Barbie, the most popular doll of the 1960s and 70s, is dying. The toymaker Mattel reported this week that sales have declined a massive 21% compared with last year, part of a continuing slump. The lanky doll with more outfits than Victoria Beckham and an impossible range of careers – nurse, lifeguard, dolphin-trainer, Spanish teacher – is being replaced in popularity by modern-day fancies. Barbie is still one of the most sought-after dolls in the world, but increasing numbers of girls are tossing her aside in favour of hi-tech, computer-based games.

This sounds sadistically cruel, but I would love to think that Barbie is dying because nobody loves her any more. It sounds more likely, however, that like the drip-dry clothing that came into fashion the year she was born Barbie is being dropped not because girls are fed up with her syrupy image but rather because of new technology.

I have previously argued that Barbie, despite her innocent expression, is an anti-feminist ploy to keep girls swallowing sexist stereotypes. The doll was first born 56 years ago, and blighted my childhood. I knew I was supposed to love her, and the drill was that a girl acquired a Barbie and nurtured her, regularly changing her outfits and supporting her towards a career suitable for a young woman.

We were then expected to introduce Barbie to Ken. I never wanted to get married, and one thing was crystal clear: there would never be a Ken in my life, a promise to myself I have never broken. Ken was a drippy, pathetic man who appeared to have no penis, hair like a bad wig, and a range of cravats that would be envied by many a camp theatre buff from the 1960s. In my brief consideration of heterosexuality, in my early teens, my taste ran to the boys that would help me jump over the school fence, ready with a bottle of cider to down, along with a packet of Capstan Full Strength.

None of the girls in my school, including me, had a body like Barbie, and it is no wonder. Tall, ridiculously skinny and flat breasted, Barbie is modelled on a German doll called Lilli, based on a comic-strip character described as a “gold-digging prostitute”. Yet this doll is marketed at pre-secondary schoolgirls.

Her birth coincided with the expansion of the porn industry. Looking like a Stepford Wife, Barbie was, and remains, the worst role model for young girls. Despite little tweaks to her appearance through the years – such as in 1971, when her eyes were adjusted to look forwards rather than being set in a coy, sideways glance – Barbie was always a 1950s pre-feminist monstrosity, resplendent in her passivity, subsumed in unthinking heterosexuality.

Do not admonish me with, “Don’t be ridiculous – it’s only a doll.” In the pre-internet days, our toys were our virtual world, and they had to be believable. Girls were heavily conditioned into feminine subservience and prepared for marriage from conception, and Barbie was a recruiting sergeant for the good little wives’ club.

I don’t have a problem with girls playing with dolls, and I love to see little boys with them too. But Barbie can do no good. Her simpering smile, dysfunctional relationship with Ken, and the fact she has never gone through at least one feminist phase, with badges, cropped hair and dungarees, leaves me with no option than to hope her end is final.