In Defense of the Barbie Movie

Scores of men across the internet have been vilifying the Barbie movies, labelling it as a “two-hour woke-a-thon”. Famous personalities known for their pseudo machismo, and chauvinistic and conservative ideals, Ben Shapiro and Piers Morgan, have repeatedly condemned the film for its polarizing and aggresive portrayal of feminism and the patriarchy.

Except, the Barbie movie isn’t polarizing and though its sparked a conversation about feminism and the patriarchy, it certainly did so in a way that shouldn’t be labeled aggresive. After all, the Barbie movie never vilified any of its characters, even the characters most deserving of criticism and it never centered the conversation of the patriarchy about women. It spoke about the damaging effects of the oppressive system from all angles, challenging its viewers to see just how much the patriarchy damaged both men as much as it hurt women.

One of the biggest criticism of men about the Barbie movie was that it fueled the rage women had against men.

And I have to say, I agree. Women really have raged against men.

Except, women have been raging against men since the dawn of the patriarchy.

Female rage was never a foreign concept. Visual art, film, music, television and even literature have long explored the feeling of feminine rage. It’s not all that hard to portray it when it is such a visceral, tangible feeling. No one can read Sylvia Plath’s poetry about how awful it is to be born a woman and think that her words do not stem from rage.

There is nothing men can do to add to the rage that women have felt for centuries. There isn’t anything they could do that they haven’t already done before. Women have been angry and they will remain angry even after all of us have turned to the dust that kisses stars.

But the Barbie movie isn’t about female rage.

It’s about female solidarity.

If Barbie had been about feminine rage, Ryan Gosling’s Ken would have been villified, burned at the very stake that scores of women accused of witchcraft have been burned at.

Instead, Ken was portrayed as misguided. He was an innocent, a thoughtless man who didn’t know any better. At the center of the story, all Ken really needed was to discover who he was outside of Barbie, the same way Barbie had to learn who she was outside of being, well, the Barbie.

Ken had to learn, on his own, who he was meant to be. Outside of revolving around stereotypical Barbie, Ken learned about his own identity, his own autonomy and his own power. Who was Ken if he wasn’t loved by Barbie? And though the ending leaves this answer ambiguous, it’s clear that his story was just as valuable as Barbie’s.

Ken, despite stealing Barbie’s house and brainwashing all her friends, never apologized to Barbie. Even after Barbie apologized to Ken for “leading him on” and took on the accountability for his actions, Ken simply accepted Barbie’s apology as fact and admitted that he never cared much for the patriarchy, having lost interest the minute he realized that horses did not play a big role in its enforcement. But we never once hear Ken utter the words, “I’m sorry.” It’s a small thing, and easily brushed aside by the movie, but it is an all too familiar scene for women around the world. How many of us have apologized for our own perceived failings when the men around us sweep their own mistakes and failings under the rug while barely acknowledging that they were sweeping in the first place? And yet, despite all this, no one in the movie brings it up. Ken is still portrayed under the frame of naïveté and the movie moves on.

Then there was Mattel executives, who, according to conservative media, were portrayed unrealistically. How dare Barbie portray these serious men in serious corporate positions as unserious.

Except, were they?

Will Ferrell’s role as Mattel’s CEO was shown taking his job extremely seriously. He needed to stop Barbie from bleeding into the real world, lest consequences arose that could very well tear a fabric into the very essence of the space-time continuum. And though Greta Gerwig chose to frame these characters humorously, they were never dismissed, an all too common experience for women in the corporate world. They were a serious threat to Barbie’s mission to find her owner and she took that threat seriously, choosing to run from them instead of giving in. And even when Barbie was close to giving into the whims of these men and was almost locked up in a box by Ferrell's character, the CEO and his Board of Directors were never viewed maliciously. They were well-meaning people who looked up to Barbie and her legacy. They simply wanted to do what they thought was right and return Barbie back to Barbieland. In fact, the CEO, despite being a man, revealed that he had an innate desire to help young girls around the world believe in themselves.

These are not the men so often shown disparaging women with their pseudo machismo machinations and chauvinistic, Machiavellian, sexist viewpoints. These were men, human men, with faults of their own but are, at the end of the day, good people. They were not villains anymore than Sasha—who, upon her first introduction, was shown being rude and condescending to Barbie but is ultimately as much a feminist icon as her mother and Barbie are—is a villain.

So, what really is the problem with the Barbie movie?

Was it Gloria’s impassioned speech about the struggles of womanhood? A speech that emphasized that it is not men, but the patriarchy, a system that ritualistically forces women into an impossibly small mold to fit into their their impossible standards from the moment they were born until the moment they die. Or is their problem, perhaps, the fact that the movie emphasized how the patriarchy also affects men by subjugating them to recede from every emotion with the exception of anger, thus perpetuating the cycle of violence that plagues their gender. Or, perhaps, it’s Barbie’s experience of being in the real world. About how men will continuously subject women to the worst of their attentions and unwanted sexual advances to how women are often penalized when they report their perpetrators, even in this post #MeToo world. Perhaps, it was how the Kens, despite being the marginalized group in Barbieland, will never be treated as worse as how Barbie and women are treated in the real world. Or was it the overall message of mediocrity and ordinariness, of how not everyone has to be extraordinary to be worth something.

The movie was never anti-men. It was just pro-women. And to these conservative men, therein lies the problem.

Women and minority groups were never allowed to exist in a space that cisgendered, straight, conservative men own. When the Barbie movie became a safe haven for all people regardless of their gender, sex, race, age or even their size, conservative men thought that to be the issue. Because if there’s space for all of us, then there is no space for all of them.

Except the Barbie movie never drew a line on the sand. It never asked us to choose between the Barbies or the Kens. In Barbieland, everyone was loved. From the Kens to the Barbies, to the discontinued Allan and Midge, and even Weird Barbie had her own space where she was free to be herself. That is the message the movie wants to portray. And if that is a message that elicits such a negative and visceral reaction from the conservative party, perhaps it’s time for them to ask why. What is it about the Barbies and the Midges and Allans of the world that scare them so much? And why ken't they shut up about it?