The Brief

Unlike flash-in-the-pan toys, Barbie is still going strong after 64 years. She’s especially hard to ignore these days, thanks to Greta Gerwig’s relentlessly promoted "Barbie" movie. Her plastic face is everywhere, in high relief against blinding fuchsia backdrops.

Why has Barbie now endured for more than four generations?

Many people suggest that it has to do with global brand recognition that’s on par with Coca-Cola. Others point to her responsiveness to broad social trends — yes, her novel careers and new-fangled accessories, but also new body types and ethnicities. Barbie has even challenged traditional notions of gender.

Still, others credit the low price point at which consumers can hop on the Barbie bandwagon (or Malibu beach cruiser).

There is some truth to all of these explanations. But I believe the real reason runs deeper.

Barbie as a fertility totem

Consider this instead: Barbie is a space-age recasting of a stone-age fertility totem, a symbol of an ancient, enduring matriarchal faith.

True, Barbie, with her cinched-in waist and narrow hips, is hardly a swelling Venus of Willendorf, a type of well-known goddess sculpture made in Europe almost 25,000 years ago. Yet like that prehistoric Venus, Barbie is a small, portable object. An object that nomadic peoples — or contemporary kids — can grab and cradle and carry in their hands.

There are other similarities, too. I rest much of my argument on Barbie’s itty bitty arched feet. Like Barbie, Neolithic goddess figures did not have feet; their legs tapered to prongs. To stand up, they were plunged into the earth, linking them to the Great Mother, Mother Earth, the chthonian (dark/underworld) source of their power.

Nor did all goddess figures have waistlines as wide as they were tall. Barbie, for instance, closely resembles the Cycladic idols — broad-shouldered, streamlined female figures with slender hips that were made in the Cyclades between 3000-2200 BCE, and that are believed to have functioned as objects of veneration.

Replica of Venus of Willendorf.

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Cycladic figurine replica, representative of the Cycladic civilization that developed from about 3200 - 2000 BC , in the group of Cyclades islands.

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If Barbie can be seen as a modern emblem of an ancient goddess faith, much about her starts to make sense. After all, in 1959, Barbie came first, two years before Ken, in the same way that the ancient goddess religions antedated Judeo-Christian patriarchal monotheism. Nor should it be a surprise that Barbie lives in a paradise of consumer goods; there is no garden — no Eden — from which a patriarchal God could exile her.

Likewise, with this perspective, Ken’s second-class status and genital abridgment make sense: he is a eunuch priest in a goddess cult. Per the tagline of Gerwig’s movie: “She’s everything. He’s just Ken.”

Barbie’s origin story

In The Barbie Tapes, a podcast I co-host with Antonia Cereijido, we delve into the origins of the Barbie we know today, the one who rates a major Hollywood film some 60 years into her time in the spotlight.

The beginning of that global fame was sparked when Ruth Handler, who was one of the co-founders of Mattel, saw a German doll known as Lilli on vacation in the late '50s.

As pieces of sculpture, the Barbie doll and the Lilli doll are almost indistinguishable. But they have very different invented personalities.

An advertisement published in the author's 2004 book "Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll."

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Lilli was based on a comic character in the Bild-Zeitung, kind of a downscale German tabloid newspaper, like The National Enquirer. In the single-panel comics, Lilli is essentially always seen taking money from jowly fat cats for sexual favors.

The emblematic cartoon, is one of Lilli completely naked, holding up a newspaper — a tabloid — to cover her naked body. She's in the apartment of a female friend and she says to the friend something along the lines of “We had a fight, and he took back all his presents.”

That gives you a sense of how Lilli operated in the world.

Handler brings back the doll and shares it with Jack Ryan, a Yale-educated engineer who worked on the Sparrow and Hawk missiles and whom Mattel had hired to do engineering work. He takes it to Japan, where he assists other members of Mattel’s design team in finding someone to make a copy of it

Ultimately those invented personalities — Barbie versus Lilli — were very different, but, you know, a woman in the 1950s had to be the wholesome milkshake-drinking girl next door and — I search for euphemisms — also have the body of a German sex worker.

Barbie as goddess

Greta Gerwig poses on the pink carpet upon arrival for the European premiere of "Barbie" in London on July 12.

