At stake in the legal clash between Barbie and Bratz was a bid for the corporate ownership of sexual politics. Photograph by Andres Serrano for The New Yorker Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.

Bratz dolls have swollen heads, pouty lips, spindly limbs, and chunky-heeled shoes. Their waists are barely wider than their necks. Their eyes and heads are so big and their noses so small that if it weren’t for their Penthouse makeup (icy eyeshadow, cat-eye liner, glistening lip gloss, and eyelashes as long as their fingers) and their come-hither clothes (crop tops, hot pants, microminis, and kinky boots), they’d look like emaciated babies, Kewpie dolls in a time of famine. Carter Bryant was thirty-one and working at Mattel in August of 2000, designing clothes for Barbie, when he created Bratz, though he later said—and his legal defense turned on this claim—that he’d got the idea for the dolls while on a seven-month break from Mattel, two years earlier. He drew some sketches of clothes-obsessed, bratty-looking teen-agers—“The Girls with a Passion for Fashion!” he called them—and made a prototype by piecing together bits and bobs that he found in a trash bin at work and in his own collection at home: a doll head, a plastic body, and Ken boots. He meant for his Bratz to come in pick-your-own skin colors and to have monetizably vague ethnic names. Two weeks before Bryant quit Mattel, he sold his idea to a Mattel competitor, MGA Entertainment, which brought out four Bratz girls in 2001—Jade, Cloe, Yasmin, and Sasha—the first dolls to successfully rival Barbie since she made her début, in 1959, in a zebra-striped swimsuit and stilettos, eyebrows arched, waist pinched.

Mattel sued Bryant; Mattel sued MGA; MGA sued Mattel. In the course of years of legal wrangling, hundreds of millions of dollars changed hands, but I’m afraid I couldn’t possibly tell you exactly how much because, as talking Barbie used to say, her pull string wriggling, “Math class is tough!”

The feud between Barbie and Bratz occupies the narrow space between thin lines: between fashion and porn, between originals and copies, and between toys for girls and rights for women. In 2010, Alex Kozinski, then the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who presided over Mattel v. MGA, wrote in his opinion that most of what makes a fashion doll desirable is not protectable intellectual property, because there are only so many ways to make a female body attractive. “Little girls buy fashion dolls with idealized proportions which means slightly larger heads, eyes and lips; slightly smaller noses and waists; and slightly longer limbs than those that appear routinely in nature,” Kozinski wrote, giving “slightly” a meaning I never knew it had. But only so much exaggeration is possible, he went on. “Make the head too large or the waist too small and the doll becomes freakish.” I’d explain how it is that anyone could look at either a Barbie or a Bratz doll and not find it freakish, except that such an explanation is beyond me. As a pull-string Barbie knockoff once told Lisa Simpson, “Don’t ask me! I’m just a girl!”

Orly Lobel, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, has recently published “You Don’t Own Me: How Mattel v. MGA Entertainment Exposed Barbie’s Dark Side” (Norton). For the book, a hair-raising account of a Barbie Dreamhouse-size Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Lobel interviewed Judge Kozinski over lunch and happened to mention that, when she was a girl, her mother, a psychologist, told her that Barbie dolls were bad for girls’ body image. Kozinski professed astonishment. “The only thing wrong that I saw when I held Barbie,” he said, joking, “is when I lift her skirt there is nothing underneath.” Last month, Kozinski resigned from the federal judiciary after more than a dozen women, including two of his own former law clerks, accused him of inappropriate behavior. Justice is hard!

Before Barbie, dolls were babies, to be fed and burped and bathed and wheeled around in prams and put down for naps. Barbie, who has hips and breasts, was a ripoff of a magnificently racy German doll called Lilli. Lilli was inspired by the title character in a Playboy-style comic strip; she works as a secretary but is usually barely dressed, like the time she shows up at the office in a bikini. “So dumb!” she says. “When I wake up in the morning, I think I’m still on vacation!” (“Gentlemen prefer Lilli,” her slogan went.) Ruth Handler, who co-founded Mattel with her husband in 1945, bought more than a dozen Lillis while on a tour of Europe with her children Barbie and Ken in 1956. She had the dolls shipped back home to California, and charged the Mattel designer Jack Ryan, a lesser Hugh Hefner, with making an American Lilli. Handler’s husband declared that she was “anatomically perfect.” Mattel introduced its doll as Barbie, Teen Age Fashion Model.

