Travel Barbie

and the psychology of packing

Friends,

Travel Barbie comes with 10 accessories, including a puppy, a neck pillow, and a pink passport. I feel a kinship, not because she’s a traveler, but because she’s a terrible packer. Who honestly believes in the myth of the neck pillow? Who shows up to Security with a puppy?

I’m a bad packer because I hate packing. I recoil at luggage, both physical and metaphorical. We’re trained to associate travel with freedom, but I’m never more weighed down than I am in the airport. I want to be light. I want to be barefoot. I basically want to be naked.

The Barbies of my childhood spent a lot of time naked. They were stripped down and stripped for parts. I remember the deep satisfaction of removing not only Barbie’s tiny high heel from her foot, but her entire leg from the hinge of her hip; of prying off her plastic head and then, like a psychopath, brushing her hair. Why was Barbie constructed that way—not just with grand, unflagging boobs, but to be so easily dismantled? Her limbs and head broke cleanly from her torso—no stuffing, no wires, no unnatural crack. There’s a theory about why we all deconstructed her: unconscious protest of impossible beauty standards. But I think she was simply designed to be mutilated.