1Limited To
In the early nineties, Mattel debuted a short-lived edition of their iconic dolls called Teen Talk Barbie. She was their first talking doll in decades, and finally, young girls could have a more modernized talking Barbie to represent their plight. Each Teen Talk Barbie would say four randomly selected phrases (from the 270 that were preprogrammed) upon pushing a button, including:
“Will we ever have enough clothes?”
“I love shopping!”
“Do you have a crush on anyone?”
“I love romantic music.”
“Meet me at the mall.”
“Let’s plan our dream wedding!”
“Wanna have a pizza party?”
“Wouldn’t you love to be a lifeguard?”
There were endless combinations of phrases for each doll, but those are a few of my favorites. However, this was not a favorite doll among many parents and activist groups, because depending on the four phrases she rotated through, it was unlikely you’d receive a well-rounded Barbie with a balance of topics related to school, boys, shopping, and hobbies within the random choosing of four out of 270 phrases, though I don’t know the exact statistics. In my defense, I wholeheartedly agree with the phrase Teen Talk Barbie said that ultimately got her pulled off shelves:
“Math class is tough!”
In short, she is me. I am her. Math class really was tough for me; the mall was my third place; I loved clothes, boys, love songs, and pizza parties. And I have a pulse and grew up in the nineties, so of course, I’ve always glamourized lifeguard culture. According to an article from October 1992 in the Chicago Tribune titled “Barbie! Say it isn’t so!”5 even though some dolls said, “Let’s start a business!” or “I’m studying to be a doctor!,” depending on the phrases and the order in which they were said, Teen Talk Barbie’s interests could appear problematically narrow for young girls, causing the American Association of University Women and many parents to protest her existence successfully. Initially, the ask was to remove the phrase about math class, but the manufacturer had no way of knowing which Teen Talk Barbies on the shelves said which phrases, so it would’ve been impossible to recall and reprogram them.
So, what were owners of Teen Talk Barbie allegedly offered as a replacement for the controversial dialogue? A mute model, aka a doll that said nothing.
This has been my experience in life trying to navigate my feminine interests. Early on, I owned my truth and proudly chatted about the hyperfeminine things I liked, before I understood their labeling as superficial, only to be silenced when I was told they aren’t things a woman should like in order to be taken seriously. You’ll later read how this has impacted me well into my thirties, where I now feel the need to order a pumpkin spice latte (PSL) incognito, so I don’t appear too “basic” upon drinking a cozy fall treat. But in the context of “Math class is tough!” I genuinely understand the backlash; if we want toys to serve as role models, this wasn’t exactly helpful in getting more young women engaged with STEM fields that (especially at the time) were marked by our severe underrepresentation. But the doll was developed from a great deal of market research and wasn’t designed to be something to aspire to; rather, it was supposed to meet young girls where they were, serving more as one of their peers. And in the nineties, I was less of a woman in STEM and more of a girl who just wanted to have nice stems, happily (if not naïvely) existing with my peers somewhere between “Do you have a crush on anyone?” and “Meet me at the mall!”
As a kid, I was shy, curious, and sensitive, and I surrounded myself with things that dared to be bolder and less plain than I felt. From observing the popular girls with big personalities to the glitter and glamour of pop stars to the self-expression I found in consumerism, literally making my every day a little more glittery with tubs of sparkly body gel. I started by studying my sister, Kelly; we were four years apart, and her world seemed much cooler than mine. From a young age, pop culture served as a unifier, bridging the age gap with our shared love of music, TV, and light crafting. When I think about it, she and her best friend, Monica, were my original influencers, and I remember a lot about elementary school, probably because I was attempting to collect enough data by copying their every move. I’d marvel at the craftsmanship of their oversized sweatshirts with ambiguously sourced iron-on decals outlined with puff paints, studying the effort put into matching the design of a folded-down turtleneck underneath, worn over stirrup leggings sensibly anchored into a pair of Keds. Monica said that her dream car was a Mazda Miata, and for years I’d tell people that my dream car, too, was a Mazda Miata, never having seen one before. I could often be found sporting one of Kelly’s Peace Frog T-shirts to school, so everyone knew I was cultured in that mall-kiosk sort of way, and I was green with envy when she was old enough to hit up the Piercing Pagoda and have some sixteen-year-old probably named Trevor pierce her ears, leaving me in the dust to oversee our collection of clip-on and stick-on earrings.
