Barbie, Motherhood, and the Political Climate
![Barbie](https://i0.wp.com/ordinary-times.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/x-barbie-e1694869919397.jpg?resize=720%2C360&ssl=1)
Promotional image from the movie Barbie. (Warner Bros.)
“What is a woman?” Matt Walsh’s obnoxious interrogative has become the clarion call for conservative douchebags in our era. For liberals, this answer, at the margins, is a question about personal expression, state of mind, societal expectations and so on that cannot be summed up in a pithy slogan. In a post Dobbs world, a woman might be defined as person who ought to avoid the state of Texas. In a patriarchal society, to be a woman is to be limited by one’s reproductive biology. Per the patriarchal worldview “woman” is a role your born into. The purpose of a woman is to be a mother and keep a home. This labor and opportunity cost is compensated with head pats and bromides, but nothing you can exchange for power, goods, or services. Indeed, the infamous pay gap is mostly a result of women spending less time at work doing paid labor and more time in the home working for free. This uncompensated labor is both a cause of patriarchy—ceding resources to men—and its justification—women just select out of highly compensated fields!
It is no wonder, given the political climate in the wake of Dobbs, that Barbie was such a runaway box office smash. The movie is a fun, often surrealist celebration of womanhood, girlhood, and all things pink and pretty in a culture that all too often views femininity and its affects as shallow, uninteresting, or even worthy of contempt. Despite how much I loved this film (I did love it! Please don’t yell at me!), I think the feminism fell flat. Barbie’s answer to the traditional feminine role of mother was hostility. Smash it to pieces! But, despite the negative market value, the work done by mothers is both irreplaceable and necessary. If we all simply cease to mother, then it is civilization over. Patriarchy isn’t a trick: it exists for a reason, and to ignore that reason is to render the feminism in Barbie shallow and nonsensical: a matriarchy without matrons.
Barbie begins with an homage to the “Dawn of Man” sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. A group of mid-century little girls play-act the only role they were allowed to grow into: that of mother. The play is drab and boring, and resembled work much more than fantasy. However, over the horizon a savior rises, revealed to be Margot Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie.” She is clad in Barbie’s iconic mid-century bathing suit, stilettos, and cat-eye sunglasses. The girls, completely enraptured with the potential offered by their new fashion-forward plaything, smash their dolls and all the toys-that-are-actually-chores to bits. Girls could now be Barbie, and Barbie could be anything…almost.
The smashing of the dolls was a strikingly hostile act towards motherhood. It was understandable in the context of the film: if you are forced into and completely defined by a single role, it is natural to want to lash out forcefully against it, but the strange hostility to motherhood in Barbie doesn’t stop there. There are no moms, and thus no small children, in Barbie Land. There is one Barbie product, Midge (Emerald Fennell), who is pregnant, but every time she is on screen, it is made clear that pregnancy makes her too weird and gross to be an appropriate toy for children.
Outside of Barbie Land there are two mother characters. America Ferrera’s Gloria, who plays a sad-sack mother to an angsty tween that sets the events of the film in motion by playing with her daughter’s old Barbies while mourning the sweet child that her angry middle schooler once was, and Ruth Handler, played by Rhea Perlman.
Ruth is loosely based on the real-life creator of Barbie, who named the character after her own daughter. In the film Ruth takes on the role of goddess and creator of the Barbies. It is Ruth, in her divine wisdom, that delivers the film’s thesis on one of the defining roles of womanhood, the role that makes the human race continue, and the role that reactionaries most often use to deny us power. “We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back and see how far they’ve come.” She says. Suddenly, my dear Stereotypical Barbie, it was I who had begun to think about dying.
The matriarchy in Barbie exists just…cuz. Barbies own all the private property and host all the parties. Barbies also hold all the cool jobs—president, doctor, astronaut (“Yay! Space!”). Kens just hang out at the beach and do the job of…beach… The film is clear that sexuality does not exist in Barbie Land. “I am actually not sure.” Ken responds when Barbie asks why he wants to spend the night. The Barbies never try to use their status to extract anything from the Kens, and the homelessness epidemic amongst the Kens appears to be a product of rigid Barbie NIMBYism more so than any actual malice. The Barbies don’t look down on the Kens or belittle their habits or try to define special feminine virtues that Kens cannot possess to justify the status quo the way men treat feminine things in the real world.
