There were not a whole lot of rules in my house when I was growing up, but the few that existed were strictly enforced. Clear your place after dinner was one. No more than an hour and a half of television was another. But the most strictly enforced was “No Barbies,” and its accompanying rule, no scales in the house.

The two were closely intertwined: my feminist mother didn’t want me to have either because she didn’t want me to get a warped body image. Barbie represented an unrealistic woman with inhuman proportions; triple-D breasts, 18 inch waist, and smooth hairless pubic area are not what most little girls will grow up to be, so I wasn’t allowed to play with one. I was allowed to have a Barbie head” one of those “beauty stations” where you could style her hair and paint on blue eye shadow. Apparently, mom wasn’t worried about me feeling ugly…just fat.

You can keep the little girl away from the Barbies, but you can’t get rid of her desire to brush hair and play dress-up with toys, so I had My Little Ponies instead. My Little Ponies have distinctly stumpy little bodies, with full rumps and pretty eyes, a perfect role model for someone with my bodytype.

I did, on occasion, play with friend’s Barbies, although even that was problematic — in kindergarten I got into a knock-down drag-out brawl with a playmate who insisted that those torpedoes on Barbie’s chest were called “boobies.” I’d never heard of such a thing, and corrected her by saying “No, those are Barbie’s breasts.” (Remember that in 1980 my mother was a registered nurse and midwife-in-training. She taught me the anatomical words.) Imagine my horror when, later that night, my mother explained that people have lots of silly terms for their body parts, and “boobies” was just one of many.