alan young

This is a must-read. 8-)

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2003/10/29/notes102903.D
TL&type=printable

--
Hummingbear

Another world is not only possible, She is on Her way.
And on a quiet day, if you listen carefully, you can hear Her breathing.
--Arundhati Roy

jackdaw

I think.. just a little bit, I might order that one.
For my Altar.

--
Jackdaw ( UK )
collector of facts, trivia and bright twinkly things!
Please remove the spam things to get the bird!

-a.

I don't know which scares me more: Secret Spells Barbie, SSB on an Altar
or SSB Bukkake. I *do* know that this is a great article and that it
has inspired me for an article in the latest issue of my college paper.
So, I put it to all of you at ARWM: how has Wicca/Paganism changed in
the last year, how has society at large changed with respect to
Wicca/Paganism and have we (as a society and as
Wiccans/Pagans/what-have-you) changed for the better or for the worse?

Blessed Be,
-A.

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tiliqua

Following intense negotiations with a potato,
I respond to In The Darkness who opined that:


I've always seen that as being DISrespectful. Even if...(no
guarantees) I get a Barbie for the altar, bukkake is RIGHT out! (To
borrow a phrase from female vocabulary ....Eeeeeewwwww!!!)


--

May the Lord and The Lady prosper your ventures

synn

LOL..and then hit the link to see the doll and read all the comments.
The doll is rather fluffy bunny to me, but the person who did the
comment section is a marketing genius.

The reason I cut and pasted the whole thing is because when I tried
the link above, it didn't work.
*******


Barbie The Hot Pagan Witch
It's the bimbo blond doll's latest Wicca-like incarnation, ready to
"poison" young girls' minds

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Wednesday, October 29, 2003

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Listen up, naughty girls.


Do you long to be an "ordinary **********" by day who "transforms at
night" into some sort of scary pink-robed glittery giggly perky blond
pseudo-witch "magical enchantress" thing, perusing your "book of
spells" with its plethora of "mysterious compartments" that "hold your
secrets," along with recipes for concocting real potions "you can
actually drink?"

You do? Well Jesus with an ******ic wolf howl and some heavy goth
eyeliner, are you ever in luck.

Because just in time for Halloween and just in time to make a few
thousand hyper-Christian parental brows furrow with consternation and
spiritual constipation, and just in time to make any true Wiccan roll
her eyes and flick this story away like so much bad juju, here comes
Secret Spells Barbie.

That's right, it's Mattel's latest Wiccan-flavored mutation of the
famous and famously obnoxious pneumatic blond dingbat, joining the
likes of Barbie Loves Spongebob Squarepants and the Barbie Romance
Novel Giftset and Princess of the Portuguese Empire Barbie and Spirit
of the Earth Barbie (all genuine items, alas).

Not to mention the long-desired Manic Depressive PR Exec Divorcée
Barbie and Resentful Proctologist Barbie and Bloated
Don't-You-Freaking-Touch-Me PMS Barbie and Desperately Lonely National
Security Advisor "Condi" Barbie, with bonus Spinning Head feature.
All, presumably, coming soon.

Hey, witches are cool. Everyone knows witches are cool. Way, way cool.
Willow from "Buffy" was cool, and the vaguely ******* witchly
threesome on "Charmed" are ostensibly cool (in a bitchy backstabbing
black-mascara mall-hopping sort of way), and even "Sabrina the ****age
Witch" is passably cool if you're, like, 12, ditto the entire whack
"Sailor Moon" anime universe, because anime is just way cool, just by
default.

And of course Harry Potter, the king himself, is still despoiling
millions of young minds with his blasphemous heathen wizard spells and
pre**** angst and secret burgeoning lust to discover what magic
dazzling transformational enchanted wunderfrump lies beneath
Hermione's knickers.

Yes, Secret Spells Barbie is a witch. Sort of. But not really. Even
though she is. But Mattel would never dare call her that, of course.
Barbie just, you know, dabbles. Plays around. Casts a "spell," then
twirls her hair and pops her gum and giggles a lot and then goes
shopping. This is what Barbie does.

Nothing seriously Wiccan here, nothing remotely intelligent or in
depth or knowledgeable about true witchcraft or magick or Wiccan
belief, of course, because were Mattel to venture too far and dare to
actually educate or inspire young maidens to shun church and embrace
nature and dye their hair black and change their name to Raven
Wolfdancer and start holding slumber parties/yoni awakenings on the
winter solstice, why, terrified Christians would almost certainly rise
up and light torches and march on their local pseudo-Christian
Wal-Marts, which would immediately stop carrying the demonic *******
Wiccan dolls that only masquerade as oversequined sanitized blonds
with the equivalent of 39-inch chests.

No, SS Barbie apparently takes witchcraft about as seriously as, say,
a hair barrette. About as seriously as the caulking on the Dream
House. About as seriously as Ken's deeply repressed desire for a
Barbie-size strap-on and a serious S&M whipping.

And yet. Apparently there's a TV commercial for this new doll, one
that instructs Secret Spells Barbie fans to gather "at a secret time,
in a secret place" to enact these "secret spells."

And then it cuts to a shot of our fair witches-in-training "secreted"
away at the library mixing "potions" and "doing spells" and one rogue
girl perks up and asks whether the spells actually work, and sure
enough right then a hunky **** boy appears and strolls right up to the
girl who has the Secret Spells "kit," and she grins all knowingly and
enchantingly and giggle titter wink ooh isn't this wacky witchcraft
fun?

It is just so cute. And it is just so sad. Because you could argue
that Secret Spells Barbie signifies the ultimate saccharine
dumbed-down heavily bleached mainstreaming of witchcraft and Wicca,
****ing poor little Harry Potter dry and embarrassing even Sabrina and
deflating all the joy and ***iness and funky chthonic wonder out of
witchcraft and magic, and for this Mattel can rightfully be jeered at
and besotted with night sweats and made to wear the Cursed Necklace of
Dhzarzebub. Or something.

