It can be hard to believe how much has changed for queer Americans in the past 30 years. In the distant past of 1993, same-sex marriage was not legal in any state of the country. Sodomy Laws Across America attempted to ban gay sex by criminalizing any oral or anal erotic contact. And Dan Savage, a sex advice columnist then known only to readers of a few independent alt-newspapers across the country, was able to break ground with a scandalous revelation: Mattel’s latest Ken doll was openly modeled after gay fashion. Or, as Savage put it in 1993, “The little girls of our great nation wanted a hip Ken, and Mattel gave them a hip Ken. A strange Ken.
By the way, that strange Ken is in Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie, in a short, winking cameo. And given the film’s satirical, knowing tone — and the scene in which he appears, in a nod to some of the most regrettable and hilarious choices in the Barbie toy line over the years — there’s no question that Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach know the name people have had for that Ken doll since 1993: “Cock Ring Ken.”
Savage’s 1993 column “Ken Comes Out” captures the details. “Earring Magic Ken” (who does not get his own credit Barbie, unfortunately) wore a transparent and revealing purple mesh shirt, a purple vinyl vest, two-tone hair, a single silver earring and a gold band around one elbow. He also came up with a pair of shiny plastic earrings for his owner to wear. “But Earring Magic Ken has another loadout that has been largely overlooked,” Savage wrote. “[H]around Ken’s neck, on a metallic silver wire, is what ten out of ten connoisseurs will tell you at a glance is a cock ring.
Photo: Yvonne Hemsey/Getty Images
Savage certainly doesn’t think Mattel intended to equip Ken with a sex toy: he initially suggests that in the search for a fashionable party outfit, Mattel designers took photos of people in nightclubs and translated their outfits into a doll design. “On closer inspection, Ken’s entire Earring Magic outfit turns out to be three year old rave clothes,” he wrote. And he describes chrome cock ring necklaces – that is, necklaces exactly like the ones on Earring Magic Ken – as “de rigueur rave wear” for the time.
“For about a year, every gay boy at a rave wore at least one,” Savage wrote. “[T]These cock rings were often put to use later in the night to help all-tweaked ravers keep up what was dragging the X down.
Twenty years later, Savage’s column is worth revisiting – and not just for the joke Barbie about why Earring Magic Ken was also a questionable design choice Sugar Daddy Ken, a doll from the 2009 “adult collection line” whose evocative name seems more deliberate than Cock Ring Ken’s clothing. (Look, he has a dog named Sugar, and he’s the dog’s “daddy.” Even in this day and age when people treat their pets like children, it’s still hard to believe that no one involved in that doll’s design meant ambiguity.)
No, the real reasons to read the “Ken Comes Out” piece are the hilarity of watching Savage question a Mattel rep about the doll (she clearly thinks he’s just making fun of her), and the revelations about how neatly Earring Magic Ken’s design captures a watershed moment of change around queer voting in mainstream America.
America defames its queer citizens and enforces laws that criminalize them (which the Supreme Court maintained as late as 1986) while appropriating them too was nothing new. Look back at all of Hollywood’s history and you’ll see how creatives and artists admire and steal queer culture, weaponizing the tastes of queer makers while keeping them underground and closeted. What was new in the early ’90s, and what Dan Savage specifically captured, was an MTV-driven era where queerness permeated mainstream life faster than the Moral majority typing could keep up – or even follow.
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“What the little girls saw and told Mattel was cool wasn’t what their relationships were wearing — unless they had hip queer relatives — but the homoerotic fashions and imagery they saw on MTV, what they saw Madonna’s dancers wearing in her concerts and movies and, coincidentally, what ACT UP/Queer Nation faggots and dykes wore to demos and raves,” Savage wrote. “Queer imagery is so pervasive in our culture that, from rock stars (Axl Rose and his leather boys) to toy designers, mainstream America isn’t even aware when it’s adopting queer fashion and mores. Or when it comes to cock rings, even small plastic rings, in the hands of little girls.”
Barbie Of course, don’t try to unpack this. Earring Magic Ken — or Cock Ring Ken if you prefer — sails by as a quick joke about discontinued dolls, just one of the movie’s roughly one million visual and verbal jokes about the Barbie line. From what we could tell from the few seconds he’s on screen, he’s not even wearing the necklace, but we’ll keep a closer look at that once clips from the film become available.
But it’s worth taking in his presence Barbie as a reminder of a very specific and special moment in marketing history, a moment when designers tried to co-opt coolness, not realizing how quickly they were helping to change history and move the world forward. Writers other than Dan Savage noted what they said “gender bending” aspects of Earring Magic Ken — they just didn’t have the working knowledge of queer culture to pinpoint exactly what they were seeing. Cock ring Ken didn’t change the world, but he sure was a sign of how much it was changing in his day – and how fast.