Our shared love of pop culture started to wear on me when we became fragmented by the entertainment that was considered age-appropriate. But the perk of this age difference was that it was a dream to sneak into her room and get to consume more mature content, stealing her Romeo + Juliet soundtrack at every turn so I could giggle at the band name “Butthole Surfers,” or unknowingly curse the name of my beloved Uncle Joey via scream-singing “You Oughta Know,” which I later found out was rumored to be about Full House’s Dave Coulier. Much to the discontent of my ears (but to the delight of my eyes!), Kelly dabbled in floor-to-ceiling nineties door beads in high school, which turned my covert operation of breaking into her room into an obvious criminal cacophony.
While door beads were a stunning interior accent for a teenager (which Limited Too and Britney’s Oops!… I Did It Again cover dreams were made of), they were also profoundly impractical. They get caught in your hair, snag the fibers of your sweater, and make it incredibly difficult to carry things in and out of the room. On top of that, they were also incredibly loud, waking us all up in the middle of the night, like an indoor plastic wind chime nobody asked for. When the noise was brought to her attention, instead of removing the door beads, she decided her best bet was to military-style crawl under them at night every single time she came and went from her room. To this day, I’ve never witnessed such a commitment to aesthetics at the expense of practicality. For any doubts cast her way about her love of spirited décor, she casts another seasonal throw pillow onto her couch in celebration of her taste, and I have always loved this about her. May we all do more of the same.
My mom, dad, sister, brother (and my dog, Daisy Mae), and I lived in a suburb of Richmond, Virginia, for most of my life. My sister and I spent our days pretending to be the Olympics women’s gymnastics team or figure skaters, making it a full family operation, whether tasking my brother as the announcer on an echo mic, having my mom score our routines, or insisting my dad document them on VHS. The early days of our furniture-less family room that my parents would apologize for was a childhood luxury to me; I felt I’d hit the jackpot, having ample carpeted space to perfect my skills, doing cartwheels and roundoffs and triple axles for hours worthy of tinfoil medals. We’d make up dances to “Achy Breaky Heart” or “Kokomo” and make sure my dad filmed those, too, with his giant heavy camcorder in case Ed McMahon called and needed the footage for Star Search. Most of my early memories of childhood are charmingly disconnected; time was measured between pool parties, Scholastic book fairs, and stapled construction paper ring countdowns to Christmas, followed by Valentine’s papier–mâché shoebox making and gumball raking to hold us over until the lightning bugs ushered back in Ghost in the Graveyard season. Making our own fun from scratch was uncomplicated, and I appreciate how it required us to be more creative, but even back then, I knew I had big Ariel “Part of Your World” vibes, and was dying to do as much research as possible for the activities on dry land I was too young to participate in.
If it were up to me, I would have been the most extreme version of a nineties iPad kid, but early on, access to TV, movies, and media was more limited, arguably fueling my obsession. In my house, there were finite windows of TV watching allowed, MPAA guidelines followed for movies, and absolutely no TVs in bedrooms. All of their rules made sense and went along with guidelines for age appropriateness, but I wasn’t having it. There were workarounds; for example, it was always a thrill to watch inappropriate programming at other people’s houses, and I feel bad for saying this, but I honestly remember hesitating to return to a friend’s place upon learning they didn’t have cable, as if we had irreconcilable differences. I would take them under my wing, making the rare recommendation to go to my house after school, knowing we could at least soak in some blue rays for thirty minutes to an hour. I feel bad if I was judgmental about this because I didn’t understand cable was cost-prohibitive. However, I did understand what it was like to be pop-culturally excluded, so I felt it was my duty to introduce friends to new shows. After all, I couldn’t be a snob about it; I felt like a woman of the people because I hadn’t reached the zenith of what you could watch on a Zenith: the subscription-based Disney Channel.
At my house, the workaround was to strategically watch certain shows or channels when unsupervised or everyone was asleep, with your finger feverishly glued to the RETURN or BACK button on the remote. In the event of a parent passing by, you could flip from MTV or VH1 to Nickelodeon quickly. But even then, my parents had some hot takes. Ren & Stimpy was too crass, but not Doug; noted. Roundhouse was too mature, but not All That; got it. Like Lori Beth Denberg, it was Vital Information for me to understand these preferences, because as badly as I wanted the scoop, there is nothing I ever wanted as badly as staying out of trouble. I’m sure they knew the whole time, but I convinced myself I was outsmarting them by pretending I was watching Get Smart on Nick at Nite when I was visibly sweating after switching off Beavis and Butt-Head in the nick of time at night, but I felt like it was harmless. Little did my mom know, I was pretty in the loop with mature themes and teenage at-risk behavior. I mean, I watched Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” video. I had seen some stuff.
