Why Barbie Lives On
The Waves: Gender, Relationships, Feminism
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 903 Ratings
🗓️ 20 July 2023
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s episode of The Waves, it’s all about Barbie. Slate senior producer Cheyna Roth sits down with M.G. Lord, author of Forever Barbie and co-host of “LA Made: The Barbie Tapes” from LAist and So Cal Public Radio. They discuss the history of the Barbie doll and how she’s managed to endure, how Barbie might actually be feminist, and what the new Greta Gerwig movie gets right about Barbie.
In Slate Plus: Episode 6 of our And Just Like That…recap.
If you liked this episode check out Is The Wedding Dress Dead?
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery.
Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I was a Barbie girl. |
| 0:03.0 | You used to love setting everything up and putting everything up and putting everything in place and then you would kind of role play and act out. |
| 0:15.4 | You would especially get excited when the catalog would come out and they'd have all the latest |
| 0:22.2 | Barbie stuff in the catalog and I think you went through |
| 0:25.1 | and marked everything in there for Barbie. Do you know why I liked Barbie so much? |
| 0:31.2 | No I don't. I don't, I really don't. |
| 0:35.0 | That's my mom, Cheryl Rokowski. We're sitting in my childhood bedroom with my niece Chloe Esther High. |
| 0:42.0 | How long can you play Barbies for? |
| 0:45.0 | 30 minutes to an hour. |
| 0:48.0 | And how many Barbies would you say that you have? |
| 0:51.0 | Um, a lot, like two totes full and we get for our birthday sometimes like when we ask for the |
| 1:00.4 | Barbies we add them to our collections of them. |
| 1:04.0 | So yeah. |
| 1:05.0 | We are three generations of Barbie lovers. |
| 1:11.0 | Do you remember your first Barbie? Yes, I do. It was the 1959 Barbie and I still have it. |
| 1:19.8 | Back when I was growing up we had a few barbies, not a lot, and most of the clothes were |
| 1:26.5 | homemade. My mom would knit clothes for us for the barbies. |
| 1:32.4 | You had a story about a girl on your street who had like all the Barbies. Can you tell me about her? |
| 1:38.0 | Yes, she lived down at the end of the row and she had Barbbies and we could look at her barbies and she had real |
| 1:48.4 | clothes real barbie clothes not homemade clothes and she had everything sorted out in baggies and everything and we could |
| 1:56.0 | look at them but we couldn't touch. So we would just go down there and watch her pull |
| 2:00.8 | everything out. My sister and I and we would just go there and just look at it |
... |
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