Barbie has taken a lot of flak over the years. She’s unrealistically proportioned and bad for body image. She’s a dolly, so she’s bad by default because girls should play with trucks. She’s blond. She had an astronaut outfit but no interim outfit for when she went through basic training (since most astronauts had military backgrounds back then); or a doctor’s coat but was way too young to have made it through med school. And the only criticism that, to my mind, has any merit: She’s a crass materialist.

She came along in 1959, when my mom turned 8. My mother insists she never had one, and I can believe it because I am pretty sure my grandmother had figured out by then that my mom was not a dolly girl, much to her disappointment. My mom got that disappointment back in spades with me, because I loved Barbie. I loved makeup, I loved dresses, I loved pink. Since my mother controlled the money, though, all that stuff was generally trumped by books and durable pants and colors that didn’t show dirt.

Grandma to the rescue! I got one of those big Barbie makeup heads as a tiny child, which my mom and uncle instantly renamed Chuckles the Clown after my first attempt at applying eyeshadow and lipstick. Through the years, I acquired a couple of Barbie dolls (I know I had Beauty Secrets Barbie, who came with a purple case of teeny tiny beauty implements that were constantly disappearing and then reappearing stuck to my bare feet; and I know the last Barbie that I got was Golden Dream Barbie, who came with this pantsuit and cape with a weird half-skirt thing that flowed out behind her.) I’d get an outfit or two for Christmas, and the fun part of that was poring over the catalog of other outfits to see what I had, what I wanted, what was ugly. I never got the cool stuff, like the horse (I think it was called Dallas?) or the Corvette. I never got a dream house, I had to manufacture a mansion out of my bookshelves and discarded book boxes. By the time I was 9, though, I was more perplexed by Barbie than anything else. Those shoes that never stayed on. The fact that her head could ghoulishly pop on and off and that it fit perfectly in the crook of her perpetually bent arm. When I was in fifth grade, my friend and I did the math to scale up Barbie to human size. I don’t remember the numbers, only that we knew she would look freakishly odd—partly because her boobs would make her fall over, but more because her neck and legs were ridiculously long.

There are those who say Barbie creates an unhealthy body image, even with her new thicker middle and flat feet. I suppose it’s possible, but I never considered Barbie’s body to be aspirational. Her wardrobe? Yes, absolutely, a thousand times yes. Her horse? You betcha. But her giraffe neck and Crystal Gayle hair? No thanks. My hair was halfway down my back and that sucked hard enough. Maybe there were girls who were brunette or stocky or had freckles had issues, but I had friends who looked like that and as far as I know, none of them wanted to look like Barbie, either. We were all materialistic little greed-balls in it for the Stuff.

I suppose that might have had some negative repercussions for me. I ran up a lot of credit debt in my early adulthood. But that was for travel and phone bills, not for my wardrobe. And I never did get a horse or a Corvette. Interestingly, one of the things on my Random Roadside Attractions list that I want to see someday is Mechanical Barbie and the Band of Many Kens, which is a kind of roided-up music box in an Italian restaurant in Ohio.

I had a boy who loved science and space, so Barbie wasn’t really on my radar as a parent. Honestly, I mourned the loss of Nancy Drew more than Barbie.

But maybe I was an anomaly. What was your Barbie experience?