Scorching Hot Take: Barbie is not a feminist movie
Inevitable caveats to begin:
Barbie is a fun - if largely plotless - movie, with incredible production design. I don’t begrudge it a penny of its $1bn+ box office.
Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are perfect in it.
It’s great that generations of women and girls are watching and enjoying this movie together.
I recognise that it is not Greta Gerwig’s job to solve the problem of patriarchy. Certainly not with a 2hr PG-13 movie as her instrument. All before her have failed.
The amount of circle-jerking commentary about what a profoundly brave feminist movie this is (“feminist epic”, “feminist masterpiece”, “this is the feminist movie you’ve been waiting for”), only serves to highlight the calamitous state of feminism in 2023.
It’s a movie whose only contribution to the discourse is to admire the problem that the patriarchy exists in The Real World. And by the end of the movie, absolutely nothing has changed in The Real World. Except that Barbie now lives here and *gasp*, she has a vagina of her very own (just like a real girl!) and can trip off delightedly to the gynaecologist.
Now, once she’s at the gynaecologist, it will take her upwards of 7 years to be diagnosed if she has endometriosis, she might be prescribed a contraceptive pill that renders her suicidal (bye-bye, sunny disposition!) and then there’s the risk that her gynaecologist sexually assaults her during her appointment.
Welcome to The Real World, Barbie! The fairy tale ending of your girlish dreams!
There is no sense whatsoever in the climax of the movie that Barbie can or will be able to improve the lives of women in the Real World. But she has a vagina now, so… cool, I guess?
Even without all of the above, the film makes heavy weather of the fact that all the Mattel execs are male and how ridiculous this is. And it is. Obviously. Yet, amidst the tonally jubilant ending of this movie, all the Mattel execs are still male. Wait… what? There was a wide-open opportunity for a female takeover of the company, but it just… doesn’t happen.
Presumably, because Greta Gerwig was aware that, whilst audiences can accept a reality in which a toy can become flesh and inter-dimensional doll/human travel is possible, one in which a $7bn company has a female C-suite would stretch credulity a little too far.
It’s a movie that pretends, self-consciously, that it’s shockingly subversive, whilst resolutely maintaining the status quo.
This, though, isn’t my biggest issue with the film’s lauded feminist angle.
How commentators delighted at this Barbie universe, where the Kens are hapless fools, in thrall to the Barbies. Emotionally stunted and barely functioning in their basic role of being occasional accessories and dance partners. Living an existence that’s been created by women, with no thought to the Kens’ needs. What an incredible world to be in! Amirite?!
Except no woman is yearning for a world populated by incompetent, anabolically-enhanced pretty boys with no self-awareness or emotional maturity and lacking any useful life skills, nor given any opportunity to make any purposeful societal contribution. Why the fuck would we? That’s basically Andrew Tate with a glow-up. No woman on Earth benefits from being surrounded by these pouting cretins.
The women I know want men who are capable, resilient, split the household cognitive and physical labour equally, have an age-appropriate testosterone count and aren’t nonconsensually choking them during sex. Men who recognise that women take on 100% of the reproductive labour for the human race and revere them for it, rather than disdaining motherhood as the least valuable occupation.
Men who don’t start podcasts rather than go to therapy, nor weaponise the language of therapy if they do go. Men who don’t send unsolicited dick pics nor refer to the time that they are obliged, as fathers, to parent their own children as ‘babysitting’. Men who don’t mansplain, dismiss women’s accomplishments at work or effectuate weaponised incompetence.
I don’t see any male role models in this movie. Just a bunch of disaffected, disempowered buffoons who are still loved, indulged and supported by the women in their orbit, despite the fact that the men make no real contribution to the community. What, exactly, are we teaching girls in this movie?
The film also presents a world where either men or women have to be in charge. In either scenario, the victor turns oppressor. There is only the patriarchy or the matriarchy, no conceivable alternative exists. That approach hasn’t worked to improve equality in any known civilisation throughout all of recorded history.
It also, rather inconveniently, plays straight into the hands of the incel/men’s rights movement. For years, far-Right MRAs (particularly in the US) have fumed about the uppity bitches who’ve dared to campaign for the right to vote and a college education. As if women didn’t already have it easy, they declaim. This, in a nation where women have no legal right to maternity leave and where, at time of writing, 13 of the 50 states have criminal penalties for performing an abortion. They have spent decades trying to convince the world that all women are itching to take over the planet and render men redundant.
And now a mainstream billion-dollar movie is doing their propaganda for them and journalists are lauding it as a feminist triumph.
