I used to place Ken’s hand right on the mound of Barbie’s breast. It fit, almost precisely, as if the rounded palm was created for this small act of intimacy. Of course, further south it was merely a place where two legs connected, a smooth sweep of plastic that neither confirmed nor betrayed pleasure. But that didn’t stop me from imagining. I used to sit on the floor between the two twin beds in the upstairs bedroom at my grandmother’s house. My parents’ house was only one-story, and the glamour of my grandmother’s two-story home was synonymous with the ranches of Dallas and vineyards of Falcon Crest. There, overlooking the farms of Lodi, California, I was Crystal lording over my small population of amorous dolls.

In order for Ken’s hand to actually come into contact with Barbie’s breast, his arm had to be raised high above his head; a position of praise, or as if Ken was answering a question in class. To successfully reach her chest, Ken’s eyes would need to be staring somewhere around Barbie’s knees. Somehow, this didn’t matter. This awkward placement of body and hand was inconsequential to the romantic scenarios I so readily created.

Many of them involved a Prom or wedding. Occasionally, a first date. The Barbies rotated, like  a female-forward key party. Magic Curl. Loving Hearts. Peaches n’ Cream. I could count eighteen Barbies to my name, but only one Ken. He was outnumbered, adrift in a sea of slim-waisted women who easily traded him amongst each other like a well-worn recipe. There was no need for commitment or monogamy, especially when the locations for trysts were limited to the fold-out ambulance or flimsy above-ground pool. I don’t remember ever giving Ken a personality. He was, as the recent movie suggests, an accessory, a chaperone of sorts whose only identity was in service to the myriad women whose breasts he found himself cupping.

It’s no wonder, then, that the Barbies would sometimes find one another, their hands, more precisely arched than Ken’s, slightly sharp fingernails along their edges, finding their way like magnets to their kin’s nipple-free bosoms. The women were more interesting than Ken. They had gold wires in their hair that I could use the small plastic curling iron to turn into wild spirals. They had grills upon which flat hamburgers and hot dogs sizzled outside a pink camper. They also had things to say to one another, important facts about life and friendship that became one of the only ways an only child could exorcize the childhood anxieties that plagued me. One of my most prized Barbies was my mother’s, with real eyelashes and a mod orange coat made of felt and gold buttons. Somehow, even though her model was made to look the same timeless age as the rest of my 1980s dolls, this Barbie seemed wiser, a Delphic oracle for me to confide in. And I’d often place her, legs perfectly extended to

90 degrees, atop a shoe box, while the rest of the Barbies sat below her, like supplicants to her wisdom. I, too, would lie down, and tell her how I felt and what hurt me.

In all the years I received Barbies for Christmas, over the decade I spent sitting in the small space between the twin beds creating a world of friendship and clumsy sexuality, I never considered what could be problematic about Barbie. Her whiteness, her extreme body dimensions, her immovable head. I see it now. But at the time, freckled and awkward and practicing kissing on my own hand, these dolls were a gateway into a world I wanted to know more about. Especially when it came to sex. Mine was not a family that talked about sex. I was not given a pamphlet or a lecture, and so my own search for information was indirect and confusing. I was a magpie, desperately gathering information and data like twigs to feather my sexual nest. My attempts at self-education were sporadic and often met with that specific brand of 1980s bullying that I can still feel in my skin.

As a child, I was in a production of The Nutcracker with our local ballet company. During dress rehearsals and performances, we would wait in the basement, slicking each other’s hair back into stiff, iridescent buns. The older girls played a game in which one would bend over and, after returning upright, another girl would press into a specific place on the other’s neck, causing her to faint into a heap of tulle. When they weren’t fainting, they told dirty jokes. The vocabulary was foreign to me, but I tried to play along, laughing when others began to until I was asked to tell one I knew. I snapped my light pink tights against my legs, causing small puffs of dust to dance in the dim light of the basement and quickly put together an amalgam of terms that I’d been collecting over the course of our performance schedule. All I remember is that I included a dance reference, and the punch line was that a couple would plie and releve as a euphemism for sex. My joke was met with silence, until one of the girls, Kristin was her name, arched an eyebrow and, elbowing the closest girl to her, asked, “You’re a virgin, aren’t you?”

I didn’t know the answer to that question, so I went with what I thought was the safest response.

“No, I’m not!” 

And the girls collapsed, not unlike the fainting game, in peals of laughter I can still recall with little effort. 

I skipped a grade. Technically, I did a half a year of kindergarten and a half a year of first grade before moving on to second. As such, I was younger than all of the children in my classes. I’ve often wondered if this might have contributed to my naivete. Or the fact that I was an only child. Or perhaps the two mixed in some sort of strange brew that stunted my development as a prescient sexual being. But I can recall having quite a vivid fantasy life, one that did involve replaying in my head the scene in Vacation when Clark Griswold takes off his wife’s underpants from within the sleeping bag. Something about the grunts they made was so thrilling to me and I’d lie awake, willing those sounds to reverberate in my brain. Sometimes I’d even recreate the scene with Peaches n Cream Barbie and Ken and a knit sock as a surrogate sleeping bag. But the fantasies never traveled from my brain to my body. I was disconnected somehow, scared of the real life implications of what those fantasies might mean outside of my imagination. And when I was nine, I thought I’d found the root of the problem.

