Ken is gay

Now if you are wondering what’s with the sex toy controversy, let me educate you guys on the drama revolving around Ken’s necklace. Hoards of gay men rushed out to buy it ironically, making it to this day the best-selling Ken doll of all time.

The whole debacle is a lesson in how corporations are willing to appropriate the cultural capital of marginalised subcultures, but only when it’s safe and uncontroversial to do so.

In 1995, when they passed on Toy Story, they may have wanted to preserve the doll’s dignity and authenticity. Savage detailed the implications these fashion pieces had and made regarding one’s sexual preferences. With his peroxide blonde hair, orange spray tan and washboard abs, he looks like some ageing twink that you’d see at G-A-Y Late on a Wednesday night – and reactions haves been mixed.

What Mattel failed to realise were the gender and sexual implications of this necklace. Here’s All You Need To Know About The Doll’s History

The doll rocketed off the shelves, particularly because gay men, including Savage, hurried out to get their hands on one. Lisa McKendall who was the manager of marketing and communications at Mattel even said, “We’re not in the business of putting cock rings into the hands of little girls”.

At the end of it all, Savage and even I do not believe that the doll was anything but a happy (and hilariously disastrous) accident.

Mattel had been manufacturing Barbie since 1959, and while she had always sold well, Ken – introduced a little while later – was something of a flop. He is pretty much the gay Ken.

Also, Mattel is coming out with a line of Mad Men collector Barbies — including a Don Draper Ken. As one blogger quipped, “Don Draper Ken Doll Still Sleeps Around Despite Lack of Genitals.”

Ironic adults are probably the target audience for these evolved Ken dolls.

This joke contrasted the anodyne, aspirational beauty ideals which Ken represented with the physical ravages of illness and death. The choice implies that “the Barbie Syndrome” contributes to body issues. The options were very simple: either Mattel gives Ken the boot or they improve him. Mattell wanted a doll that was ‘cool’ and in keeping with the zeitgeist of the time… just not in a gay way.

The kitsch factor drove Earring Magic Ken to become the best-selling Ken doll at the time.

We reached out to Mattel for comment multiple times — to find out just how well the doll sold and whether it remains the No. 1 Ken, as well as for the current regime's take on this piece of corporate history — but they did not return our requests.

Though the Earring Magic Ken incident showed that LGBTQ culture at the time had infiltrated the mainstream (or, arguably, been co-opted by it), Ken might've simply remained the butt of late-night jokes until Savage — who's since gone on to serve as one of the country's most prominent sex and relationship advice columnists — published his explanation of the gay-culture subtext communicated by wearing the sex toy.