Barbies gay Ken Easter egg, explained

It can be hard to believe how much has changed over the past 30 years for queer Americans. In the distant past of 1993, gay marriage wasn’t legal in any state in the country. Sodomy laws all over America attempted to outlaw gay sex by criminalizing any oral or anal erotic contact. And Dan Savage, a sex-advice columnist then only known to readers of a few independent alt-newspapers around the country, was capable of making breakout news with a scandalous revelation: Mattel’s latest Ken doll, part of the Earring Magic line of Barbie toys, was openly modeled on gay fashion. And Mattel had unwittingly put a sex toy around his neck.

Or, as Savage put it in 1993, “The little girls of our great nation wanted a hipper Ken, and Mattel gave them a hip Ken. A queer Ken.”

That queer Ken is in Greta Gerwig’s movie Barbie, in a brief, winking cameo. And given the satirical, knowing tone of the film — and the scene where he appears, in a nod to some of the most regrettable and hilarious choices in the Barbie toy line over the years — there’s no question that Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach know the name people 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 own credit 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 around one elbow. He also came with a pair of shiny plastic earrings for his owner to wear. “But Earring Magic Ken is sporting another accoutrement that’s been largely overlooked,” Savage wrote. “[H]anging around Ken’s neck, on a metallic silver thread, is what ten out of ten people in the know will tell you at a glance is a cock ring.”

Savage certainly doesn’t think Mattel set out to equip Ken with a cock ring: He initially suggests that in the quest for a fashionable party outfit, Mattel designers took pictures of people at nightclubs and translated their outfits into a doll design. “On closer inspection, Ken’s entire Earring Magic outfit turns out to be three-year-old rave wear,” he wrote. And he describes chrome cock ring necklaces — which is to say, necklaces exactly like the one on Earring Magic Ken — as “de rigueur rave wear” for the era.

“For about a year every gay boy at a rave was wearing at least one,” Savage wrote. “[T]hese cock rings were often pressed into service later in the evening, to help totally tweaked ravers keep up what the X was pulling down.”

Thirty years later, Savage’s column is well worth revisiting — and not just to get the gag in Barbie about why Earring Magic Ken was a questionable design choice, alongside Sugar Daddy Ken, a 2009 “adult collector line” doll whose suggestive name seems more deliberate than Cock Ring Ken’s apparel. (See, he has a dog named Sugar, and he’s the dog’s “daddy.” Even in this age of people treating their pets as kids, it’s still hard to buy that no one involved with that doll’s design intended any double entendre.)

No, the real reasons to read the “Ken Comes Out” piece today are the hilarity of watching Savage question a Mattel rep about the doll (she clearly thinks he’s just messing with her), and the revelations about how neatly Earring Magic Ken’s design captures an inflection point of change around queer voices in mainstream America.

America vilifying its queer citizens and hanging on to laws criminalizing them (which the Supreme Court had upheld as recently as 1986) while also appropriating from them was nothing new. Look back at the entire history of Hollywood, and you’ll see creatives and artists admiring and stealing from queer culture, and weaponizing the tastes of queer creators while keeping them underground and in the closet. What was new in the early ’90s, and what Dan Savage pinned down specifically, was an MTV-driven era where queerness was pushing into mainstream life faster than the Moral Majority types could keep up with — or even track.

“What the little girls were seeing, and telling Mattel was cool, wasn’t what their relations were wearing — unless they had hip queer relatives — but the homoerotic fashions and imagery they were seeing on MTV, what they saw Madonna’s dancers wearing in her concerts and films and, as it happens, what ACT UP/Queer Nation fags and dykes were wearing to demos and raves,” Savage wrote. “Queer imagery has so permeated our culture that from rock stars (Axl Rose and his leather chaps) to toy designers, mainstream America isn’t even aware when it’s adopting queer fashions and mores. Or when it’s putting cock rings, even little plastic ones, into the hands of little girls.”

Barbie doesn’t attempt to unpack any of this, naturally enough. Earring Magic Ken — or Cock Ring Ken, if you prefer — sails by as a quick gag about discontinued dolls, just one of approximately a million of the movie’s visual and verbal jokes about the Barbie line. As far as we could tell from the few seconds he’s on screen, he isn’t even wearing the necklace, though that’s something we’ll be watching for more closely once clips of the movie are available.

But it’s worth taking his presence in Barbie as a reminder of a very specific and particular moment in marketing history, one where designers trying to co-opt coolness didn’t realize how fast they were helping change history and move the world forward. Writers besides Dan Savage noticed what they called the “gender bending” aspects of Earring Magic Ken; they just didn’t have the working knowledge of queer culture to pin down exactly what they were seeing. Cock Ring Ken didn’t change the world, but he sure was a sign of how much it was changing in his day — and how quickly.

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