Artist Gives Barbie Nipples ... and a Bad Reputation

Puberty can trigger erratic behavior, and for Barbie, Mattel's iconic doll and vision of the feminine ideal, it's been a particularly unsettled time. After being bestowed with a pair of nipples, the 11.5-inch plastic figurine flung off her underwear, ran off with a skeleton biker and eventually hanged herself.

The rub, of course, is that Barbie did none of these things -- at least as far as Mattel is concerned. The narrative is part of an alternative reality that San Francisco-area artist LaVonne Sallee has strung together for the notoriously proper doll.

Since 2004, the 64-year-old Vallejo, Calif., resident has earned a modest income repurposing Barbie dolls, giving them racy new identities -- as a dominatrix or biker chick, for example -- and placing them in dioramas, where they act out and find themselves in compromising positions.

While Sallee's pieces earned three blue ribbons at the 2007 National Barbie convention, the artist is perhaps best known for a particular enhancement she gives her dolls: nipples. In many of her works, Barbie, the wild child, frolics bare-chested, flaunting anatomically correct breasts.

The dolls have drawn criticism, however, from mothers who believe that while traditional Barbies offer girls a welcome escape from an oversexed society, Sallee's Barbies unduly expose them to it.

To Sallee, though, the nipples merely correct an omission.

"What popped into my mind was, 'Well, then, why did [Mattel] deform the doll and not give her any nipples?' " she said in an interview with AOL News.

(Mattel did not respond to requests from AOL News to comment for this story.)

Sallee, who sells her altered Barbies for between $75 and $450 at her gallery, OOAKBarbies Gallery, and maintains a blog introducing her latest creations, estimates that she began giving Barbie nipples after the 20th piece. Since then, her dolls have displayed a considerable trashy side.

For example, there's the work titled "I Know What You Want for Christmas," in which Barbie straddles Santa Claus on his chopper, and another, "Let Me Help You In," where Barbie bends over, sans undergarments, as Ken "helps" her into a coach.

Elsewhere, Barbie goes topless, bottomless, makes use of bondage gear and fornicates with trolls.

It's all just a little too much for Vickie Martin, an Idaho mother of seven, including five girls, who takes a vested interest in her children's role models.

"It's something we don't need, especially with a child's toy," Martin told AOL News. "It's really easy as an artist to sometimes take the easy way out, and do things that will really stir people up, so they'll look at it. Pornography is such a problem in our society that we don't need that. We need to go the opposite way."

Dr. Carole Lieberman, a Los Angeles psychiatrist whose book "Bad Boys: Why We Love Them, How to Live with Them and When to Leave Them" addresses myths in popular culture, suspects that Sallee is living vicariously through her dolls.

"The bad girls are the ones who essentially use attributes like Barbie has in order to attract and keep the men," Lieberman, who has never met Sallee, said in an interview with AOL News. "It sounds like the artist is angry at Barbie for creating this low self-esteem in women who don't look like Barbie."

Sallee's psyche aside, the artist has also shown discretion for which she gets little credit: the dolls' anatomical accuracy stops at the waist.

"I don't care much about genitals," Sallee stated. "Plus, Barbies come with little plastic panties these days, so if I did Barbie genitals, they would have to be on top of her panties, and that just wouldn't look right."