Feminists in the dream house
My very serious writing group goes to see the Barbie movie
Gentle reader,
I think that summer’s onslaught of all things Barbie must point to something deep in our collective psyche.
Barbie is an avatar for big feelings about femininity, the ways femininity is packaged, bought, and sold, and the ways femininity is despised, reclaimed, adored, and renegotiated.
Last weekend, I saw the Barbie movie (directed by Greta Gerwig, starring Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken) with my long-time writing group, who are also some of my closest friends.
I loved every moment.
I laughed.
Hard.
I even teared up a couple of times (I mean, there’s a mom/tween-daughter reconciliation which would pull on any mom-of-teen’s heartstrings…)
Professors see Barbie. Some of us like pink more than others, but somehow, we all manage to stay friends.
I low-key wasn’t allowed to play with Barbies growing up.
For feminist reasons.
Which I low-key understood.
I was intrigued, though, by the naked Ken I found in the dollhouse in my friend’s basement. Someone had placed him there, atop naked Barbie.
The feminist objections to Barbie are real: the unlivable body, the capitalism run amok, the focus on beauty norms.
“If Barbie was a real woman, she’d have to walk on all fours due to her proportions.”
But, to a little girl, Barbie can also represent grown-up, sophisticated womanhood: all kinds of things that are off limits to her.
Lipstick,
boyfriends,
convertibles,
and even a house all her own.
There’s a delight in all those little parts.
All those choking hazards.
Tiny little plastic necklaces.
Tiny little shoes.
That Barbie camper! With a bowl of popcorn and marshmallow roasting sticks! And a Barbie-sized puppy!
In a world where we lack female role models who aren’t married, Barbie could be an icon for the single life, a life lived outside of the aims of husband and family. (I’m not saying she’s landed at, say, theological aims or eudaimonia, but, hey, it’s something.)
“Since the beginning of time, since the first little girl ever existed, there have been dolls. But the dolls were always and forever baby dolls, … Which can be fun… for a while, anyway. Ask your mother.”
— Narrator, in the Barbie movie
What about Barbie as a career woman?
Barbie has worked heavily in the arts, and—more recently—in the sciences. She’s been in the military, education, public service, and athletics and tried over 200 careers including astronaut, beekeeper, police officer, McDonald’s cashier, train conductor, dentist, showgirl, race car driver, game developer, chef, spy, and—in 2023—US president (finally, after being a candidate in 1992, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016, when she also ran as a VP candidate).
I remember coveting 1985’s veterinarian Barbie, as I was heavily under the influence of James Herriot and my family’s floppy-eared hound, Mo.
Barbie merchandise is everywhere right now. My teen daughter tells me Barbie has collaborations with over a hundred other brands.
At least two of them appeared among the birthday gifts I bought for her sweet sixteen, and I’ll admit that I have coveted some pink gemstone earrings from a Barbie x Kendra Scott collab and a “Barbiecore” outfit emailed out by Draper James. Brands that don’t have an official collaboration are still pushing their products in pink.
I want to enjoy this, optimistically, as a delightful celebration of the female, or I want to think that Barbie-style-beauty is a satire of itself, but I’m also unsettled by Jessica DeFino’s critique:
“The issue . . . is that you cannot subvert the politics of Barbie while preserving the beauty standards of Barbie. The beauty standards are the politics, or at least part of them. (And yes, sure, Gerwig’s cast is diverse — but it’s diverse in the seemingly expansive but ultimately narrow way of modern industry marketing, which embraces every body as a means to position every body as needing correction: white skin and brown skin, but always clear skin; cis bodies and trans bodies, but always hairless bodies; red lips and bare lips, but always full lips — parting to reveal perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth; younger actresses and older actresses, but always eerily ageless actresses.)”
— Jessica DeFino at The Unpublishable
Barbie feminism may aim at diversity, but it is not getting at the work of understanding things like the relationship between patriarchy and racism, the work of intersectional feminism, which:
“draws attention to invisibilities that exist in feminism, in anti-racism, in class politics...”
There may be diverse Barbies, but we all know that archetypal Barbie is white. At the link below, read DeFino’s whole piece; don’t miss the horrifying 1960s airline ad and the critique about “beauty work” as oppression of working women.
