HSG

"Dream come true" would be an understatement.

What you are looking at is not an exercise in Photoshop, nor a tour de force of airbrushing. This really is a plastic doll that resembles Barbie, but has luscious, Classical proportions.

Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?

She possesses Barbie's blue eyes, pink lips, blonde hair, and cute round facial features. However, she also boasts an alluringly heavy bust, womanly hips, and a swell around her middle. True, her arms and legs have (unfortunately) not been sized up to plus proportions, but her body is at least a size 14W. She is utterly gorgeous.

If you are not excited enough already, just wait until you see the next image. Here is not just one, but a whole row of plus-size Barbies, still in their original packaging. The doll's foreign name would seem to indicate that this is not a product for the domestic U.S. market, but is indigenous to an overseas location. And as a matter of fact, Ciotka Kena is Polish. (Her name literally means "Ken's Aunt.") She comes in a blonde and a brunette edition, but primarily it is the fair-haired model that captivates the eye and captures the heart, because she is so very much like Barbie--or rather, Barbie as she should be.

By now you are all undoubtedly contacting Polish relatives or planning trips to Poland in order to import this gorgeous doll for yourselves. You already intend to present numerous Ciotki Kena to your friends, sisters, daughters, etc., thereby replacing your loved ones' "Anorexic Barbies" with these pretty dolls, whose facial features are every bit as cute and adorable as Barbie's, but whose voluptuous, well-fed figures embody the true ideal of feminine beauty.

A side view clearly exhibits these plump playthings' curvaceous physiques. Not only are they buxom and full at the hips, but they even display a seductive swell at the abdomen. Just imagine how much better every young girl in America would feel about herself if this were the doll that she spent her time dressing and playing with, in lieu of the emaciated distortion of the female form that is the current Barbie.

Too good to be true, you say?

Unfortunately, you're right.

While these dolls really do exist and really do come in the packaging that is shown in these images, only 24 were ever made. They were created by a Polish artist named Zbigniew Libera in 1994 (thus predating and possibly inspiring the Body Shop's famous Ruby doll, which was popularized by Mode in 1997).

Much of the Web commentary concerning this doll is, understandably, in Polish, but the following English text offers one particular surprise:

Ken's Aunt [was] produced in cooperation with Mattel Corporation complete with pink Barbie Doll boxes and clear plastic bubble wrapping. This "art object" was produced in an edition of 25 copies, and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Ken's Aunt is [a] buxom version of Barbie, made up of "Sindy" dolls and complete with [wardrobe] and a hairstyle more likely to be found in Poland than in the United States.

A number of Polish sources relay the same information--that the artist created this unique series of dolls "in cooperation with Mattel." Yet the fact (also corroborated by several sources) that the model's face is that of a Sindy doll, not a Barbie, would seem to belie this, as in 1994 Sindy was being produced by Mattel's rival, the Hasbro corporation:

Ciotka Kena / Ken's Aunt" (1994) restores a realistic dimension to the (unnaturally slim) ideal and standard of beauty promoted by Barbie doll (in reality the artist used Sindy here).

Either way, the result is the realization of one of the fondest dreams of size celebration--a plus-size Barbie. It is simply incredible to see that lovely doll's face coupled with such a sumptuously proportioned body.

The Polish write-ups about the doll (translated by yours truly) more explicitly delineate its subversive character:

Ciotka Kena . . . is a dissertaion on the theme of an already established pattern of a woman--Barbie. It is unnecessary to mention her influence on the shaping of the young female body. The "non-canonical" silhouette of the Ciotka--large bust, wide hips--shows what an unreal world the Mattel corporation creates, a world that is often the cause of complexes and unnecessary dramas. An interesting fact that comes to light is that Ciotka Kena was executed under the patronage of that very company [Mattel].

