Canvas editorial: Sarah Daniell on Barbie, feminism and Sinead O’Connor

Sinead O'Connor (pictured here in 1991) had something to say about feminism, war, sex abuse and the Catholic Church but the world wasn't interested in listening to a woman who shaved her head. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION

He came back from Vietnam, via Singapore, bearing gifts and a trunk-load of regrets that he never unpacked. I was 6 and my father was coming home, under the cloak of darkness. We met him at the train station and drove home to Raumati South.

He bought a stereo for the family and a Barbie for me. She had rubbery, bendy limbs and sharp little features. I would make her sit cross-legged and turn her tiny pale pin-head sideways and narrate fascinating conversations for her, with her invisible friends.

I loved the stereo, and the records we played on it became, in a sense, the soundtrack to my childhood: Louis and Ella; Carole King; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; The Beatles; Neil Diamond’s Holly Holy. But this Barbie creature was extraordinary because she had cachet that almost immediately transformed my own currency.

There were girls at school who’d made my life a bit miserable, but suddenly there they were, in the bedroom with the two slim single beds and the candlewick bedspreads that I shared with my sister. They were my new best friends. I had a Barbie and they were buying in. It was transactional. But I was 6. And I liked this new warmth. I wanted buy-in too. If it took Barbie to make this happen, I was here for it.

Later I got a Ken doll that wasn’t bendy but made of inferior material: hard plastic in a deep orange, like a bad Trump spray tan.

Eventually, we left that town. I would’ve packed up all her clothes and accessory handbags and tennis racket and weird white sandals and would later move on from her.

I have not yet seen the Barbie film, but the colossal marketing campaign around the feminist power-message has me a little cynical — because I know what a transactional collab looks and feels like. I was 6 but not stupid. But I pinky promise that when I do, I will be open-hearted, and I know I will laugh.

But when everyone has buy-in, and you’re not the one sticking your neck out, it’s easy to join the wagon. This week we lost a true feminist who was so maligned, one who had so much to say, before anyone else had the guts to. She took on that most sacred of institutions — the Catholic Church — which, up to that point had been largely untouchable. She represented rebellion and liberation.

As an obit in the New York Times says, “she was an integral part of the renegotiation of old stereotypes of gender, sexuality, rebellion and liberation that is still going on today”.

Sinead O’Connor did not want to be defined as pretty. A woman who fit the male gaze. She had something to say. She talked about sex abuse, equality and the folly of war. But the world wasn’t ready to hear it from a woman who shaved her head, and it turned on her. Perhaps it is ready now.