The Kens, for their part, have a compulsion to get some attention from Barbies, but otherwise just sort of accept their situation because…well, because they are played with by little girls who don’t care what boys are up to probably. But the movie’s matriarchy doesn’t make for a believable counterpart to our male-dominated society, nevertheless.
Contrast this to our patriarchy. Throughout the 19th century, American women fought and eventually succeeded at gaining the right to own property and, in 1974, even obtained the right to credit, but the lack of property rights wasn’t used to make women homeless; it was used by men as a means of controlling their wives and daughters, who were in turn obligated to reward men with sex and flattery, clean their homes, care for their children and any other sick relatives, contribute to their income with money from their side-hustles, and so on. Women also were kept out of high-status, interesting jobs, but not to go hang out at the beach all day. As displayed in Barbie’s sister movie, Oppenheimer, while men got to save the world with science, women were at home managing screaming children and hanging laundry. Patriarchy has a reason to exist and a logic to it. Women were not oppressed for the sake of oppression; real material gains were extracted at the expense of women and to the benefit of men, their families, and society at large.
As nonsensical as Barbie Land’s matriarchy is, the means of establishing patriarchy by the Kens is even sillier. Stereotypical Barbie’s Ken, played brilliantly by Ryan Gosling, stows away in the Barbie mobile when Barbie travels to the real world to try to address the cause of her existential dread (“What if there’s beach!?”). While Barbie experiences her first dose of sexual harassment, Ken, for the first time, is treated with respect and even deference as a tall, handsome man. He explores Los Angeles and sees men everywhere. Men are not just represented, but over-represented in all the cool careers and positions of power. He winds up in a library, where he finds entire books on patriarchy (“Why didn’t Barbie tell me about patriarchy?”) and also horses for some reason (“Horses are just men extenders.”).
Ken travels back to Barbie Land while Barbie is still in the real world. He steals her Malibu Dream House and turns it into his own “Mojo Dojo Casa House,” decked out in man stuff and horses. He uses his books on patriarchy to somehow trick all the Barbies into becoming compliant helpmeets for the Kens, which is pretty ridiculous, so it happens off screen. When Stereotypical Barbie returns to Barbie Land, along with Gloria and her grumpy tween Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), they find a fully functional patriarchy that is set to be enshrined by the Barbies via an upcoming election.
The explanation given for the quick ascendency of the Kens is that the Barbies, having lived in a matriarchy, have no resistance to the arguments in favor of sexism. (How the men of the real world developed such a strong resistance to matriarchy is left unexplored.) Luckily, the patriarchal spell can be broken if Gloria shouts a few of the things that suck about being a woman at each Barbie. The newly re-liberated Barbies do not vote for a patriarchy and completely restore the status quo ante, promising Kens they can slowly obtain more and more rights. Presumably this is a nod to how slow progress is in the real world, but no in universe reason is given for the deliberative speed.
In our world, women have also slowly been chipping away at real patriarchy, which has taken much more than some peptalks and a few horses to dismantle, for centuries. As our power has grown, we’ve even begun to take the blame for our own unequal status. Women are no longer prohibited from working high-status jobs, but even as the formal barriers to women’s workplace equality have fallen away, persistent gaps in both pay and career status for women remain. The pay and status gaps women face are now justified by women’s choices. Women choose to take care of children and family matters for no pay, or they choose careers as CNAs and daycare providers rather than construction workers and as teachers and social workers rather than engineers, and the markets punish them severely for their economic sin. Success requires smashing the babies to pieces.
One could argue that there is sexism there—that the fact that the vital work traditionally done by women existing largely outside the markets is sexism—that a market that punishes individuals for caring for children, the sick, and the elderly is inefficient, unsustainable, and wrong, but then one would not be the Barbie movie.
