What Women Can Learn From Malibu Stacy

"Math class is tough," a talking Barbie doll once reminded little girls.

Ria's post on the University of California-Davis study concluding "both women and men become hesitant when giving instructions to the opposite sex about topics that are stereotypically not associated with their gender" -- such as "changing a tire and buying make-up" -- reminded me exactly how subject matter becomes gender specific.

Examples of the sort of disempowering, self-deprecating, social cues baby women and their grown-up sisters have been giving men, and one another, started long before any real life Joan Holloway told an actual Peggy Olson how to wrangle a free lunch from the Sterling Cooper ad men, or instructed her to mother her boss, dress for men, or parlay her job into marriage.

In my childhood, during the Pleistocene Era, little boys were given trucks and cap pistols and little girls got baby dolls and Easy-Bake Ovens. When I was 10, Barbie was invented.

Girls all over the world were enchanted by the ridiculously out-of-proportion Mattel icon. Ria linked to a Wikipedia synopsis of a classic 1994 Simpsons spoof, "Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy," in which Kathleen Turner voices the designer and model for Lisa's talking "Malibu Stacy" doll, which, to Lisa's distress, only has versions of "I'm a pretty little nitwit" on its pre-recorded loop. In the parody, though, when Lisa talks Stacy/Kathleen Turner into designing a more realistic role model, the new doll fails in the marketplace after the original nitwit doll comes out with a new accessory.

Though many toys and other children's products still cater to gender stereotypes (after the Simpsons episode, Barbie's impossibly tiny waist was widened a bit), parents can now find plenty of toys that do not.

As an aside, I once ate a late breakfast in Palm Springs with my mother's cousin-in-law, Barbara, for whom her own mother, Ruth Handler, had decades earlier named her revolutionary invention. My brunch companion was very charming, still apparently a natural blonde, and to my relief, quite normally proportioned.