I’ll say it loudly for the people at the back: WOMEN DO NOT WANT TO HAVE ALL OF THE POWER. They have enough shit to do. Rather, women are sick of doing work that is unrecognised and of having their needs go continually unmet. So, yes, women who have made Nobel Prize-worthy contributions in their fields should absolutely be receiving their Nobel Prizes.
Women are, by now, so used to having to adopt an energy of “Fuck it, I’ll do it myself then,” that becoming President seems like the only viable option to make meaningful change. Although we all saw how that worked out for Hilary Clinton, possibly the most qualified US Presidential candidate in history, who was derided and discounted on the basis that HER HUSBAND had committed sexual indiscretions in the course of their marriage*.
Pitting the sexes against one another and implying that only one can prevail is desperately unhelpful. But the movie throws us another couple of nuggets in its ‘resolution’ of the battle of the sexes.
First of all, to assert themselves, women should emotionally manipulate men, by pretending to like them, then make those men (who, we are led to believe, have genuine feelings for the women) jealous by flirting with other men and THEN encourage the men to resolve this impasse by physical violence. After which, presumably, the victor gets to claim the woman, regardless of her feelings towards him. Whilst the men are distracted by fighting one another, the sneaky (tee hee!) women can seize power. And this is what we’re taking teenage girls to see at the movies in droves whilst celebrating the ‘feminism’? Fuck me…
Additionally, per the movie, it is women’s responsibility to empower women by telling women all the things that are shit about womanhood (and, in some instances, just a bit shit about being human). Which are things that, y’know, WOMEN, are already pretty aware of. No matter; these conversations should happen out of earshot of men and without male participation. Oh yeah, the way many women learn about periods. And that works out really well for male awareness and understanding of female bodies.
If we could overthrow the patriarchy by virtue of women discussing their collective suffering, the patriarchy wouldn't have survived past the first childbirth. Not a chance. But the movie pretends that if women are aware of the frustrating realities of their situations, the world can and will change in the blink of an eye. Women are aware. The world is unchanged…
If anything, women assembling to share wisdom in female communities have had the threat of persecution (“Burn the witch!”) hanging over them globally, throughout history.
The patriarchy is not going to be torn down by women. It can only be demolished if men agree to cede their existing social power and to never use their greater physical strength against women. If that can ever happen, it will only happen by the persuasion by men, of men. That’s not a cheerful sentence to type, but men influence men more than women do. Women have no direct ability to dismantle the patriarchy - they’ve been trying to for millennia, with only minimal gains.
It is disingenuous of the movie to reinforce the myth that women can overthrow male power structures and actually distracts from the genuine need that women have for men to assume a leading role in effecting meaningful change in sex and gender roles and relationships. I wish the future of womanhood were not dependent on the actions of men, but all of history suggests that it does.
Finally, though, the most obvious reason that Barbie cannot be a useful engine for any comparative discussion of the sexes is alluded to for humorous purposes, but is never addressed in a substantive way to highlight the fundamental difference between Barbie Land and The Real World.
The Barbies and the Kens have no reproductive organs (Oh my days! The hilarity!). The movie milks this for a couple of cheap laughs - and the final ‘Barbie’s Dream Vag’ payoff - but fails to address this fundamental truth: a world in which men are no longer a sexual threat to women (or men) and in which women stop being responsible for physically birthing the species, uncompensated, is unrecognisably different from the one that we inhabit.
The overthrow of Barbie Land is presented as a war, but one without the menace of rape. Our Kens have no ability to oppress the Barbies sexually. They have no esteem issues related to their consumption of pornography. And the Barbies in this movie do provide a glimpse of what is possible when the biological shackles of having female reproductive organs are removed.
Of course they can be anything they want - they don’t have the responsibility for growing or raising any of the little Barbies. They just emerge, fully-formed adult women, with limitless potential. No awkward puberty for our Babs, no PMS, no risk of perineal tearing, no menopause, no postpartum depression, no disdain for her once she’s deemed unfuckable. How unstoppable women would be, without the social and biological constraints placed upon them by their roles as the vessels from which all of human life is birthed.
As feminists have maintained for years: the world, as we know it, is not designed for female bodies, and society’s persistent unwillingness to accommodate them - let alone nurture or celebrate them - remains the crux of women’s struggle.
I’m not convinced that Barbie’s going to be as thrilled with that vagina as she thinks she is…
Quality article, I want more people to read this. Will share 👏
I agree totally with this critique! I had some of those thoughts while watching too. Sigh x