Barbie is a delightful surreal movie that captures a lot of the female experience in an extremely hilarious way. I recommend that you go see it, and I hope that more movies like it are in the works. Nevertheless, the movie buys wholesale the logic of capitalism as developed under patriarchy, smashes the babies to bits and leaves mothers in the dust. And a feminism that leaves behind a majority of women is no feminism at all. Instead of standing still, let’s see if we can learn to run so that our daughters might learn to fly.
Two somewhat related thoughts:
I’ve been thinking recently about how sexism is the ur-generator of illiberalism. When we examine illiberalism it always seems to end up in a vision of a rigidly defined roles and always in the most intimate sphere of our personal and sexual lives.
What the Barbie vision gets right is that it shows the absurdity of the patriarchal logic.
Patriarchy often devolves into some sort of half assed sociobiology, e.g., that men need to be in charge to defend against saber toothed tigers and lift heavy rocks.
But of course in an industrialized world, a woman CAN be the President and CEO and astronaut, while ALSO being a mother, and aside from their sperm-making ability, men don’t have any specialized role to offer and are easily envisioned as Kens, standing aroound idly until their specialized purposed is needed.
And of course men are swift to object, talking about our ability to complement a household and our role as nurturing fathers and maybe soemthing about the unique perspective that a male brings but that argument depends on the very tolerance and acceptance and equality that feminism stresses.Report
Thanks for the feedback!
That is an interesting point and something I have sort of noticed without understanding. a lot of the “woe is men” discussion recently has focused on wanting to define a special masculine virtue that is inaccessible to women, which doesn’t seem possible. And you don’t often see the reverse happen where women need special women only virtues. kind of like how there isn’t a female equivalent to “emasculating” that I can think of.
I can see where the opposite side of being forced into a specific role is feeling kind of purposeless, like all you can do is beach, which is painful in its own way.Report
My thoughts on sexism being the progenitor of illiberalism comes from my observation of how young so many of the new rightists are.
People like Charlie Kirk or Ben Shapiro or any of the seething bros you hear about who are Joe Rogan fans.
Liberals customarily used to mock the angry red-faced Fox News grandpas and regarded them as a dying force.
But…I remember hearing that same story in the early 70s, when it was asumed the Pepsi Generation would sweep away all the Archie Bunkers.
But it occurs to me that sexism is an eternal problem to be dealth with.
People can easily limit their interaction with members of a religious or ethnic minority limited to the public sphere but our interactions with members of theopposite sex are always intimate and intertwined with our deepest selves- we interact as mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters.
And so our attitudes are always filtered through the lens of our most personal lived experience and carry with it all the joy and rage and psychic wounds which we carry inside us.
It isn’t really possible to regard the relationship of the sexes with dispassion or detached objectivity.Report
There is a similar and weird thing when discussing what is “conservatism”. Conservatives want their values to be different then liberal values as opposed to seeing shared values. I’ve had this discussion a few times over the years here. I’ll say family is a liberal value, which is great since it’s a conservative value. It’s a UNIVERSAL value so maybe we can bond over that. And conservatives have argued with me stating that i’m ……well….i’m not sure what their argument ever was. Some people crave stark boundaries between groups. Even when talking about very very shared beliefs.Report
“kind of like how there isn’t a female equivalent to “emasculating” that I can think of.”
(there is, it’s “transfem”)Report
The femme equivalent of emasculation is the circa Victorian term “unsexed.” A woman was unsexed when she took a public role, or agitated for the vote, or rode a bicycle.Report
I don’t know if this is a sign of something of a rightward drift as I get older or something else but I am losing patience for this sort of radical pondering about different issues. There is something off putting about it.Report
I’m unclear as to what radical pondering is going on.Report
Men being Kens and not having any specialized role to offer and being a bunch of Kens that just stand around until needed.Report
Men are physically stronger.
It’s extremely hard and risky for one person to do everything.
Women have serious advantages for caring for very young children, that drops to zero as they age.Report
Less “justified” and more “the result of”. It’s not like there’s a massive conspiracy and the law black letter says men and women are paid the same for the same work.Report
It is a funny sort of patriarchy that allows women to totally overtake men in educational performance and start to dominate certain traditionally high prestige fields, like law.
