Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie”: Not the Movie We Deserve

Okay, it seems I am a second time offender, however today’s gender focused culture holding America’s favorite gendered toy offers too many opportunities for thought. With that here goes my likely contested and unpopular view of Barbie. Yes, she can be anything, an astronaut, a business woman, a doctor and such. But if we challenge the honest way in which we played with this toy, the true story places Barbie in a love triangle. As simple as that, I challenge any woman, especially from the 80’s who regularly played with Barbie and who owned at least 1 Ken to tell me their play story lines offered anything more than a daytime made for TV telenovela. If Barbie attended any type of work environment, her participation in such activities set a stage for the love drama that soon followed. With “day to night” convertible outfits that outlined clearly Barbie made after work plans, girls read the room loud and clear. Barbie lives to model the mating game. To be honest, I struggle to remember any story during Barbie & Ken play that lacked a dating narrative. I feel safe to say 99% of her stories involved meeting up with Ken for adult fun, not friendship fun. The excitement when Ken admits he thinks she’s pretty and wants to be her boyfriend, the first kiss, and of course Barbie and Ken absolutely had sex, at least laying in bed together. Any woman who tells you otherwise is lying. The makers of Barbie made her purpose perfectly clear knowing most girls would own three Barbies for every one Ken doll. One boy in a toy box full of girls provided a very accurate model for the future. Ken always had his pick, constantly changing his mind and having time with each Barbie, usually favoring one. Barbie performed literal gymnastics to get Ken’s attention and win the boy.

Although Greta Gerwig’s well meaning Barbie movie was the movie we wanted, it was not in fact the movie we deserved. The real Barbie world is a world in which NO GIRL owns more Kens than Barbies, where Barbies fight over Ken (literally) and she always felt the pressure to be romantic with Ken knowing eventually it would come to that. My art considers how desire shapes our identities, poking at the force behind it. This force fuels the transformation girls experience the moment they realize the world wants something from them that they will never escape. No amount of character, intelligence, skills or strength will save them from the desire they will feel from heterosexual men (specifically) for their bodies as well (quite frankly) as the converse lack of desire for some girls. The public can demand the patriarchy exercise control of their desire in public discourse. However, privately the gloves (and pants) ultimately come off and we know their desire rages in their porn filled caves, and I’m not sure erections can be labeled as fundamentally patriarchal.

French philosopher Simone De Beauvoir claims one is not born a woman but becomes a woman. Perhaps Barbie’s dating life sets the stage for women's inevitable role in the pageant of desire. The stereotyped version of her offers the quintessential ideal of beauty, long blonde hair, caucasian, thin, and pleasantly always smiling, the vanilla flavor of desire enjoyed by the lionshare of the population. Playboy’s printed content heavily focused on this ideal, knowing its universal appeal sold the most magazines. Girls whose Barbies focus on their careers fail to recognize the doll, modeled after the busty Bild Lilli doll sold in tobacco shops to men, already embodies the physical ideal of female performance and desire without even trying (unless you turn her into “Weird Barbie"). To become a woman is to participate in this pageant, and the winner wins the boy’s desire, and ultimately proliferates her DNA (whether she intended to or not). Failure to perform your gender is a failure to compete. Failure to compete renders less options for procreation whether you choose to procreate or not. For the act of procreation to happen (outside a laboratory), Male’s desire must be present. As it turns out, Gerwig’s Ken is not “just Ken”, but the key to the future of the human species. For if young girls fail to learn how to win him, their girls won’t exist to play Barbie and repeat the cycle.

And by the way, we women demand so much more of our Ken’s than ever before creating the 1 to 3 scenario in Barbie land. I know, this likely unpopular opinion diverges from the progressive ideals in which gender exists as a fluid construct existing on a spectrum. It also diverges from the idea that women perform the female gender as an act of identity purely for themselves. These ideas may still be true, however it is not patriarchal to claim there are limits to what wins Ken’s gender fluid non-existent implied penis and that which ultimately results from it. 

“Barbie (2023)” - Literally NO GIRL owns more Kens than Barbies. Think about that.