Since my access to TV and movies was limited, the other ideal place for doing R&D about the teenage world was the mall. And like Teen Talk Barbie, it was where I felt like I belonged. I recall discovering my passion for the mall as a preteen at a magical place called Limited Too. One day I was feeling particularly blue, and I walked past an item that read DO YOU LIKE ME? CHECK YES, NO, MAYBE SO. My stomach dropped. I had recently tried to employ this method when I passed a note to my classmate Josh, asking him out, offering these three options: yes, no, maybe. Imagine my delight when he passed it back to me with a promising “maybe,” as I spent several days preparing for my yes, with my optimism only mitigated by the ever-present threat of jinxes. I was so excited about my first boyfriend; my thoughts were consumed with girlfriend cosplay as I tried to figure out if I’d be a DJ to his Steve or a Kelly to his Zack. But like Icarus flying too close to The One, I came crashing down when he had a friend tell me in the cafeteria he wanted to change his answer to “no.”
On the heels of this “no,” I found a sense of home at the mall, likely under a sign in Limited Too that said something like IT’S A GIRL’S WORLD, floating above the racks of clothing, accessories, and sassy sayings inside the store. I remember it being a wonderland of rotating rainbow lights, the curliest fonts, inflatable furniture, funky hair accessories, photo booths, and a personal-care section with gateway tween cosmetics. With multicolored daisies everywhere, flower power appeared to be a domineering authority, but the feminine fanfare solicited overt girl power, too. For me, girl power wasn’t new. I was a Spice Girl, after all, from my commitment to their branded Chupa Chups to begging my mom for a platform shoe. My friend crew recently had to ditch our Spice Girls Halloween costumes because the boys in our school seemed to think they weren’t hip, so I assume I dodged the shirts that read my favorite Spice name, BABY, to instead rifle through graphic tees that said ANGEL, DIVA, and I DIDN’T ASK TO BE A PRINCESS, BUT IF THE CROWN FITS. Upon fact-checking my memories of Limited Too, I saw other tees from that era that read I ONLY SHOP ON DAYS THAT END IN Y. I wished. I was there to shop ’til I dropped the thought of Josh, a name I thought was hot ever since I saw Clueless. I was hoping to buy a fuzzy pen like Cher’s to circle tips from a magazine a friend shared about how to shave the fuzz off our legs.
Thinking back to how I felt as a preteen in a suburban mall is a sensory experience. Where else are young people on a leaf-raking budget actively encouraged to take up space? I spent many days there with my girlfriends, subsisting on Auntie Anne’s pretzel samples, makeovers from buying one Clinique lip gloss, and gaming the free-gift-with-purchase system like the Groupon queens we’d later become. I loved the sights, the sounds, and the skylights paired with mediocre indoor landscaping that attempts to provide an indoor-outdoor coastal feel in a landlocked state. Despite buying almost nothing, the mall still somehow provided everything. You could further your education at Waldenbooks but spend most of your time browsing the boy-band-calendar section. You could listen to only demos of those boy bands at Sam Goody and pretend you were in the “One Sweet Day” music video when you put on the giant headphones. You could exercise your musical talents further with rain sticks at Natural Wonders, but not before debating if you wanted to buy a single polished rock and place it in a velvet bag (an early sign that millennials would later resort to crystals for self-care). I used to love the wholesome Beatrix Potter energy of Crabtree & Evelyn juxtaposed with the market research one could collect at Spencer Gifts in the key-chain section to learn new curse words. I could then relax and rejuvenate from my guilt toward my expletive enchantment with a chair massage at a Brookstone. If I had been loaded, I would’ve taken my talents to get a Sharper Image of myself at Glamour Shots, but my mom never seemed interested in sponsoring photos of me at age ten with a smoky-eyed sultry stare and a used showgirl’s boa.
