It may be exhausting to imagine how a lot has modified over the previous 30 years for queer People. Within the distant previous of 1993, homosexual marriage wasn’t authorized in any state within the nation. Sodomy legal guidelines throughout America tried to outlaw homosexual intercourse by criminalizing any oral or anal erotic contact. And Dan Savage, a sex-advice columnist then solely recognized to readers of some unbiased alt-newspapers across the nation, was able to making breakout information with a scandalous revelation: Mattel’s newest Ken doll, a part of the Earring Magic line of Barbie toys, was overtly modeled on homosexual trend. And Mattel had unwittingly put a intercourse toy round his neck.
Or, as Savage put it in 1993, “The little ladies of our nice nation wished a hipper Ken, and Mattel gave them a hip Ken. A queer Ken.”
That queer Ken is in Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie, in a short, winking cameo. And given the satirical, understanding tone of the movie — and the scene the place he seems, in a nod to among the most regrettable and hilarious selections within the Barbie toy line through the years — there’s no query that Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach know the title individuals have had for that Ken doll since 1993: “Cock Ring Ken.”
Savage’s 1993 column “Ken Comes Out” lays out the specifics. “Earring Magic Ken” (who doesn’t get his personal credit score in Barbie, alas) sported a sheer and revealing purple mesh shirt, a purple vinyl vest, two-tone hair, a single silver earring, and a gold band round one elbow. He additionally got here with a pair of shiny plastic earrings for his proprietor to put on. “However Earring Magic Ken is sporting one other accoutrement that’s been largely missed,” Savage wrote. “[H]anging round Ken’s neck, on a metallic silver thread, is what ten out of ten individuals within the know will inform you at a look is a cock ring.”
Savage actually doesn’t assume Mattel got down to equip Ken with a cock ring: He initially means that within the quest for a modern celebration outfit, Mattel designers took photos of individuals at nightclubs and translated their outfits right into a doll design. “On nearer inspection, Ken’s whole Earring Magic outfit seems to be three-year-old rave put on,” he wrote. And he describes chrome cock ring necklaces — which is to say, necklaces precisely just like the one on Earring Magic Ken — as “de rigueur rave put on” for the period.
“For a few yr each homosexual boy at a rave was carrying not less than one,” Savage wrote. “[T]hese cock rings have been usually pressed into service later within the night, to assist completely tweaked ravers sustain what the X was flattening.”
Twenty years later, Savage’s column is effectively price revisiting — and never simply to get the gag in Barbie about why Earring Magic Ken was a questionable design alternative, alongside Sugar Daddy Ken, a 2009 “grownup collector line” doll whose suggestive title appears extra deliberate than Cock Ring Ken’s attire. (See, he has a canine named Sugar, and he’s the canine’s “daddy.” Even on this age of individuals treating their pets as youngsters, it’s nonetheless exhausting to purchase that nobody concerned with that doll’s design supposed any double entendre.)
No, the actual causes to learn the “Ken Comes Out” piece at this time are the hilarity of watching Savage query a Mattel rep in regards to the doll (she clearly thinks he’s simply messing along with her), and the revelations about how neatly Earring Magic Ken’s design captures an inflection level of change round queer voices in mainstream America.
America vilifying its queer residents and hanging on to legal guidelines criminalizing them (which the Supreme Court docket had upheld as not too long ago as 1986) whereas additionally appropriating from them was nothing new. Look again on the whole historical past of Hollywood, and also you’ll see creatives and artists admiring and stealing from queer tradition, and weaponizing the tastes of queer creators whereas holding them underground and within the closet. What was new within the early ’90s, and what Dan Savage pinned down particularly, was an MTV-driven period the place queerness was pushing into mainstream life sooner than the Ethical Majority sorts might sustain with — and even observe.
“What the little ladies have been seeing, and telling Mattel was cool, wasn’t what their relations have been carrying — until they’d hip queer family members — however the homoerotic fashions and imagery they have been seeing on MTV, what they noticed Madonna’s dancers carrying in her concert events and movies and, because it occurs, what ACT UP/Queer Nation fags and dykes have been carrying to demos and raves,” Savage wrote. “Queer imagery has so permeated our tradition that from rock stars (Axl Rose and his leather-based chaps) to toy designers, mainstream America isn’t even conscious when it’s adopting queer fashions and mores. Or when it’s placing cock rings, even little plastic ones, into the palms of little ladies.”
Barbie doesn’t try and unpack any of this, naturally sufficient. Earring Magic Ken — or Cock Ring Ken, if you happen to favor — sails by as a fast gag about discontinued dolls, simply one in all roughly one million of the film’s visible and verbal jokes in regards to the Barbie line. So far as we might inform from the few seconds he’s on display, he isn’t even carrying the necklace, although that’s one thing we’ll be expecting extra carefully as soon as clips of the film can be found.
But it surely’s price taking his presence in Barbie as a reminder of a really particular and explicit second in advertising and marketing historical past, one the place designers attempting to co-opt coolness didn’t notice how briskly they have been serving to change historical past and transfer the world ahead. Writers in addition to Dan Savage observed what they referred to as the “gender bending” points of Earring Magic Ken; they simply didn’t have the working data of queer tradition to pin down precisely what they have been seeing. Cock Ring Ken didn’t change the world, however he certain was an indication of how a lot it was altering in his day — and the way rapidly.