Kelsey

“Barbie taught us a lot—sometimes more than we wanted to know. Her posture showed us that being sexual meant being immobile. It meant: walk on your toes, bust out, limbs rigid. Barbie would flash the white of her teeth, cock her head, swivel on her torso, half raise her smooth arm, but she could say nothing. For Barbie had no conceivable character or inner life. Barbie’s breasts and clothes seemed to blunt her personality. In Barbie’s life, events were merely excuses for ensembles. Her story could really go nowhere. Which meant, perhaps, that once we got over the excitement of getting provocatively dressed and then undressed, our story would go nowhere.
We were fixated on Barbie, but we also despised her. The secret game in countless American basements and playrooms involved (and still does, I am told) little girls doing bad things to Barbie. Sometimes we would make her take positions that were ludicrous or that looked painful. Other times, we would pop her head off the rounded stump of her neck. While this was a nice, French Revolution sort of vengeance, it also scared us. It was scary because even when you held her body in one hand and her head in the other, nothing seemed much changed. After all, she had been made up of parts to start with. Even when fully assembled, she wasn’t whole. Her hands didn’t grasp, her feet didn’t walk, her face had no expression.”
― Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

“This was the only door she ever opened, the door into herself. And her taciturnity was such that in a mirror, where every woman smiles at her reflection, she struck at herself over and over again, hammering her own effigy at her dumb forge. No flame, no air. Clad in red velvet, adorned in white, in black or pearl, her face heavily made up beneath the large pale forehead. In the heart of her room, encircled by candelabras, nothing but herself; a self always unseizable, and whose many faces she was forever unable to assemble in a single look.”
― Valentine Penrose, The Bloody Countess: The Atrocities of Erzsebet Bathory

“There existed between Erzsébet and the external world something like a vacuum, like the padding in a madman’s cell. The eyes of the portrait proclaim it; she wished to seize and couldn’t touch. Then, the wish to be awake but not to be alive, that is what kindles the taste for blood, the blood of others; perhaps this was the hidden secret which, ever since her birth, had been obscured from her.”
― Valentine Penrose, The Bloody Countess: The Atrocities of Erzsebet Bathory