I recall being intoxicated by the smell of loose change in a fountain, envious of its riches because I had to find something within my allowance budget to get that shopper’s high. Per the canon of the board game Mall Madness, I knew that the only way to lose after a day at the mall is not to buy anything. I found an alternate solution for my under-construction conspicuous consumption and would often take my talents to the barrels at Bath & Body Works, where they sold miniature hand sanitizers that I decided were the perfect timeless, affordable, and fragrant option under five dollars. At the time, Bath & Body Works had an indoor-market feel with barrels of products leading the display, almost like a Cracker Barrel, just without the rocking chairs and with a lot more teenage theft. There were also stunning red gingham awnings that pulled me in like a moth to a flaming redhead because they reminded me of the elegance of Felicity Merriman’s canopy bed. I think I speak on behalf of many American Girls ° o ° when I say that as a kid, I assumed the ultimate status symbol of wealth was a canopy bed. I grew up circling Felicity’s red-checkered linens to remind Santa that my collection would forever feel incomplete without a proper Colonial bedchamber. Underneath the shade of these indoor awnings, I would dig and dig through piles of uninspired Country Apple and Sun-Ripened Raspberry sanitizers, hoping to get my hands (and then sanitize them) on the holy-grail hot-girl scents: Cucumber Melon, Warm Vanilla Sugar, and Sweet Pea. It was the most affordable way I could own an item that held status at school, and most of my memories of going to the mall over the years were no different. I’d acquire popular branded consumer goods to be in good standing with my peers, hoping brands would green-light me as a likable human when I was wading through preteen uncertainty that made it challenging to like myself.
If I went into the lore of a Hot Topic, I’d get way too off-topic, but that was where my sister bought a shiny shirt and pair of butterfly hologram platform sandals with her F.U. babysitting money that would spark my love for high fashion. And by that, I mean the fashions that only look appealing to you when you’re likely high from spending too much time sniffing Fierce cologne inside an Abercrombie.
Admittedly, it was always exciting to get slightly asphyxiated by the cologne pumping out of a Hollister or an Abercrombie & Fitch. They were effectively the Subway sandwich shop of the galleria with their forced fragrances that subliminally influenced me to buy more paper-thin layers, or perhaps spend my entire allowance on an age-inappropriate shirt that said MIDNIGHT COWGIRL. The hope was that an employee might notice you, because everyone knew that if you were hot, you got asked to work there. Later I’d come to realize I was likely too young for a part-time job in my peak mall-rat days and maybe that’s why I was never asked, but if I’m being honest, it’s also fair to say that preorthodontic work, my looks were better suited for a Wet Seal stockroom. But I didn’t care. This was the height of nineties makeover-obsessed America; there was hope for everyone, and all the beautiful things and people at the mall made me dream of my potential. However, thinking about the mall serving as a linoleum castle of self-improvement through consumption is precisely why I can’t quite figure out if I honor these memories or if I, too, was inappropriately programmed like Teen Talk Barbie.
When I reflect on my immersion in nineties mall culture, I feel confused. Perhaps the most accurate depiction of being in a “girl’s world” at Limited Too in my earliest mall days was me seeking a sense of empowerment through clothes or accessories or makeup to modify something about my image in the presence of male rejection. But can’t a gal with a deflated ego window-shop for an inflatable sofa, if only to be reminded that the person she loves will one day be seated next to her on an elegant love seat made of 100 percent plastic? On the one hand, it doesn’t actually feel that deep. The store did feel like a girl’s world, an aesthetic love-bombing that made me feel like—despite my age and broken heart—I could take on the world, Too. But on the other hand, through the lens of Teen Talk Barbie’s assumed difficulty with math, these candy-coated memories look disproportionately bleak. In the context of preteen girls trying on in fitting rooms T-shirts that said I LEFT MY BRAIN IN MY LOCKER, the shoe fits. Beyond that fuzzy pen, what Cher and I shared is that they wanted us to believe we were Clueless.
I think about the toys and games I loved to play in my childhood, and while gender-neutral or STEM-focused toys for girls were less common in the nineties, I still could have built stuff with LEGO bricks or Lincoln Logs or played Risk with my brother if I wanted to. But I didn’t. My parents tried introducing me to more intellectual and cultural pursuits. I couldn’t be bothered. Other than being a Francophile in terms of my interest in French manicures or magazine how-tos about French kissing, I didn’t have particularly cultured interests. I spent my days willingly and gleefully as the material girl next door, doing a round-robin of neighborhood friends’ houses that had the good games, and for me, the more superficial, the better. I loved Pretty Pretty Princess, where you’re taught success means simply just collecting more jewelry than the rest of your friends. While it’s not exactly virtuous, it’s also not not true, so I did learn something playing that game. I also loved to dabble in fictitious credit-card debt with the aforementioned game Mall Madness. The goal? To finish your shopping list! How to excel? Score a sale, of course! There were valuable lessons of savviness and task completion amidst the overt cosplaying of consumerism. I guess the devil works hard, but capitalism works harder. But I didn’t know better; before we had Lady Gaga to make us feel comfortable in our skin for being “Born This Way,” we had Mall Madness ads on Nickelodeon telling young girls in the early nineties we were “BORN to shop!” reinforcing what we already knew from the likes of Teen Talk Barbie and T-shirts that said we only shop on days that end in “y.” To be fair, the messaging was everywhere, and I ate it up. With all these cultural touch points reinforcing how I’m a girl and must love to shop, how would I not take it as some sort of a calling?
