Barbie's Feminist Commentary is Lacking

A review from the girl who cut the hair off her Barbie dolls.

I finally got around to seeing the Barbie movie last night. I enjoyed the corny jokes, the well-choreographed dance numbers, and Ryan Gosling’s abs. But I didn’t find the gender messages as thoughtful as everyone else did.

I saw the movie nearly three weeks after everyone else. Movies in theaters aren’t generally my thing: I like the freedom to comment aloud and to fast-forward through boring parts. I had intended to wait to watch it when it came out on Netflix. But after having at least three people emphatically recommend that I watch the movie, I finally joined three other friends who also had been resisting the Barbie bandwagon.

Most people who walked in three weeks ago expected a fluff movie about Barbie, so naturally they were delighted to find something with a bit more substance. I, however, had so many people talk up this movie — indeed, my Facebook feed was filled with gushing reviews that mentioned teary eyes — that I was expecting a movie that would challenge some of my inherent assumptions or perhaps offer a lens through which I could reexamine some aspect of my life.

But that’s not, for the most part, what the Barbie movie offered to me. Worse, I found some of the movies stereotypes irritating. But before I rant about what I didn’t like, let me be fair and discuss some of what I enjoyed.

The Parts I Enjoyed (other than Gosling’s Abs)

If you haven’t seen any of the Barbie movie yet, here’s the basic plot: Barbie goes into the real world to find the girl who is playing with her. Through this basic plot device, we are able to view our world through the eyes of Barbie. This plot device also allows a clever commentary on the controversy that has always followed Barbie dolls and their unrealistic standards, and this was one part where the movie really succeeded.

As she is readying for her journey into the real world, the other Barbies comment about how the kids are sure to love Barbie and greet her with a giant hug. After all, she has shown young girls that they can be anything they want: doctors, Nobel prize-winning authors, and presidents. When Barbie finally finds the girl who is playing with her, she is greeted by an angsty tween who points out Barbie’s outdated beauty standards and argues that the stereotypes surrounding Barbie have hindered equality rather than helping it.

This early part of the movie gave me a few interesting questions to mull over. Does dressing up a doll with outlandishly large breasts in a doctor’s outfit help send the message that young girls can aspire to have any career they’d like? Do our changing cultural values sometimes skew our perception of past progressive efforts and has that happened with Barbie? Did Doctor Barbie, despite being driven by consumerism and harmful body images, also help move the needle toward a society in which little girls grew up wanting to be doctors, even if they also grew up believing that they weren’t pretty because they did not possess blue eyes and gorgeous curves?

But the movie quickly whisked me past these questions and started hitting me over the head with the virulence of patriarchy. And this is where I started to get irritated.

The Parts that Left Me Irritated and Confused, but Still Showcased Gosling’s Abs

As Barbie enters the real world, she discovers that she is being objectified by men. But the objectification is so heavy-handed that it is instantly annoying. As she rollerblades down the boulevard, a few men say crass things. Eventually she encounters a group of four construction workers, and each one gives an inappropriate comment that is a double-entendre. And this was where I began to become a bit skeptical of the movie’s portrayal of gender stereotypes.

Don’t get me wrong: there are still men in the world who will shout “hey baby, I can see myself in your pants” at a random woman in public. But the vast majority of human beings have figured out that this is socially unacceptable behavior and those who haven’t figured that out aren’t watching this movie. Thus, if the point of that scene is “men shouldn’t do this because this is objectifying and horrible”, the point wasn’t landing on the correct audience.

That scene is NOT what typical harassment looks like. It’s far more common to get bawdy comments from male coworkers who think they are being funny than from random strangers. Furthermore, it’s easy to ignore random strangers but tough to ignore male coworkers. We can walk away from random strangers. We have to find a way to tell a male coworker that their comments are inappropriate without harming their feelings and our work relationships.

Moreover, what I really fear is that the movie allows some men to pat themselves on the back undeservedly. Modern harassment takes the form of repeated comments from men who refuse to acknowledge or refuse to abide by obvious “no” signals. For example, after our movie, my friend and I walked over to the bar to chat and catch up, only to be repeatedly interrupted by a guy who was both drunk and desperate. We sent all the normal “no” signals—turning our back, offering polite but curt answers when he was un-ignorable, and leaning in to the conversation to exclude him from possible eye contact. In fact, even though there were more comfortable chairs nearby, we stayed in the bar stools because it would have allowed him to interject in a manner that would have been tougher to avoid. Remaining at the bar offered an easy escape and the relative safety of having other people around.

And THIS is what patriarchy actually is: a culture in which some men still haven’t figured out that when we turn our back at a bar, the appropriate thing to do is to move on. A culture in which women still have to strategize how to avoid unwanted advances AFTER we’ve said no. A culture in which men will argue that their comments are funny, not rude. A culture in which we strategize how to avoid making a scene because if we directly ask a person to leave we usually end up in a position in which we feel less safe, not more.