It was 1987 and I was lying in bed, listening to my two roommates talk about their bodies. I didn’t have anything to contribute to the conversation, so I stayed quiet, mocking sleep so that they would talk freely together. I was the odd one out of the dormitory bedroom, and these two girls operated much better as a straight line than a triangle. Lindsay was counting the days until her mom would let her wear a training bra, and Randi was wondering when she’d get her period. I felt so honored to be a part, albeit a silent one, of this conversation that I wanted to write down what they were saying in my diary, but didn’t dare break the illusion of slumber. Soon, a discussion of the mechanics of vaginas began and I held my breath. Here was real information I could use, remember, manifest when I returned home to the space between the twin beds. It was only when they began to enumerate the various jobs of the three holes “down there,” that I audibly gasped, causing the conversation to shut down and a general distrust of my presence to begin. But I remembered. And for years after, and I mean years, I was convinced that I was missing a hole. I had a poop hole and a pee hole. But there was no “sex hole” as they called it, giggling as mosquitoes gathered around their ears. I tried looking for my third hole in my bedroom mirror when I got home, but my dad came in the garage at exactly that moment and told me I was disgusting. I stopped, and waited for the day that, perhaps, I would grow that third hole; that it would develop like my breasts were supposed to.

I’d sometimes sit in the small library down the street from my house and secretly read anatomy books. Once, I found a book called The Hair Down There which provided a wealth of information, but it was offered in cartoons, not unlike Peanuts which I read every morning at the breakfast table. Heads were oversized, eyes were just white circles with dots in the middle, and my trust in the accuracy of this book and its diagrams became murky. So I went back to my dolls, who not only listened and offered support and sympathy, clad in their gold lame gowns and leg warmers, but whose genitals were completely hole-less, a feature that, at the time, made me feel slightly less incomplete. If Magic Curl Barbie could have no holes and still be invited to Prom, then maybe there was hope for me. We’d commiserate about how our holes, and lack thereof, would never add up to the correct number, but that didn’t stop us from experimenting and seeing what might work.

I’m not sure I was aware of it at the time, but there must have been a safety in that experimentation. The smooth space that stood in the place of Barbie’s reproductive system, was a blank slate for me to imagine, fail, and try again without specificity. There was an openness inherent in that play that felt shielded from judgment, especially when I thought that there was something missing in my own body; something that might keep me rooted in imaginative play and forbidden from the real experience. My Barbies were a randy bunch and their bodies were so much more evocative than the Cabbage Patch Dolls that also occupied my room. Long before I began sneaking my mom’s copy of The Two Mrs. Granville’s into the bathroom, my Barbies were my initial foray into sensuality and sexuality in ways that feel quite remarkable now. 

As the mother of two sons, I was not privy to a daughter’s exploration. My sons were given their own versions of sexual misinformation from their peers. A child at their elementary school once explained sex as “that time a man eats a woman’s boobs,” which sparked a rather early initiation into bodies and reproductive systems for my children. We have not shied away from these discussions as parents, rather my husband and I wanted to, if anything, over-explain concepts, normalizing feelings and questions in what we hoped was a safe and supportive environment. I know we made mistakes along the way, horrifying our children with certain details, but making ourselves available for any question or concern. Their exploration was their own, though, much as mine was. I do not know with any precision the ways in which they explored and sussed out their own desires. That is a private experience that I was not, and should not have been, a part of. But I do wonder, sometimes. There were no Barbies to guide the way, and the Skylanders they chose to play with instead never seemed laden with potential lust. But I also know that children will find ways to explore and discover, and I can only hope that the sexual information superhighway we paved for them has led them to a healthy relationship with their bodies and the bodies of others.   

I do not blame my parents for not guiding me in this way. I understand the generational and societal mores that most likely contributed to their silence. But I do wish that the time I spent worrying about my missing hole could have been curtailed. I had no one to ask. And in a pre-internet world, if it wasn’t at the library or on a VHS tape, it remained unknown. Even sex education at school fell under the veil of ambiguity. In the sixth grade, girls and boys were separated into different classrooms with same-gendered teachers who showed a short film about sex that featured puppets, not unlike my Barbies, talking about their bodies maturing in new and frightening ways. Again, the choice was made by someone in a position of power, to utilize cartoons, puppets, nonhuman beings to answer the very real and human questions of sexuality, causing many of us to feel slightly more confused when it ended than we did when the projector had initially been rolled into the classroom. When our teacher stood at the end of the film, thirty sixth grade girls waited nervously for what might be described. But she did not use the words “penis” or “vagina.” Instead, we were told about “peninsulas” and “Virginians,” a fact that we eagerly discussed with the boys when we all met on the four–square lines at recess. The irony of vaginas being replaced with a word that described people from a state that was, according to the advertisement, “for lovers” took many years to recognize.