If I wasn’t doing that, I was pretend-calling teenage boys with the board game Dream Phone, whose name says it all. A dream of a game that came with a hot-pink phone, where the entire objective was to call boys who provided minimal, robotic-like responses to narrow down who had a crush on you. Again, it’s not not accurate for what it’s like to date in the modern world. I had to get through countless less-than-charming text responders of the word “k” before I found my prince who took the time to spell out the entire word “ok.” The least realistic thing about the game was that all the boys I was interested in would pick up my calls, so if anything, it was aspirational. Another game I spent a lot of time playing was called Girl Talk: A Game of Truth or Dare. It was a board game where you had to pick truth or dare, and if you didn’t do an embarrassing dare or admit an equally humiliating truth in front of your friends, you got penalized. But not with something arbitrary like losing points in a game; rather, with a simulation of (a girl’s assumed) worst nightmare: getting a zit. Each game came with a sheet of fake red zit stickers to serve as a visible penalty to your beauty if you were uncooperative. The layers! I guess long before “chicks before dicks” entered my girl-world lexicon, I learned to put the demands of chicks before zits by participating in games of truth or dare that bordered on bullying in the name of peer pressure and a clear complexion.
A common theme you’ll hear throughout this book is how I often struggle with the dichotomy between celebrating the things I grew up with for what they were while also criticizing the way they shaped my worldview. I know that in many ways my interests are a product of the boxes I was placed in, but when you’re inside a box and don’t know any better, it looks a lot like freedom. So I decorated that box the best I could and had a great time playing games of being at the mall, playing truth or dare, and talking about boys, zit stickers and all. Looking back on my girlhood I’m both charmed by my earnest devotion to semisexist things and horrified that they represented a set of options that seemed so comprehensive of my worldview, I didn’t even notice it was narrow. But when I think about the ever-present misogynistic trivializing of women’s interests, I also feel frustrated by the hypocrisy and want to defend all of this behavior vehemently. How dare they criticize the way we’ve chosen to decorate the boxes they’ve put us in? I find there’s great irony in how society aggressively promotes the same things to girls they ultimately shame them for caring about, like growing up surrounded by media that taught us to only care about boys, clothes, and shopping, only to be told you’re vapid if you’re boy crazy, love fashion, and hang out at the mall. Shows like Baywatch were made to pander to straight males, whose gaze is often centered in mass culture, so this trickled down to girls like me developing a fascination with the glamour of lifeguard culture, which likely showed up in the focus groups that influenced Teen Talk Barbie. It’s all interconnected. It bothers me to no end that the same world that programmed us to like these things also tells us that we shouldn’t tell people they are our interests if we want to be taken seriously. When it comes to women, it often feels like they’d prefer the mute model.
I guess Too things can be true: I found comfort in consumerism at Limited Too on the heels of male rejection, and I look back on this fondly. I had a great time playing Mall Madness, Dream Phone, Girl Talk, etc. But I’m also alarmed that my instincts were no more dimensional than a doll who was comparably programmed to vacillate between mentions of her crush and going shopping. Some days I want to rage against the way I was programmed; some days, I want to be allowed to just exist. Some days I’m not totally convinced that there’s enough distance between my hyperfeminine nature and the way stereotypically feminine things nurtured me; maybe they just got the right target audience. But then I become concerned about being brainwashed with some sort of Mars-Venus logic that tells women gender roles are a product of innate preferences and not oppression. Perhaps for me, it was a mixture of both, and I don’t know how to feel about it. The older I get, I guess I’m still playing truth or dare in a sense; I’m trying to sit in my truth, but some days I dare to ask if that truth was ever mine to begin with. Like the Facebook relationship status millennials became known for in the aughts or my second-favorite Nancy Meyers film, it’s safe to say It’s Complicated.
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