Rambling post Barbie watch comments
This originally appeared as a series of Instagram story posts:
I’m going to talk about a very important lens I think should be laid over watching Barbie. Don’t click through my story if you hate spoilers of any kind. I don’t think what I’m about to say is too spoilery, but I don’t care about those kind of things.
If you do, consider this your fair warning.
OK so here’s the key in my opinion to understanding the Barbie movie’s brilliance… you have got to understand that Barbieland is a world that is the collective creation of decades of 10 year old girls playing with the dolls.
The things that are in it live in a magical liminal space that is bound by the understanding that your average 10 year old would have + Mattel’s silly mentality that creating dolls of all career kinds would be a meaningful antidote to patriarchy.
The “adult” things that happen in Barbieland (like jobs, boyfriends, sexuality, matriarchy, queerness, politics, work, etc.) are all from the childlike understanding of little girls.
I think this is for everyone who really played with Barbies in the 80s-90s like me… it’s very easy to understand once you get this. Barbieland is everything is shiny and “pretty” and innocent. But Barbieland is ephemeral and fleeting, as well.
Just. Like. Girlhood.
The things that happen in the “real world” are closer to the unvarnished truth and that’s what shocks Barbie. (Which is a metaphor for when a girl’s body becomes adultlike through puberty or transition.)
The world that a little while ago felt happy and glittery and full of possibility for you feels suffocating and scary. People are looking at you in a way that feels violating but you don’t really understand why yet.
But along the way Barbie becomes humanized through her own experiences and because of women and girls she meets. She realizes that Barbieland (and childhood) can’t last forever.
The real feelings (of adulthood) at first terrify her but she realizes she’s forever changed and the beauty of real life is worth the risk. The beauty of real relationships is worth the risk. The beauty of living a full life is worth the aging and loss of beauty of the body. The beauty of figuring out who you are outside your personal Barbieland is petrifying but ultimately what she needs. Pretending her personal matriarchy is all there is becomes untenable.
Ken is drawn to the patriarchy of the real world because he’s only ever lived in the Barbieland’s version of matriarchy, which is innocent and mostly harmless. Its worst effect on him is he lives on the beach and Barbie has too many girls’ nights. He eventually learns that the patriarchy that compelled him for the 2 seconds he was in the real world is a lot more fucked up than the life as an accessory to Barbie he lived in the imagination of little girls. He has to walk his way around to understanding that he doesn’t need the patriarchy to feel strong… he, too, is Kenough.
Any MRA type who is crying about the “depiction of men” is willfully playing the victim and either real dumb or pretending not to get this.
Barbieland Kens aren’t about real men. It’s a 10 year old’s ideas of a future boyfriend.
It’s so different to live in a child’s dream world than to exist in the real one. But we all know that avowed misogynists don’t care to admit what the real world still is to women.
The end… for now 😅