What we really have is incredible progress. However with that progress has come choices without obvious answers with respect to how women navigate the need to work for a living and the biological realities of the female role in human reproduction.Report
I recall Gloria (America Ferrera’s character in Barbie) making that exact complaint. Something to the effect of “A woman has to be everything to everyone all the time. She has to be a mother, and she’s never a good enough mother. She has to be a career woman, and she is never good enough at her job. And if she does do what it takes to be good at her job, she isn’t putting enough effort in to being a good mother. And if she somehow does both, she’s letting her looks go, so she isn’t pretty enough. And if she somehow does all of that she’s so completely stressed out that she gets told she needs to smile more. It’s literally impossible for her to win.” I’m sure the phrasing of her speech was different than this, but I feel like I have the gist more or less right.
I mean, I agree that women having the option to pursue meaningful, well-paid careers is better than women not having that option. For sure. But the commentary encapsulated in Gloria’s rant isn’t so much about legal rights as it is about cultural expectations. And that’s something that both men and women can work on shifting, but of course shifting cultural expectations is precisely what conservatism is fundamentally about about opposing (standing athwart history and shouting stop! and all that), and thus the alignment of our current discourse about sex, sexism, and gender roles.Report
I think this is because a lot of feminism is very middle and upper middle class oriented. You see this a lot in debates around childcare. The main people arguing for state provided childcare are middle and upper middle class women with jobs they find interesting but who aren’t able to afford nannies and au pairs on their own salary or even combined with their husband’s salaries. Working class women who are working more humdrum jobs that they don’t care about that much like working class men with humdrum jobs want a policy that will allow them to stay home with their children.
On the other blog, a women poster a long time ago recognized that feminism doesn’t really do a good job arguing for the average or even below average woman. It assumes ambition and passion rather than a lack of ambition and a lack of passion for a vocation.Report
I actually think that shunting motherhood to the side is more the “feminism for the ambitious” and I think that my argument is a small corrective to that. it is working class women who perform back breaking CNA labor for little compensation and working class women who are doing low value work waiting tables and flipping burgers instead of the work of taking care of kids, which is much more valuable, but that’s not reflected in the market.
Also, working class women are basically the queens of side-hustle. unfortunately it’s often bullshit MLMs, but i don’t think the desire for the benefits of a job/career are as limited to upper class women as we think.
Also, we used to be friends on Pandagon, back in the dayReport
I don’t remember you but thank you for remembering me. I agree with you on these topics. A lot of thinkers really don’t have much to offer the humdrum, so it isn’t really that surprising that we get a feminism of the ambitious that kind of doesn’t get into the fact that the majority of women like the majority of men are probably going to end up with meh jobs just because of statistics. I suppose people also feel really bad imposing this level of realism on small children.Report
Welcome to Ordinary Times.Report
Maybe it’s just the word ‘patriarchy’ I chafe at. More heat than light and all that.
Of course I agree that there are a number of damned if you do damned if you don’t choices women face. And to be clear I think we really should be looking to soften those where we reasonably can through public policy, not trying to turn back the clock. It is very much on my mind today, watching my wife struggle to take our 11 week old to daycare. Needless to say that was not easy for her, and I definitely don’t expect any sympathy given how successful we are. However even then our lifestyle requires her income, and I shudder at the choices people (women in particular) who aren’t as lucky as we are have to make.Report
I know that the word is kind of loaded, but couldn’t think of anything betterReport
On a side note, I’m effectively a single parent now days. I’m divorcing my wife, last kid lives with me full time and refuses to have contact with her.
So in a weird way I’m in that situation.Report
That sounds hard. Im glad your youngest has support it sounds like. I’m sorry you are going through that.Report
Very sorry to learn of your divorce, Dark Matter. Mine hurt bad and it sounds like there’s a very unpleasant situation going on motivating it. Not trying to inquire about the particulars of that, just noticing that it sounds very unhappy and offering up some empathy, the consolation of knowing your path has been trodden before, and the hopes that this journey eventually takes you and your family to a place of happiness.Report
Thank you for the best wishes.