Thus, I found the Barbie Movie’s portrayal of harassment simplistic to the point of being annoying, if not a bit offensive. I recognize that the movie may have been using stereotypes to comment upon the absurdity of stereotypes, but I couldn’t get past the feeling of being mildly insulted. My life as a female isn’t hard because of ill-behaved construction workers; my life is hard because of men who don’t understand boundaries, men who make me feel unsafe, and men who, in the face of polite rebuke, make things worse as they try to save their own fragile ego by arguing that they were being funny, that they meant no harm, or that I am overreacting. The harassment that makes our lives harder takes place in the workplace and in social gatherings, and is sometimes done by a male acquaintance in plain view of everyone. Worse, men who harass sometimes use as a defense that they are just being funny and use the example of “real harassment” — e.g. the harassment perpetuated by construction workers in the Barbie movie — as a defense of their own actions. “Real harassment”, the argument goes, is harassment by strangers who are just seeking to objectify you, not funny jokes or flirty texts from male coworkers that you are simply overreacting to.

The irritating stereotype of the construction worker scene could have escaped my ire if not for the patently absurd portrayal of patriarchy that came later in the movie. While Barbie searches for the child who is playing with her, Ken discovers that unlike Barbie Land, in the real world men have power. He scampers back to Barbie Land to tell the other Kens while Barbie continues her search. When Barbie returns to Barbie Land, she discovers that the Kens have staged a coup and taken over all of the Barbie Dream Houses and transformed them into bachelor pads.

The formerly empowered Barbies were now entirely brainwashed, dressed in demeaning French maid costumes, and serving beer to the Ken dolls.

And that’s where I began to question whether the movie understood what misogyny looks like in the modern world. Because being brainwashed into dressing as a demeaning male fantasy and serving only as a decorative servant is definitely misogynist, but it is the most extreme caricature of misogyny one could choose, almost what one would choose to show if one had only heard misogyny described but had never directly experienced it. Misogyny in 2023 doesn’t come in the form of French maid outfits and subservience: it comes in the form of overburdened women who are expected to extend themselves to a breaking point as they juggle careers, families, and the expectation of having clean houses, well-stocked fridges, and well-educated kids. A depiction of misogyny could have been a world in which the Kens and Barbies returned from their respective days at work and the Kens kicked back in front of the TV while the Barbies cooked dinner and cleaned the house. It could have been a world in which Skipper worked to finish her homework as she babysat and made dinner for her elderly grandmother, while Alan sat in the next room playing video games. Instead of a thoughtful view of modern misogyny, we were given a scene in which the Barbies had become male fantasy stereotypes that had been brainwashed out of their own identities.

Any why, exactly, did they become brainwashed? Perhaps I was not supposed to think too hard about that question, but I found myself pondering: “Is the movie implying that male charm and power is so intense that we cannot help but crumble into brainwashed, giggling bubbleheads the moment we are faced with male domination? Are we supposed to infer that the patriarchy exists solely because we are too brainwashed to notice?”

And thus the Barbie movie fell squarely into a category of movies like Zootopia — movies that, in their attempt to comment on stereotypes, manage instead to perpetuate them. And perhaps that was the entire point, since that’s essentially the criticism of Barbie dolls.

If the movie had intended this irony, I could perhaps credit it with a superior sense of humor and clever writing. However, the movie was far from subtle in any of its messaging, and so I am forced to conclude that the parallel was entirely accidental. Indeed, the Barbie Movie was so paranoid that viewers might not notice its heavy-handed message, it decided to hit viewers over the head with the obvious conclusion in the form of an overly-long monologue about how difficult it is for a female to balance society’s expectations, thereby breaking the basic show-don’t-tell rule of most media. Rather than risk any subtlety, the movie also included three different montages to the joys of motherhood and the sorrow of children growing up. Apparently the writers thought we needed these montages in case we missed the mother/daughter relationship themes in the movie. People who find their eyes welling with tears over the heavy-handed montages from the Barbie movie would do well to re-watch the brilliance of Toy Story 2, which accomplishes the same pathos through story-telling. Or the brilliant montage from the beginning of Up, which evokes natural sniffles through a series of scenes that also… um… further the plot.

In the end, I found myself feeling as if I had just had a conversation with a rather drunk man who decided to mansplain feminism to me. The kind of man who believes that he can hide his ignorance by simply saying things that sound profound.

As if to highlight its basic lack of insight and profundity, the end of the movie rewarded me with the most baffling viral movie line ever: “We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back to see how far they have come.”

Um, no. We mother’s work our collective asses off so our daughters can find the decades-old gender stereotypes in the Barbie movie as confusing as we did. How can a movie that tries to celebrate feminism give me a line so utterly tone-deaf?