poetry / writing prompts

Those Dolls

Chris Hall60 Comments

I never had a Barbie and certainly not a Ken.
I never liked dolls in anyway at all.
I even found them a little scary in fact.

But now I’m thinking that Barbie and Ken
might be quite useful,
in some way or another?

~~~~~~~

Image credit: Julee Juu @Unsplash

For the visually challenged reader, this image shows Barbie lying on a picnic blanket looking through a magazine and Ken standing next to her with a bag from McDonald’s. There is a pizza box lying next to her too. In the background, you can see a lush green lawn, trees, and a blue sky!

Written in response to Sadje‘s What Do You See #283 photo prompt.

What do you see # 283- 7th April, 2025

60 thoughts on “Those Dolls”

  3. Fun poem, Chris. I had two Barbie dolls before but as I have two older brothers, I ended up playing with their toys more. Sometimes we’d use my dolls as action figures. My dolls were martial artists 😄

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  7. I don’t remember them before 69. My sister wanted one but the budget was too tight. My wife was not aware of them, and wouldn’t have bothered with one. We loved the 2022 movie – clever. But I wonder, is there any good in a commercial product?

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      • I remember that it looked like a little suitcase; had a suitcase handle, and little latch, and I could either plug it in to a power point or wind it up. I used to like winding it up, setting the flipper whatsis to F-for-fast, and playing Teddy Bear’s Picnic. They sounded like chipmunks singing. I didn’t have that record for long though; on the label it said it was ‘unbreakable’ … so I bent it until it broke—discovered what Not fit for use meant. I was a very difficult child: naked dolls flying off turntables and breaking the unbreakable. I’m still trying to break the unbreakable! 🤣

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  14. I never had a Barbie or a Sindy. Not my thing. Sis and i did have dolls though, and Great Gram used to make them new outfits when she came to stay in the holidays. Our dollies were the best dressed on the estate!

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  15. I begged my mother for a Barbie doll, but she refused to get me one because she didn’t want me to get unrealistic expectations about my future womanly body. She got me a Tammy doll, who had wee little breasts, and accurate prediction of mine.

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  17. I’m with Liz, we never had Barbies either, for the same reason as her mom’s. I have to say my mom was ahead of her time in that respect. She always told us we were fine the way we were, and she didn’t want us to be influenced by the world’s view of what constituted “beauty”. Our older cousin did give us a couple of hers as hand me downs, but I don’t remember us playing with them that much.

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  22. This picture reminds me of the Barbie storybooks I saw as a kid, where the dolls and accessories were posed to for pictures to go with the stories. Literature disguises toy catalogs, I guess! lol

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