What Barbie and TV Taught Me About My Body

Barbie’s waist was about the circumference of a quarter.

That was my first body lesson.

I did not even think about how my body looked until third grade, when someone made a comment about my stirrup leggings. It was not shouted. It was not cruel in a dramatic way. It was casual. Thoughtless. The kind of comment that lands because it was never meant to. In that instant, I went from being a kid to being a body. And in my head, I have felt fat ever since.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s, there were not a lot of counter-messages. Barbie was everywhere, lined up in toy aisles, perched in pink boxes, her impossible proportions presented as normal, aspirational, and feminine. Her body was baked into every storyline we made up on the carpet. She never ate. She never slouched. She never took up space. She existed to be looked at, and she was perfect at it.

On television, the lesson continued. My afternoons were filled with Saved by the Bell and Boy Meets World, shows that pretended to be about friendship and growing up, but quietly reinforced the same truth. The girls were tiny-waisted, glossy-haired, effortlessly desirable. They were never awkward for long. They were never allowed to be unattractive. Even when they were “learning a lesson,” their bodies remained untouched by consequence.

At night, I often sat with my grandma watching soap operas, especially Days of Our Lives. The women floated across the screen like goddesses, draped in glamour, lit just so. Their beauty was not incidental. It was the point. It was power, currency, survival. They were dramatic, desired, unforgettable. And they all looked the same.

Between Barbie’s plastic waist and the women of Days of Our Lives, I learned early that my body was already wrong.

By the time diet culture fully took hold in the 90s, the message had already set up shop in my brain. Fat-free everything. Heroin chic. “Beach body” ads screaming from magazines at checkout lines. Shrink. Erase. Be less. This was not framed as cruelty. It was framed as self-improvement. If you failed, it was because you lacked discipline, not because the standard was impossible.

The fallout has been decades long.

I have lived in disordered eating, in quiet calorie calculations, in the reflex of hiding food wrappers like evidence of a crime. I have lived in cycles of control and collapse, shame and resolve. I have lost seventy pounds. I am smaller than I have been since high school.

None of that changed the voice in my head.

Inside, I still feel like the third grader in stirrup leggings who was told, in one careless moment, that her body was too much.

Even now, when my husband tells me I am beautiful, my brain translates it into static. I stand in front of the mirror and try to see what he sees, but Barbie’s quarter-sized waist is still there, hovering like a measurement I can never escape. And when it comes to my face, the quiet comparisons linger too. The airbrushed skin. The flawless hair. The polished beauty absorbed from every screen I grew up watching. Impossible then. Impossible now.

When the Barbie movie came out, I adored it. Not in a nostalgic way, but in a weary one. It felt less like entertainment and more like an apology for past transgressions. A glitter-covered acknowledgment of what my generation endured. Watching it, I felt a pang of recognition. For the first time, Barbie was not telling me to disappear. She was admitting she had been wrong all along.

But apologies do not erase programming.

The girls who grew up in my era, born around 1979, raised on Barbie dolls, diet commercials, and soap opera divas, we are still unlearning the lies. We are still trying to believe compliments without suspicion. Still trying to eat without guilt. Still trying to make peace with mirrors that never learned how to tell the truth.

Barbie was never supposed to look like me.

But maybe I was never supposed to look like her either.

Barbie was plastic.

I am alive.

And that is the body story I want to leave behind.

If you made it this far, guess what? This is just one piece. My brain has more. Follow for more.