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Amanda Buckiewicz got hold of her Doctor Barbie and did some serious surgery.
"I cut her hair down, dyed it brown with a Crayola marker and drew on some glasses to make her look like an actual doctor," remembers Buckiewicz, 24, a science journalist in Toronto.
"I also melted her feet – to be flat – on the stove."
This is Barbie's ugly secret. From the day the fashion doll hit the shelves 50 years ago, girls have just loved to mutilate her. A lot.
They've shaved her head, decapitated her, painted her with nail polish and ink, removed her limbs and put her into compromising positions with Ken and G.I. Joe.
While it may take a parent aback to see this doll carnage on the rec room floor, there's nothing to worry about, says Marshall Korenblum, chief psychiatrist of the Hincks-Dellcrest Centre For Children.
"Girls want to explore toys the way boys would," says Korenblum. "Both girls and boys play with toys in a variety of different ways."
It's only when the violence goes beyond the toy box that there should be any cause for worry, he says.
According to Tanis Fowler, a 28-year-old Guelph editor, many girls treat Barbie like she was an action toy.
"My brother had Transformers that he could take apart. I took Barbie apart."
Her Barbie dolls led particularly gruesome lives.
"There were beheadings, orgies, biker haircuts and tattoos and, in one memorable incident, a tragic Lamborghini accident that led to Barbie having her leg amputated below the knee."
Fowler would switch Barbie and Ken's heads and limbs.
"I don't think I was being malicious," she says today.
"I just wanted to see how they worked."
Researchers in England stumbled across Barbie mutilation in 2005 when they interviewed 100 children aged 7 to 11 about a range of branded products. Barbie evoked strong emotions among the girls, who 'fessed up to gleefully damaging the dolls in a variety of ghoulish ways, including putting them in the microwave. The school of management researchers at the University of Bath concluded it was a rite of passage.
However, women contacted by the Star say they were just having fun.
"I serially decapitated Barbies," confesses Niya Bajaj, 22, a Toronto event and meeting manager who staged a mass execution of all 50 Barbies she and her sister shared when they were growing up in Bahrain.
"I remember the head made a very satisfying popping noise," she writes in an email.
The sisters swapped the dolls' heads and cut their hair, although they usually tried to keep the rest of the bodies intact.
"The removal of limbs was accidental, as those were much harder to reattach."
Megan Griffith-Greene was raised by a feminist who forbade Barbies, but one of the dolls made it into their Toronto house during a Grade 1 birthday party.
It was Malibu Barbie and she wore out her welcome in about half an hour.
"Her sunglasses broke right away and I lost one of her shoes," remembers Griffin-Greene, 32, editor of Shameless, a feminist magazine for teens.
Soon, she was giving Barbie a haircut.
"I got inspired; by the end of the day she was pretty bald," she writes in an email. "In the end, she was an arts and crafts science project like the toys I really liked."
Linda McGuire, 44, also couldn't resist cutting Barbie's hair and thinks she got the idea from her own haircut after her mother got tired of putting it in braids every day.
"I'm sure it looked awful in reality but, in my mind, I know I thought I did a very professional styling job."
Although her older sister kept her dolls in pristine condition, artist Desiree Ossandon couldn't wait to mess Barbie up.
"Every single Barbie I got, I would chop off their hair, right to the scalp, as short as I could.
"Then, I'd take markers and colour their head in.
"And that's just where I got started," Ossandon reminisced in an email, adding that Barbie ended up with a head-to-toe tattoo.
In her defence, Ossandon says she wasn't trying "to destroy my Barbie."
"I just thought they were so boring to begin with. They all had the same hair, same eyes, same everything."
Public relations officials for Mattel, the company that makes Barbie, did not respond to requests for interviews yesterday.