Yes, it’s a mess. I can’t make deals with her, she doesn’t follow through.
For perspective, none of my children are on speaking terms with her. I think we’re in mental illness territory although there’s no way she’s legally mentally ill (she’s too functional).
Moving back to the topic at hand…
Speaking as a single parent, it’s not so much harder as it is a lot more risky. I had covid, when I did I wasn’t able to drive for several days. If I needed to drive my kid somewhere then it’s a massive problem (Uber, maybe).
Without another adult around I need to structure my life around that lack. We live close to the school so she can walk so it doesn’t matter whether I’m available. If there’s an emergency I am blessed with a job that lets me drop everything and ride to the rescue. My job is stable so I don’t need to interview or whatever.
So all this is workable… but having another adult around is a massive advantage.
This is admittedly less of a “women need men” observation and more of a “power of a stable marriage” thing so there’s that.Report
Re: “as a result of women’s “choices””
This is why I say that feminism is unlike any other political movement because in the case of feminism, the personal IS the political.
Most political movements can be abstracted into objective detachment; If say, a group wants independence for Puerto Rico, or if truckers want lower gas taxes, or someone else wants free college, these things can remain in the public sphere.
But feminism reaches deep into our personal intimate lives and seeks to change how we behave in our own home.
What Barbie is discussing is how young men and women are accultured and how our desires and expectations from the opposite sex are shaped and directed by the adults who raise us.
There is a lot of study abnout how even in modern secular cultures, even in Communist countries, the traditional roles played by men and women have been highly resistant to the black letter law.
Men still expect to come home to a meal, and still expect to do little housework, even if they are married to CEO Barbie.
And women still participate in this; Feminism doesn’t liberate all women equally, it doesn’t lift all boats. Many women find their purpose and power in exploiting mens expectations to their own advantage.
But the flip side of this coin, feminism DOES liberate men, men who don’t fit into the traditional roles or find those uninspiring and deadening.
One complaint voiced often by divorced dads is how the system views them as “Wallets with legs”, i.e., it views divorced fathers as Kens, essentially useless beings who have one single purpose, and outside of that, expects them to stand around on the beach, waiting to send off the monthly check.
But…that’s the traditional view, isn’t it?
That man is the hairy chested caveman clubbing tigers and dragging home the kill. What useful purpose does caveman serve other than Meat-Provider?
The self-described internet Alpha Males who sneer at tender domesticated daddies driving minivans to dance recital are every bit as oppressed by patriarchy as a Gilead wife.Report
I don’t want to be too dismissive here Chip, but in the context of the modern west a lot of this sounds less like oppression and more like first world problems. I’m all in favor of some renegotiation of these things to account for modernity. Hell I try to live my life that way. But if the theory of feminism has the CEO Barbie cast as a victim of patriarchy because her husband is a lazy schlub well, it just isn’t a very convincing theory.Report
Difficult truths are usually best denied:
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Now that is the kind of honesty we really need.Report
Be careful what you wish for – Trump often display’s that kind of honesty. And we certainly don’t need him.Report
How is this different from men? If you asked me what sex partner I had who was the very best, I’d pick someone who I had a fling but not a LTR with; she also had some unorthodox personal traits. (I’d guess she still does.)
See also: https://nypost.com/2012/11/25/nobody-marries-their-best-sex-ever/Report
I’ve heard “crazy in the streets, crazy in the sheets” but my own personal experience is that that’s not accurate.
Granted, I’m not particularly Captain Insano myself.
But if we’re looking for something that definitely qualifies as a First-World Problem, I’d say “our most desirable mates ON PAPER and our most desirable humpbuddies don’t have a whole lot of overlap” would *DEFINITELY* fit the bill.Report
This only shows that a lot of women like a lot of men like separating the people for short term fun dating and long term relationship dating into different categories.Report
If women were REALLY honest about the best sex of their life it would be alone in a dark room with a vibrator.Report
Maybe look at it as less about what you recognize as “Oppression” and more what is a problem to be solved.