And, furthermore, you could say that Witch Wanna-Be Barbie exemplifies
a deep and rather obnoxious insult to true Wiccans everywhere, the
equivalent of Mattel launching some sort of perky bare-thighed Islamic
Fundamentalist Barbie or maybe Frigid Catholic Nun Barbie or Wide-Eyed
Rosicrucianist Barbie or even Creepy Cult of Scientology Barbie with
Deluxe Tinfoil Hat and Fanatical Grin.

You could say that. But it's not really worth it. Because more than
anything else, you just have to say that this incarnation of the
world's best-selling virgin, this premolded hunk of insidious white
plastic that inflicts the initial lashings of the American beauty myth
on millions of young girls, is utterly, shamelessly useless.

Secret Spells Barbie is, despite her potential and much like every one
of the 150,000 weird sub-subniche Barbies on the market, entirely
pointless and disposable and, unless the girls who end up with her
somehow tap into their inner badass witchiness and suddenly get
inspired by some divine funky moonscream to rip off Barbie's arms and
paint her hair bright red and tattoo her nipples with a Magic Marker
and impale her on a red-hot hair pin and suspend her upside down from
a dreamcatcher, well, she does nothing to further the cause of funky
gorgeous goddess-thick witchness and nothing to further the cause of
earthly luscious pagan interconnectedness or divine feminine power.

Not that she claims to. Not that this was ever Mattel's point, or
Barbie's raison d'etre, really. And I suppose it's sort of wildly
unfair to hope that Barbie might actually inspire girls beyond the
hair-twirling saccharine fetishism of shopping and friends and cars
and boys and shopping and money and dye jobs and shopping and fake
careerism and shopping.

But in Secret Spells Barbie, there was a glimpse. There was a glimmer
of hope that underneath her massive d****ry of blond follicles and
beneath that massive melon chest and beneath that huge pink cheap
sequined magic robe beat the raw red heart of a latent pagan
priestess, just dying to bust out of that whitebread virgin
faux-Christian Botox world and get it on with the divine, even a
little. Alas, it's not to be.

Oh, Barbie. When, oh when, will you strip down and writhe in the woods
and howl at the moon?


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.

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newsletter.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and
Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which
it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed
thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at
sfgate.com/newsletters


http://www.webdesk.com/secret-spells-barbie/
~
Synn
~
Hope is the doorway
that you must pass through
to your inner strength.
~

in the darkness

Ohh, I don't know... given that many of the female "goddess"
statues of old were posed in something that became known as
the "Ashtarte Pose", it really isn't that far off the mark.

Matter of fact, some archaelogists suspect that may have
been part of the rituals involved. You have to be
clinical about these things, and keep an open mind.

I do like the DISrespectful caps though, cute.

I might have spelled it DEUSrespectful... just as
tongue in cheek.

BB

thenie

After a 2-step cut&paste, I read the article.

Frankly, I don't know whether to laugh with the author or feel terribly
insulted by him. Though some thoughts I agree with, others are either off
the mark or egregiously presumptuous IMHO.

I think it's presumptive to think (though obviously modelled on 'Charmed',
and 'Charmed' admits to being 'wiccan'; yeah, sure...) that SSBarbie is
specifically Wiccan. I also think it's off the beam to portray Wicca as
necessarily *******-based (and what's with depicting the 'Charmed ones' as
******* when they're siblings, and failing to point out Willow's
proclivities in the same aside?) or to present Wicca as 'Wild Women'-like or
raw (Wiccan does not equate to Maenids). My experience is that Wicca has a
considerable range of expression and practice that tends to be more mild in
the main; this article presents Wicca as 'normally' much wilder and possibly
more intentionally (even in-your-face) anti-chistian than is the real thing.

I recall seeing the broadcast ads for SSBarbie and gave it full attention,
to see what was really there. It looked modelled on 'Charmed' and
'Sabrina', on the one hand creating a sisterhood (which adolescent girls do
anyway; in my day, we did it with tagteam storywriting and following media
stars) and on the other depicting magick as something that's effortless
(which requires no further comment here). As modelled on those two shows,
it presents magick as something natural, innocent, and meant to be
nonharmful; for the religious underpinnings, those shows and SSBarbie also
present magick as something that is not aligned with any Deities or
religious ritual.

As a Wiccan, I acknowledge the simplistic, fluffy facade of the product, but
I also accept it as a device for young girls to explore their personal
(non-magickal) issues and maybe to consider the magick inherent resident
within them (some of them, anyway). Simplistic and fluffy makes for an
innocent, natural and non-threatening environment, not a bad thing. Sure,
it lacks teeth and reality, but the point of giving Barbie facades form and
little content is to allow the child to fill the content during the
exploration of play. After all, the Obstetrician Barbie has no speculum,
the Veterinarian Barbie doesn't neuter or take animals' temperatures, and
the Schoolteacher Barbie's textbooks don't open. What isn't specified is up
to creation and expression by the child's inner world and knowledge.

Heavily-religious households will not be happy with SSBarbie, but they're
not the ones that will be purchasing them. I don't think SSBarbie will be
responsible for much loss of followers to paganism unless there is a ready
chord to strike within the individual so inclined, which case the lack of
toy will not much affect future course. In any case, I'd rather see new
aspirants coming from the innocence of SSBarbie and 'Sabrina' (lots of
ethics on that show) and 'Charmed', than from goth and "The Craft" (my
apologies to the better part of the goth subculture, but you know there's a
lot of idiots out there 'posing').

OTOH, I'm hoping the article is merely an early 'trick-or-treat'...

-'Thenie