Ruth Handler elaborated on Barbie’s German origins only after Ryan, a man she called “the world’s greatest swinger,” began claiming that the idea for Barbie was his, not hers. (“He couldn’t think of anything original,” Handler said about Ryan, “but once you led him, and said what he should make, then he figured out how to make it happen.”) Handler said she named the doll after her daughter, but Ryan insisted that he was the one who named her, after a different Barbara, his wife. (Another of Ryan’s five wives, Zsa Zsa Gabor, claimed, after divorcing him, that she hadn’t been able to bear the fur-lined sex dungeon in his Bel Air mansion.) In 1961, Lilli’s manufacturer sued Mattel, charging that the company had copied Lilli “one to one,” having modified her “only very slightly; et voilà, Barbie was created.” Handler liked to say that Lilli was a freak, that she had an “elongated and distorted kind of look,” while Barbie was entirely natural. “I wanted an American teen-ager, but I wanted a narrow waist, narrow ankles, and boobs,” Handler said. In fact, the two dolls are nearly identical. Mattel settled the case out of court, and bought Lilli’s copyright in 1964. In 1978, Handler, having been investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, was indicted for fraud; she maintained her innocence but pleaded no contest. Two years later, Ryan sued Mattel; Mattel settled. In 1991, after suffering a stroke, Ryan shot himself in the head. Handler, who, after battling breast cancer, had founded a company, Nearly Me, that made prosthetic breasts, died in 2002, the year Bratz won the Toy of the Year Award.

Notwithstanding her lurid origins, Barbie was the world’s top-selling toy for girls for a half century. Mattel is believed to have sold nearly a billion Barbie dolls. Sales have lately been falling (despite Mattel’s introduction, in 2016, of “body diversity” Barbies that come in different sizes, shapes, and colors). Still, nine in ten American girls between the ages of three and ten own at least one Barbie doll, and, even without counting those buried in landfills, there might well be more Barbies in the United States than there are people.

Barbie is both a relic from another era and a bellwether of changing ideas about women and work, sex, and men. Her 1959 début coincided with the release of the erotically charged film “Pillow Talk.” Doris Day, who looks something like Barbie, plays an extravagantly fashionable interior decorator obliged to share a party line with a rakish playboy (Rock Hudson). They flirt over the phone. “This career girl had everything but love,” the film’s trailer announced, introducing “the most sparkling sexcapade that ever winked at convention.” The playboy has a switch in his apartment with which he can lock the door from the couch, so that his dates can’t escape. The interior decorator, who fends off all manner of advances from her clients, wants nothing more than to be carried into the playboy’s lair. (Much of the winking at convention had to do with Hudson’s sexuality: at one point, he plays a straight man pretending to be a gay man; at another point, he is taken for a pregnant man.)

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Shopping

In 1961, Barbie began dating Ken, a Rock Hudson look-alike named after Ruth Handler’s son. Their sexcapade sparkled. “I have a date tonight!” an early talking Barbie said in 1968. “Would you like to go shopping?” Originally marketed to girls between the ages of nine and twelve, the career girl and her beach-blanket-bingo boyfriend weathered the women’s movement and the sexual revolution by appealing, each year, to younger and younger children, which also made Barbie appear, each year, older and older. By the nineteen-nineties, when three out of four women between twenty-five and fifty-four worked outside the home and Mattel was taking in a billion dollars annually in Barbie sales alone, Barbie had become a plaything for three-year-olds—girls who wore footie pajamas and pull-up diapers and who drank out of sippy cups, girls who were still toddlers. Barbie wasn’t their baby; Barbie wasn’t the teen-ager they wanted to grow up to be; Barbie was their mommy.