exposed penis. She, too, believed it was inappropriate for the “adult boy” to show his genitals to children, wrote M.G. Lord in her 1994 biography, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll. It was agreed upon that Ken would have permanent swimming trunks painted on his crotch.
But Ken’s augmentation posed yet another problem for the Barbie team. Barbie clothing designer Charlotte Johnson, seemingly the only designer on board with giving Ken a bulge, said the area grew “bigger and bigger” when zippers were added to Ken’s fly.
Okay, make that two problems—over at Mattel’s manufacturing plant in Japan, an engineering supervisor deemed the molding of the shorts too challenging and vexed over how the lump added 1.5 cents to every unit. So he “arbitrarily” removed both features, Schneider wrote.
The first Ken doll would enter the scene with a flat nether region. All that drama for a cock-block.
Ken finally got a smidge of his redeeming bump over time, Handler noted… though that came way after the lashes of teasing that her son had endured at school over the smooth genitals of his namesake doll.
View this post on Instagram
You can read more about how Ken’s nuts were cracked here.
