Asia Times Online


	March 15, 2002	atimes.com

Front

Iran's Sara and Dara battle Barbie and Ken
By Ross Peters

Iran has introduced its own native version of Barbie and her cohort Ken. Government prohibitions against selling Barbie and Ken dolls have proved ineffective in stemming the dolls' popularity, so on March 2, Dara and Sara dolls hit the shelves of toy stores all over the Islamic republic to offer a mullah-endorsed alternative.

Dara and Sara are not new to Iranian children. For years, the Iranian Institute for the Development of Children and Young Adults has used Dara and Sara as characters in value-laden children's stories designed to teach the morals of the Islamic republic to Iran's next generation. Notwithstanding Dara and Sara's state-subsidized stardom and omnipresence in elementary school texts, Barbie and Ken, smuggled in from America, remain the unquestioned queen and king of the Iranian toy market - a fact the folks down at the Institute for the Development of Children and Young Adults want to change.

Sara, the girl, is intended to replace Barbie, minus the anatomically impossible inflated breasts, stilt-like legs and revealing outfits that come together in such a way as to make her closely resemble a cartoonish caricature of a German streetwalker. Neither can you pull her string and hear her say, "Let's go shopping. Will we ever have enough clothes?" To be honest, the only thing little Sara has in common with Barbie is her proverbial blank empty stare and perpetual smile. The powers that be have exorcised Sara of all the despised properties that earned Barbie her abomination status among the mullahs.

Still, Dara and Sara come laden with propaganda. The dolls are the idealization of the moral child the Islamic Revolution has failed to replicate in a significant portion of the population born after the 1979 revolution. Little Sara wears traditional Persian attire with a hejab scarf covering her hair and is always chaperoned by Dara when in public.

One toy seller told Associated Press, "Dara and Sara are strategic products to preserve our national identity." Another toy seller pontificated, "Every Barbie doll is more harmful than an American missile." These sentiments are echoed in the halls of power in Tehran, where children's toys of Western origin are considered to be sodden with the corrupt values of their morally degenerate creators back in the US. Barbie is perceived as a direct threat to the Islamic morals of Iran's younger generation, and consequently an indirect threat to the Islamic-based government's future.

Unlike much of their intended consumer base, Dara and Sara never download the latest hip-hop and rock music mp3 files from the Internet, nor do they burn pirated Hollywood DVDs that their American cousin Ali bootlegs at the Irvine Spectrum in Orange County, California. In this context, Dara and Sara represent an ideological defense against the barrage of non-Islamic influences seeping in from the West. Children's toys are the new front line. Barbie and Ken are no longer vacuous consumer goods; they are American proxies in a struggle for the very life of conservative Islam. And Barbie is regarded as the equivalent of the US's "daisy cutter" bomb.

Even with this crude cultural counterattack, the mullahs have displayed a somewhat sophisticated appreciation of the potential ideological effect American consumer products have on the Iranian population. They have realized that intellectual property and pop culture are more than just potential capital; they are weapons. In this respect, the mullahs possess a more refined awareness of the culture war currently being waged in their nation than the source of all their consternation, the US.

For its part, Washington seems unaware of the best card it holds - American pop culture. The proverbial invisible hand of capitalism has blessed the US with minions like Barbie and Ken. And yet, Washington's only action has been to place counterproductive sanctions on exporting these cultural weapons to what it considers "rogue states" like Iran. Moreover, President George W Bush has fallen back to the pathetically simplistic and costly Cold War tactics of brute military strength and aggressive posturing. The lack of any public comment by the administration on the strategic power of American pop culture betrays the fact that Bush and his advisors are trapped in an increasingly irrelevant 20th century Reaganite worldview where victory is achieved by spending the most on the biggest and newest weapons.

In this respect, Washington has actually provided much needed relief for the mullahs and Sadams of the Middle East on the cultural front by self-imposing unilateral sanctions on ideologically unfriendly states. These sanctions only limit trade and the subsequent flood of American consumer goods and pop culture. They have proven to do little to undermine unfriendly governments. In this way, these self-imposed impediments are doing the mullahs' work for them. Imagine how many more Barbie dolls the Islamic republic would have to contend with if it were legal for Mattel to export and market there. Instead of undermining conservative Islam at its root, Bush has done the exact opposite with his ham-handed "axis of evil" speech that united a frightened Iranian populace behind the old guard in Tehran.

Consonant with its newfound awareness of the ideological power of intellectual property, the Iranian Institute for the Development of Children and Young Adults has plans to export little Dara and Sara. In this respect, Dara and Sara may represent a new twist in how the mullahs hope to export the Islamic revolution. Who would have predicted that plastic almond-eyed Cabbage Patch-lookalike dolls would be the next evolutionary step after Hizbollah?

Let the doll wars begin. Dara and Sara are actually the first salvo in what appears to be a new regional phenomenon in the Middle East. A Tel Aviv-based company has developed Dara's Jewish counterpart, Shimmy. Like his Iranian "cousins", Shimmy is designed to counter religious Jewish anxiety over the corrupting influences of Barbie and Ken. He says a prayer when squeezed and possesses a surrealistically abstracted human face to avoid violating the mandate against graven images. Not to be outdone, the Arab League also has plans to develop and market an Arab version of Barbie.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the doll wars lies in the paradox of globalism. Barbie, Ken, Sara, Dara, and even Shimmy are all made in China. The Chinese get rich because we all can't get along.

And are the Iranian youth lining up to be the next proud owners of Dara and Sara? Toy stores in Iran report low sales so far. All the kids I talked with are too preoccupied with whether Ali will be able to bootleg Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones this spring.

Ross Peters is a US attorney and smuggler of Barbie dolls to Iran. He is not afraid of going out of business any time soon. He may be reached at hominuslupus@yahoo.com.

(Copyright Ross Peters. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished in any form without the written consent of the author.)

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