Between 19, Handler sold dolls like hotcakes, and little by little, she gave Barbie a trousseau. Ken, on the other hand, was based on no one but Barbie.

His arms were rigid until the model Superman Ken went on the market in 1977, but his pectorals gradually expanded until he reached, in the medium-term, the appearance of a steroid-pumped bodybuilder.īarbie was originally a thinly veiled plagiarism of Lilli, a German doll based on an erotic comic strip, though Handler insists that she didn’t realize until years later that her inspiration was a young prostitute with a BDSM aesthetic: she found the doll at an adult toy fair, but did not see the comic that it was based on. She gave him the name of her son Kenneth (the younger brother of Barbara, the girl who inspired Barbie), and she gave him the appearance of a thin, blond, attractive post-adolescent, with a skimpy red bathing suit, sandals and a towel over his shoulders. Ruth Handler, creator of Mattel alongside her partner Harold Matson, conceived him as a life partner born out of Barbie’s ribs. Bettmann (Bettmann Archive) Sometimes Barbie and Ken dressed up. Ruth and Elliott Handler, creators of Barbie and Ken with their dolls. He was the satellite of a much bigger, more controversial and more fertile planet. He sold well, though not as well as Barbie. In all that time, he exercised a sort of neutral masculinity. In reality, Ken Carson went mostly unperceived in his first decades of existence, between his birth in 1961 and the last years of the 20th century. In the Barbie universe, which joined our own in the late 1950s, Ken has been an absent presence, a man without a backstory, the consort of a queen who left no space for anyone else on the throne.

This is why his story must be told.” Gosling is right. If you ever really cared about Ken, you would know that nobody cared about Ken.

Like you ever thought about Ken before this? You never cared. Gosling himself, in an interview with GQ and on social media, mentioned the uproar: “I would say, you know, if people don’t want to play with my Ken, there are many other Kens to play with,” he said, “It is funny, this kind of clutching-your-pearls idea of, like, #notmyken.

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