The information gleaned from that film and those words was new and exciting and certainly more than I’d ever received, but it still didn’t explain what was wrong with me and perhaps that’s why I was still playing with Barbies when most of my friends had abandoned them for other playthings, less naive instruments.  In retrospect, I should have asked. I should have flagged someone down, anyone, and asked the questions I wanted answers to. I should have trusted friends my age but I felt such a distance from them, not only age-wise, but socially. This is not a dynamic that has altogether dimmed over time. I still feel, at times, that sense of disconnect, gaps of information, the dirty joke that doesn’t quite land. Now, I can attribute it to social anxiety or neurodivergence or any other handful of things I’ve discussed in therapy and with loved ones, but back then, with my Virginians and cartoon uteri, I had no such definitions. And so I continued to retreat back into my Barbie fantasies at the same time that, I would later find out, my friends were taking those tentative first steps toward reality with others and with their own bodies.

Over time, I was able to suss out more. From HBO After Dark. From Danielle Steele novels that, over time, could open by themselves to the pages I devoured. I drew naked bodies on pieces of notepaper and then ripped them up, flushed them down the toilet so no one would know my clumsy attempts at diagramming myself. I started to understand the logistics of two bodies together, but my own was still a mystery. I don’t know if this naivete emanated from me like a fine vapor, but it seemed the world saw me as innocent, almost cartoon-like. Much like with Randi and Lindsay in that cabin, conversations were had that were not meant for me; on the other sides of walls, words hushed as I passed in school breezeways and cafeterias. It took me years to figure out that when I babysat for my best friend’s little sister, it was so that my friend could go to the parties I hadn’t been invited to.  Those same parties that would serve as fertile ground for exploration and love for my peers, while I remained stuck in a permafrost of childhood that no book or Barbie could thaw.

It would be so lovely to say now, on the precipice of fifty, that these feelings of inadequacy, of aporia, were overcome by age, by marriage, by experience, by motherhood.  But to say that would be misleading and, I’m coming to understand, unhelpful. I’ve been very lucky to have wonderful relationships in my life, all of which taught me about my body and my desires, but sex, so built up in my mind as either frightening, or inappropriate or something “good girls” didn’t do, was off the table from all of them. I used to have to plan for when I would tell a new boyfriend that there was only so far I would go. Some took it in stride, offering me a wide space to explore other avenues of intimacy, others walked away before I could complete my planned speech. Never was I pressured, a fact I find almost unbelievable today. For those who chose to continue forward with me after my proclamation, I was shown such grace that it allowed me to come to terms with my fears in my own time and in my own way. I was honest with those young men, to a fault perhaps, but I was not honest with friends. Very few of my closest friends ever knew that I was a virgin. I’d smile and nod, at times lying during particularly heated bouts of “Never Have I Ever.” It was a shameful truth about me that I was open to sharing with the one person to whom it might matter, but not to the friends who could have offered me support or guidance or even a joke that could  have catapulted me outside of myself.

I did not have sex until I was twenty-four, and that man is the one I am still married to twenty five years later. He is my one and only and it has not been a road without its obstacles. My insecurities have surfaced time and again, but, again, I have been gifted with men in my life who have understood and patiently stood by as I decoded my body and how it works. I’m still figuring out my body. I, who have given birth to two beautiful sons and who now, as a menopausal, middle-aged woman, feel more alive in my sexuality than I ever have. I, who once was told by a doctor that sex would always be painful for me until I “got over it.” I, who once arrived to a date with a British barista with a handwritten letter explaining my virginity. I, who fretted and worried and visited the oracle of Barbie long after it was age-appropriate to do so, have come to a place of tenderness around my sexuality. It has been a journey all my own, filled still with some regrets, and some trepidations, but still mine; a collected works gathered over time that still feels in process.

I learned about my third hole. It was a book called The Teenage Body Book and I bought it while my family was on a trip to Boston for my dad’s national YMCA Convention. I pored over it, taking notes, underlining sections, until I was brave enough to compare my body to the anatomical illustrations. These pictures, absent of any funny hat or speech bubble, were my roadmap to feeling whole.  And when I came home, eager to share my new-found information with my Barbies, they listened and never bemoaned their lack of holes, never resented the smooth spaces of their own bodies. Instead, Oracle Barbie sat atop her shoebox, the rest of us in repose below, and we celebrated. Ken’s arm outstretched high above his head, a position of praise.

 -Katie M. Zeigler

Katie M. Zeigler (she/her/hers) is a writer and professor living in Walnut Creek, CA. She hold a BA and MA in English from Stanford University and an MFA in Creative Writing from St. Mary's College. Her short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the Maine Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Atlas & Alice, The Worcerster Review, The Centifictionist, Digging, Griffel, Wilson Quarterly, Fish Anthology and Stanford Magazine. She was the winner of the 2023 Baltimore Review Winter Contest and the Stanford Magazine Fiction Contest. She currently teaches writing at St. Mary's College and creative writing at Diablo Valley College.