- Barbie creator Ruth Handler wanted the Ken doll to have a "bulge," she wrote in her autobiography.
- But Mattel's "all-male" teams refused and gave him a crotch "as smooth as Barbie's," she said.
Ken would have had much more of a "bulge" if Barbie's creator got her way.
Ruth Handler, $4, wanted to give Barbie a boyfriend. So two years later Mattel started selling Ken, $4.
"I felt that he needed what we all primly referred to in those days as a 'bulge,'" Handler wrote in her autobiography "Dream Doll," published in 1994. "Both the all-male design and marketing staffs, however, disagreed, so the groin on the first Ken doll was as smooth as Barbie's."
Cy Schneider, a Mattel advertising exec, wrote in his 1987 book "Children's Television: The Art, the Business, and how it Works" that company staff weren't sure "how explicit" to make Ken. They worried that adding genitalia would cause some mothers to object, but omitting it could make the doll look like "some wounded Hemingway hero," he wrote.
When designing the dolls under the Barbie brand, Mattel consulted Ernest Dichter, a psychologist and marketing expert with a specialism in Freudian psychoanalytic concepts.
"He pointed out the primary play mode for the Barbie and Ken dolls was dressing and undressing them," wrote Schneider, and questioned whether children would see Ken as their fathers or brothers.
"If so, was it healthy to see him undressed?" Schneider wrote. "And when he was naked, why did he or didn't he look like Daddy or a brother?"
"At Mattel, a storm raged over his genitalia," M.G. Lord's wrote in her 1994 book "Forever Barbie," with Handler and Barbie clothing designer Charlotte Johnson fighting against male execs for a doll with a noticeable crotch.
After Handler and Johnson vetoed a male doll with the same completely smooth crotch as Barbie, three new versions were were sculpted with varying degrees of "bumps," Lord wrote.
"The men — especially one of the vice presidents — were terribly embarrassed," Lord quoted Johnson as saying. After Handler and Johnson picked the middle one, the vice president said "he would never have it in the toy line unless we painted Jockey shorts over it," Johnson told Lord.
"Ruth felt the design team lacked 'the guts' to give the Ken doll even the suggestion of male sex organs," Robin Gerber wrote in "Barbie and Ruth," her 2000 biography of Handler. "The male designers resisted all but the barest hint of a penis."
Various options were discussed, including painted-on or molded swimwear.
Lord wrote that Handler had never wanted a doll with a penis showing.
"If the child took off the swimsuit, we felt it would be inappropriate with an adult boy to show the penis – so we all reached a conclusion that he should have a permanent swimsuit," Lord quoted Handler as saying.
"No curious little girl would ever be able to remove his underwear," Schneider wrote.
But Johnson disagreed. "Do you know what every little girl in this country is going to do?," Lord's book quoted Johnson as saying. "They are going to sit there and scratch that paint off to see what's under it."
Lord wrote that ultimately the men "reluctantly" agreed to give Ken a "bump." But it didn't work out, anyway.
"Somehow in the manufacturing process in Japan, one of the engineering supervisors determined that molding on the shorts was too difficult and that the lump added about a cent and a half worth of plastic to the plastic of the product, so he arbitrarily eliminated both," Schneider wrote.
Instead, the first Ken to be released on the market came with a greatly smoothed-over crotch which contrasted with his clearly-defined buttocks. His two legs were created as separate, moveable pieces. No underwear was painted on him, but he came with a small pair of red swim shorts to cover his dignity.
Like Barbie, the original Ken was available in both blonde and brunette.
"Mattel was careful to give him boyish, clean-cut looks and the overall, non-threatening, asexual appearance of a wimpy little jerk," Schneider wrote. "His androgynous looks and his lack of sexual equipment immediately became a hot internal issue."
Handler wrote that "he did get a little bump as time went by – but not before our son took a lot of teasing at school." Gerber similarly wrote that $4
Much like Barbie, Ken has evolved over the years.
Towards the end of the sixties, Ken got "a hunkier build, a handsomer face, longer hair, and a healthier skin tone," Handler wrote in her autobiography.
Since then, dozens of reincarnations of the doll have been released. Recent versions have included long hair, different body types, and varying skin tones.
Barbie's 'voluptuous figure' initially put buyers off
One of the major debates among Mattel execs during Barbie's development in the 1950s was how to shape her figure. A major inspiration behind her appearance was $4, a character who first appeared in comic strips published by the German tabloid paper Bild Zeitung and was turned into plastic dolls from 1955, with a heart-shaped face, high blonde ponytail, and sharp red pout.
Handler had already known she wanted to create an adult doll for young girls to play with, and in her autobiography she praised Lilli for "the breasts, the small waist, the long, tapered legs."
Handler also enlisted Dichter's help in exploring attitudes towards Barbie. After interviewing 191 girls and 45 mothers, he suggested enlarging the doll's breasts but also downplaying her "sexual overtones" to appeal to mothers, per Gerber.
At the 1959 Toy Fair in New York, where Barbie and her "voluptuous figure" were unveiled to the world, buyers were put off by Barbie's breasts, Handler wrote. Demand for the doll didn't pick up until later that summer.
"Barbie always followed the trends, she didn't create them," Handler wrote in her autobiography. "And her 'figure' typified what the feminine ideal was in the late 1950s. Even back then, however, we were getting criticism about Barbie's big boobs."
"Ruth was not political or prone to dwell on the root of cultural standards," Gerber wrote. "If girls were being told they should wish they were busty blonds, Mattel would profit from that message."
"Ruth had no interest, time, or patience for debates over the political or social impact of products," Gerber continued. "She had hired Ernest Dichter to tell her how to sell the most Barbie dolls, not how to make the doll a proxy for an emerging feminist version of women."
Over the decades, Barbie's figure has been the subject of countless debates, with critics arguing that she creates unrealistic beauty standards that could harm the dolls' young owners and some that children struggled to find dolls that looked like themselves. Mattel has launched a range of diverse dolls, including some $4, and $4.