Ask yourselves: if Mattel did indeed create the mold for Ciotka Kena, the physical mold into which the doll-making plastic was poured, the mold that enabled her full-figured body to be produced in 24 units, then why, oh why, did it not employ that mold to produce an official, separate line of mass-produced dolls with precisely these proportions--just to see how the public would react?

We can guarantee that if these dolls were available in stores nationwide, they would fly off the shelves. No girl would ever again want a skinny Barbie when she could have a curvy Barbie instead.

It is highly significant that this plus-size Barbie originated in Poland, because despite the preponderance of emaciated East European girls on the world's fashion runways, the truth is that the traditional Slavonic ideal of beauty was most decidedly full-figured. Indeed, even in the Polish diaspora, second-generation Polish youth still express a preference for fleshier feminine beauty, despite growing up surrounded by postmodern cultural brainwashing.

Another Polish text about our full-figured Barbie highlights this cultural contrast, and correctly identifies the true reason why plus-size beauty is suppressed in the modern age:

First, Libera brought to life Ciotka Kena (1994)--a fuller-figured Barbie doll. Her full body negates the super-skinny ideal that Barbie promotes. The Barbie doll was conceived in 1959 by Ruth Handler, a co-creator of the Mattel company. In short order she became the symbol of female attractiveness (but not of femininity!), an unattainable ideal, which women nevertheless to this day attempt to attain, setting themselves up for frustration and developing serious illnesses, such as anorexia nervosa. In the Poland of the 1990s, the typical model of the hard and enterprising, career-minded "feminist business woman" that this doll [Barbie] personifies is chosen significantly more often than traditional femininity and motherhod, which is what Ciotka Kena symbolizes. "Polish motherhood" is today out of fashion.

Bingo. This writer perceptively recognizes the real force behind the imposition of the androgynous standard in modern culture. For all that the feminists decry Mattel's Barbie, she is, at least in her figure (or lack thereof), an implement of the masculinization of women, of the physical erasure of their essentially womanly characteristics (hips, bust, and extra weight)--the very features that identify them indisputably as women, and which are oriented around their innate purpose and identity: motherhood.

It is not coincidental that this plus-size Barbie prominently exhibits the physical attributes that most distinctively identify a woman as a mother-to-be, that distinguish her as a well-fed young girl ripe and ready for procreation. Libera's doll restores this Classical ideal, which also happens to be the traditional Slavonic ideal of beauty ("Polish motherhood"), and shows what Poland lost as its Old World culture was overwritten by Madison Avenue after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It is understandable why a Pole would sooner recognize the feminist/corporatist root of the push towards female androgynization than most Americans. In the U.S., one has to go back to Lillian Russell's day to reach a time when the full-figured womanly body was the dominant ideal of beauty. In Poland, this change occurred within the last generation, and many Poles recognized that the reshaping of the female figure was, in truth, an agenda to reshape the female mind--to destroy traditional gender identity and the traditional family unit.

* * *

At any rate, this Polish plus-size Barbie is a remarkable near-fulfillment of the aesthetic restoration, and a glimpse of what our world could be like and should be like. Just as we all dream of a world where plus-size models instead of androgynous waifs grace every magazine cover and walk every runway, and where full-figured ingénues are the romantic leads in every Hollywood movie, so can we now envision what our world would look like if girls' dolls likewise embodied the timeless ideal.

Looking at a row of these voluptuous plastic vixens is like seeing an array of Aphrodites, as if the sculptor of the Venus de Medici had been reincarnated in our own time and had realized his aesthetic vision in plastic rather than in marble. This demonstrates how Classical beauty could be disseminated throughout society, how even a much-maligned phenomenon such as "mass production" could benefit our culture, by combating eating disorders instead of propagating them, and by promoting essential gender identity rather than attempting to corrupt it.

A society's health or sickness depends on the aesthetic values by which it is governed. Let us all endeavour, each within our own sphere of influence, to refashion the world so that modern, degenerate values are eradicated, and timeless, healthy, traditional values are restored.