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Gerwig, in fact, seems to have homed in on the goddess aspect of Barbie’s identity. In the film, Barbie leaves her idyllic Olympian toy world for the terrestrial one inhabited by humans. This is a familiar trope in mythology. Consider the mess the Greek goddess Athena made meddling in human affairs, not the least of which was causing the Trojan war. (Because Barbie has no navel, she reminds me of Athena. Neither were of women born.)

The hero’s journey of discovery is also a trope in fairy tales. In "The Little Mermaid," Ariel cuts a deal with a treacherous witch to incarnate as a person. She swaps her fish tail for legs and relinquishes her voice — an unfortunate exchange that imperils the very transformation she seeks.

I realize there is a tongue-in-cheek, ivory-tower quality to the idea of Barbie as an ancient feminine archetype. Yet Barbie's first marketers, an unabashedly cynical bunch, relied heavily on the idea of unconscious motivations — and pervasive archetypes — to construct their advertising campaigns.

What a Freudian psychoanalyst had to do with Barbie’s success

Ernest Dichter, a real Viennese Freudian psychoanalyst, revolutionized U.S. marketing in the 1950s and 60s. He analyzed consumers' deep-seated fears and needs, then exploited those fears and needs to sell products. In Getting Motivated, his 1979 memoir, Dichter admitted that in marketing, his “knowledge of mythology came in handy.”

The first sales strategy for Barbie came out of the focus-group research Mattel had commissioned from, yes, Dichter himself.

Not only could Dichter identify people’s unconscious drives, he also saw the ugly social order as it was, not as people may have wanted it to be. His crafty strategy to sell Barbie, however, had less to do with her underlying identity and more to do with the second-class status of real-life women. In the 1950s and 60s, women could not buy property or open a checking account without the sponsorship of a husband or father. This meant that men, in those days, were essentially meal tickets.

During Dichter’s Barbie focus groups, the cunning psychoanalyst saw how dead-set most mothers were against the doll: one referred to her as an over-sexed “daddy doll.” But when a rough tomboy told her mother that Barbie looked “well-groomed,” the mother softened toward the doll.

This, Dichter realized, was a way to position Barbie. Better her daughter should learn to snare a man in a sleazy way than not be able to snare one at all.

What this has to do with the new ‘Barbie’ film

Over Barbie’s six decades of doll dominance, she’s inhabited a toy ecosystem now fully realized on the big screen in Gerwig’s relentlessly marketed film.

Gerwig’s costumes and settings that are often direct quotations from real outfits and playsets that the director herself, age 39, would have encountered in childhood.

Barbie drives the cars, not Ken. Barbie owns the dream houses, not Ken. Barbie is the empowered figure, and Ken, if not literally a eunuch priest, is very much her subordinate.

It is, of course, a fantasy world — and a world that entices viewers through nostalgia. It is also world of exaggeration, of “camp,” a world that is artificial, and defiant in its flirtation with kitsch. Camp is ironic. It presents a world of objects surrounded by air quotes — a world not of lamps but “lamps.”

Viewers will have to determine how well Barbie survives a harsh human world that is still very much controlled by men. I want that archetypal feminine essence to prevail. I hope she emerges as a goddess, not merely a "goddess."

Of course, Ruth Handler once dismissed the goddess idea as "baloney." That said, the designers who crafted the doll did not.

Most were well-schooled in visual art and understood its metaphorical underpinnings. In the 1990s, I asked Aldo Favilli, Mattel's chief of sculpture since 1972 and a former sculpture restorer at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, about the idea of Barbie-as-goddess.

His judicious reply: "I've heard that said."

Listen to our podcast "The Barbie Tapes"

Listen • 30:58

Listen • 30:58

The Barbie Tapes: A Toy is Born

From prototype to prestige, this episode kicks off the origin story of Barbie as told by her creators in their own words.

Listen • 32:36

Listen • 32:36

The Barbie Tapes: Battle of the Bulge

Ken's creation is a big hit for Barbie fans, but he’s facing a few growing pains of his own. In this episode, we investigate Ken's origin story, delve into the inner workings of Mattel, and hear how Barbie's inventor, Ruth Handler, was ousted from her own company.

Listen • 32:24

Listen • 32:24

The Barbie Tapes: When Girls — and Barbie — Could Do Anything

A new Mattel team, led by a man who feared the volatility of the toy business, diversified the company and made a big gamble on electronics. It didn’t work. Fortunately, Barbie ends up in the sure hands of some trailblazing women executives. From the workforce to the workout, Barbie was a doll of her times.