Barbie, Motherhood, and the Political Climate

“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 19^th 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.