One of the explanations for the persistence of poverty is that poor women tend to not marry the father of their child.
And one explanation for that is that often the men in question are unemployed and yet demand that she perform all the household duties after she gets off her 12 hour day.
And one of the explanations for men remaining unemployed is that entry-level jobs nowadays aren’t brawny Springsteen-esque jobs like assembling Fords or hoisting hods of bricks, but feminized jobs like retail clerk or assistant gofers.]And surprise surprise, men who buy into the caveman mystique scorn these sorts of jobs.
And this becomes a problem whose consequences all of us are stuck with.Report
Maybe we could fix things by importing a lot more unskilled labor and keeping unskilled wages low?Report
I’m not sure I buy the idea that there’s an overwhelming supply of jobs that the sort of men in those circumstances are qualified for, and they’re just opting not to take them out of dedication to some traditional notion of what kinds of jobs men have. Really we should always be skeptical of just-so stories like that which also happen to flatter a particular world view. I think you’d say the same thing if someone trotted out the welfare queen talking points of yore.
Anyway what I’m trying to get at here is bigger. The kind of totalising philosophies in question seem to operate under the assumption that if only everyone adopted the right politics or cultural attitudes all of the mundane problems of human life would be solved. The truth is that the vast majority of the time there is no way to have your cake and eat it to. There will always be interpersonal problems, disappointments, and hard trade offs with no policy solution.
With respect to feminism we have (rightly) made it illegal to tell a woman she can’t have a particular job or get a degree because of her sex. We can’t guarantee that she can both be a girlboss executive and also the mother of the year that makes every recital and little league game. That’s not patriarchy. It’s just life. And that’s not only for the upper/upper middle class. We can mandate child support and alimony. We can’t prevent people from ill advised sexual relationships with disinterested partners going nowhere in life.Report
The entire girlboss thing is simply because feminism tends to be aspirational rather than realistic. This is probably because wives and daughters of surgeons are going to be more interested in doing what their fathers and brothers could do than wives and daughters of coal miners, where they get to see a lot of physical aches and pains and yeah being a house wife doesn’t seem that bad compared to black lung disease.
Plus girlboss and mother of the year makes for a lot more exciting story than a husband and wife with humdrum jobs that they don’t care that much about trying to make the best of life. A frew years ago, somebody I I know in real life posted some fanart of each Disney princess job and how they it makes sense. Here is an example:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/813603488909144813/
I not getting the point or maybe being too much of a Calvinist made the point that most girls like most boys are going to end up with humdrum jobs when they are adults. A friend I know from real life, and a mother of a daughter, pointed out that while she appreciates my realism it is important to let kid’s dream. And if I had kids maybe I’d feel the same but maybe not. Maybe we need to be more realistic about this and crush the dreams to achieve a just reality.Report
I’m actually kicking myself now for saying ‘girlboss’ because I think it’s unnecessarily sarcastic. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being an ambitious, high achieving woman with big dreams, and women need to be as free as men to pursue them.
However I think you might be onto something with the realism. There are only so many hours in a day, and people need to be honest with themselves about what’s possible. Blaming abstract forces for all of our frustrations and disappointments in life is probably not a recipe for happiness.Report
It’s not just the hours in the day. Most people are going to end up average because most people are average. That not everybody could be great and ending up in a modest but comfortable lifestyle is a fine outcome used to be a stock moral. All the way up until the 1980s. Now this disappeared. Either the strivers decided they can’t stand mediocrity any longer or the stakes are too high and life became something where failure is not an option but highly likely.Report
No, justified is the correct word here. When women choose to enter a field the wage drops. Computer science is the first example that comes to mind. When men started to choose computer science, the wages went up. Women are choosing pharmacy more, and the wages are going down. Men’s careers have the opposite affect. Low wages happen AFTER women enter the field. When we make the choice for a high paying job, then pay goes down. We are told we make bad choices, but when women make the right choices employers make it wrong when they realize more of us flock to the higher paying job.Report
I see this talking point a lot, and it doesn’t really make any sense on a micro level. The idea is that employers are willing to sacrifice profits, or customers are willing to pay more, when an occupation skews male just because they think that dudes rock?
