Barbie, Laughter, Happiness
The excellent Jeff Miller quotes Ann Althouse on changes to Barbie:
“Not only does Barbie now look about 13 years old, she’s got her mouth open in the can’t-stop-talking position. I have never even accepted Barbie smiling. To me, Barbie has always been this [solemn] face. She doesn’t smile. She’s not a child. She’s a glamorous, sophisticated woman. She’s not an empty-headed chatterbox.”Miller then asks, “How did this happen to Barbie? Why did this happen to Barbie? Is it because beauty and fame used to be this and now it is this?”
Discussing the ways that societies develop, elaborate, and propagate their male and female ideals is an enormous undertaking, particularly if you’ve any sympathy for the incredible pressures such ideals put on people. In my milieu, eating disorders are literally more common than not in young women.
Nevertheless, I’d like to isolate one detail: the fact that we now believe that the open-mouthed laugh is a more ideal reflection than the solemn, even serene expression preferred in the past. Kundera has an interesting assessment: because laughter is the convulsive aftermath of a comic moment, it reflects the sudden absence of reason, the absence of self-control.
Indeed, laughter is literally ecstatic: it takes us outside ourselves, and while the historic ideal of a human was a man or woman in perfect self-control, dutiful and reserved and composed and purposive, the present ideal is the opposite: the “natural” person, freed of all duties and purposes, pleased by everything, hedonistically enjoying themselves, beyond reason and duty and “conformity” to “values” and in a world of laughter.
Thus: photos were once taken of stars and presidents as they sat rigid, projecting an identity completely of their determining, looking stern as they faced you and the world: ready to do what they must. Photos are now of guffaws, exposed mouths, easy laughter, “natural” laughter (often posed!), the laughter of people who “don’t let things get them down” and who know that life is to be enjoyed.
Elle Belle recently mentioned in conversation how the concept of happiness as life’s purpose is a relatively recent one; it was not long ago that people didn’t expect happiness, didn’t measure their lives by its attainment, didn’t obsessively gauge whether they were happy and undergo periodic upheavals in an effort to make sure they were.
The purpose of life had more to do with the subordination of the will to a system of purposes and meanings: a national system, a religious system, a tribal system, a communal system. They were esteemed who overcame themselves; heroism was not the accident of being present at a tragedy, but the act of overcoming the will and the self and performing duty when it was radically disincentivized.
Your great-grandparents might have said: “The purpose of life is to be a good child, spouse, parent, employee, neighbor, and friend.” Happiness was incidental, or rather a result of devotion, not the object of devotion. Thus if they were unhappy in marriage, they didn’t necessarily divorce: happiness wasn’t the goal, marriage was the goal. One hoped that happiness came from it.
In assessing what’s changed, we must be honest: perhaps we all just got wise to the fact that all the systems and traditions to which we’d subordinated ourselves were phony, ineffective, or mere masks for the ensconcing of power elites. Or perhaps we simply became greedy and rebelled, like children, against forces that our forbears had given us for our own good. I have no idea and make no argument.
I only observe that the human ideal used to be a person who was in control of herself or himself and whose value was in deeds and doings. Now our ideal is one who is happy. Happiness is a state, not a deed (although deeds may contribute to it), and is expressed not through facial solemnity but through the abandonment of control of the face: the laugh.
So I haven’t read all of this. But will later, & I know there is a symbol in the first line—that’s why i had to repost
