Barbie Designer Outed as a Pervert
Posted By jss on January 8, 2009
I know it’s just the New York Post and Jerry Oppenheimer, the “Tell-All King.” But I can’t look away.
From the Post’s Page 6, we have:
“In “Toy Monster: The Big, Bad World of Mattel,” out next month, Jerry Oppenheimer reveals that Jack Ryan, the Yale-educated designer who popularized Barbie, was a “full-blown seventies-style swinger” with “a manic need for sexual gratification.” ”
First of all, a salute to the power of words. If we take out the adjectivals “full-blown” and “manic” we’re left with “a seventies-style swinger with a need for sexual gratification.” Not nearly as lurid, is it? Almost quaint and conservative and yearning. “Seventies-style,” to me, harkens back to a rather more innocent time, pre-AIDS, full of free love and hope and “let’s end the war” sex. News for Oppenheimer — the ’70s may have gotten all the publicity, but swinging in the “Naughty Aughties,” meaning now, is a much, much bigger thing than it was.
Which is a part of what “Into Temptation” is about. The odds of anyone in America being in a roomful of 20 people and having none of them interested in or participating in swinging is very low, and that includes going to church on Sundays.
I’ll leave it at that, for the moment anyway.
Oppenheimer also outs Ken Handler, the son of Mattel’s founders for whom Barbie’s boyfriend was named, as a closeted gay who was diagnosed with AIDS in 1990. The author, if you’ve not heard of him, has written tabloidy tell-alls about the Clintons, the Hiltons, Martha Stewart … you get the picture. But I’ve always had the feeling that he doesn’t get the full picture, or doesn’t want to.
"Into Temptation" is a usually-but-not-always safe-for-work forum about evolving social-sexual networks and how they have changed and are changing lives. It will also loosely chronicle the research, writing and publication, I hope in 2011, of a book by the same name.
YOU are totally a swinger, dude!! I can read between the lines. I need to get back into swinging sometime. I had a fun mfff foursome the other day, and I’m having a sexxy couple over for dinner next week – not sure if we’re going to break in the new dining room table before or after we eat… but they do not consider themselves swingers. They are polyamorous. I am that for sure.
But back to your post – and here I never allowed my daughter Barbies, what was I thinking? ha ha
I just read a bio on Alex Comfort, the author of The Joy of Sex. DAMN he was an odd duck. He dipped into the 1970’s California orgies.
To quote Napoleon Dynamite: “Lucky.”
Thanks so much for showing up, TBK! … I have Dr. Comfort’s books on my shelf as well. Soon enough, I’m sure I’ll be doing at least mini-reviews of my whole reading list for research on “Into Temptation” … three shelves worth of books right now.
But … but … what was the Napoleon Dynamite quote? You must have gotten distracted …