If this actually holds as a general pattern, and isn’t just an artifact of cherry-picking examples, then there must be some kind of supply-based explanation. One possible factor is that educated women seem to be more drawn than educated men to what you might call self-actualization jobs, i.e. jobs where supply is relatively wage-inelastic because people really want to do that particular kind of work, even if the pay is low. Men, on the other hand, are more inclined to follow the money.Report
You would need to have a lot more research to tease out what’s going on, if it exists. Much more likely these are just talking points taken out of context like the whole “x cents per dollar” thing.
It is illegal to pay women differently. We have vast amounts of legal and political machinery to enforce this. The idea that multiple fortune 500s, much less the entire economy, discriminates is absurd. Something else is going on.
Two interesting examples are… after HRC using the whole “wages discrimination against women line”, someone did some math and found the HRC campaign staff had the usual issue that the men were paid higher (not for the same work).
2nd, The Uber algorithm doesn’t know the gender of it’s drivers but men get more money from it.Report
I’m struck by the resonance between America Ferrera’s role as Gloria in Barbie — a middle-aged mother who struggles within the patriarchy and mourns the bitterness of her formerly-sweet daughter — and her film debut in the wonderful Real Women Have Curves, where she played a young woman having to choose between a patriarchal life path and a more independent feminist path. It’s ironic and a very deliberate choice of the writers of the earlier movie that the patriarchal path is urged by the young woman’s mother, as a way of supporting the family and avoiding risk, where the feminist path is presented as something of an unknown but full of opportunity, and urged by the men in the protagonist’s life. Barbie gives us an argument that even if a young woman chooses the feminist path, the patriarchy’s ubiquity is still going to thwart all the promise and sap all the happiness that a path of greater independence offers.
The surrealistic mirror image of the patriarchy in Barbieland, in my opinion, was actually no better than the patriarchy itself and I found myself faulting the Barbies at the end for not crafting a better and more equitable solution for the Kens. But then again, Barbieland is animated by the power of the people in the Real World who play with the Barbie dolls, and as the OP points out, they tend to be basically uninterested in the affairs of the various Kens, which is perhaps not equitable from an adult perspective but we are talking about mostly little kids, after all.Report
oh, yeah the status of the Kens was monstrous. I was actually mad at the Barbies when they decided on “slow progress” and not “fix it right now!” especially given there was no reason for the discrimination and no problem to fix to allow equality, beyond allowing for more real estate development.Report
I have not seen Barbie but I’m still skeptical but using basically a capitalist product to critique modernity. Mattel was watching things with a tight fist and clearly knew they could sell at a lot of merch through Barbie. As TvTropes would put it, the man is sticking it to the man.Report
I’m what would be called a cis-heterosexual man under Internet parlance. I am also in what might be called a caring profession where I have to hear a lot of very sad life tales and help desperate people along with a lot of hand-holding along the way. I do not find that I am served well by this current moment in politics. The Patriarchal Right for lack of a better term thinks I need to be more of a stoical real man about this and maybe not like what I do anyway. But the opposite side isn’t much better either. Being emotionally drained or getting emotionally crushed from being in a caring profession seems to be something of a right reserved for women. I’ve had colleagues reach out for emotional support but when I need help it is all tough love and take things in stride or nothing and the only reason I can think of this is because I’m a heterosexual XY chromosome holder. The entire thing just seems really hypocritical.Report
It was kind of funny how many pieces I’ve seen about how the film shows how bad living under patriarchy is for men, and also how bad a sort of weird fictional matriarchy would be for men. And then the happy ending for Ken is he’s free to become self-actualized, with no suggestion of what that would actually look like, at the slight expense of apparently being alone the rest of his life. It gives the impression that the ideal path for a man under feminism is basically to piss off.Report
I’m getting a lot of feeling that many people see it is their time for their group to enjoy their moment in the sun and other previously dominate groups need to piss off. Most people don’t think like this but the people that do tend to be very loud and also make media, so seem much more common than they are.Report