Should the Barbie movie—with its brilliant directing and writing work—be held responsible for the ways the film gets capitalized? For the incompleteness of Barbie feminism?
“Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.”
― Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
I don’t know, but I believe we’re all always implicated and co-implicated, and there’s no doing our work without implication.
My instinct is to say, “do the work anyway.”
Write that film.
As bell hooks has it:
“There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.”
― bell hooks, Feminist Theory
In Barbie’s world, Ken is a side character.
This fact is core to the film’s plot. Barbieland is a female-centered paradise. The Kens exist only as accessories to the Barbies.
“Barbie has a great day every day, but Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him.”
—Narrator, The Barbie movie
I’m not saying this is the ideal we’re working toward. We can’t smash the patriarchy without men and women seeking to live together in love and peace. (This is also a rather key point in the film, wherein Ken discovers patriarchy in the real world and tries to bring it back to Barbieland.)
But maybe this female-identified Barbie world, in which men are a sideline, is a kind of protected space for celebration and safety, a little like a women’s college. I don’t think Ken’s name is on the deed to the Dream House.
When I was seventeen, two friends gifted me a pair of coming of age presents: copies of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and of the Indigo Girls album Rites of Passage (which is, ahem, the best album ever).
I could still sing you every word, just as Barbie and the other women in the film can.1
“A woman must have money and a room of her own.”
What about a dream house of her own?
At least as a space for feeding the imagination?
My writing group is a kind of room of our own.
We’ve been meeting together, this group of four women, for more than a decade.
Encouraging each other.
Providing words and support different from any words or support men could or would provide.
We’ve shepherded each other through the writing of ten books, the raising of ten children, the production of tenure and promotion application files, hard losses, and joyful gains.
We’ve prayed and we’ve prayed and we’ve prayed for each other.
I’ve needed this women’s room.
“Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”
— Galatians 6:2
I’ve needed a space where to be female is not to be less than. I’ve needed a space where women are trying hard to love each other well. Though I’ve never had a proper home office, I’ve been able to thrive, at least sometimes, in my dream house.
Barbie world, like my writing group, stands a decent chance of passing the Bechdel test on any given day.
As a parent, I found the Barbie movies to be surprisingly … good. They were spaces for fantasy. The movies featured mermaid, princess, and fairy Barbies. There was definitely a period in our household when we all knew all the lyrics to the musical Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper, starring Martin Short as a scheming, singing villain.
When I was younger, I wouldn’t wear pink.
I couldn’t have told you why.
Now, I think I know. Pink is the ultimate in being coded as female, and we live in a misogynist world, the opposite of Barbieland. For the Barbieland Kens are, of course, a metaphor for real-world women.
As if I could have avoided being hated or ignored, just by wearing black or blue.
Her older brother and sister had imaginary friends, but my younger daughter had an imaginary house.
When she was an adorable three years old, she started many, many sentences, “In my pink house…”
In my pink house, there are pink cupcakes, pink lollipops, and pink cookies.
In my pink house, there are pink walls and pink couches.
In my pink house, I can do anything I want, and I don’t have to listen to you.
Margot Robbie as Barbie shows the other Barbies that something has gone wrong: “FLAT FEET!” “I would never wear heels if my feet were shaped like this,” says Barbie.
In one of the films we watch when my kids are little, a Barbie fairy learns to follow her heart.
“But, if you follow your heart, won’t you just be going around in circles?” — my other daughter, circa age 6
A 20-year-old woman tells my colleague, a lauded and prizewinning professor in literature, that Kate Chopin’s The Awakening isn’t a feminist story, that she (the professor) is importing all that, making it all up.
Margot Robbie as Barbie
“Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
Kate McKinnon as “weird Barbie” offers a crucial choice.
The theater is filled with women and girls. Some wear pink. Some don’t. Some are long hair and lipstick people. Some are intentional about rejecting beauty norms. It looks to me like they’re all laughing and—if they’re my age-ish—being tempted to sing along to “Closer to fine.” They’re enjoying a couple hours in the dream house.
“When I Found Out The Patriarchy Wasn’t About Horses, I Lost Interest Anyway.” — Ryan Gosling, as Ken, in Barbie
Pink makes me happy, and I’ve long since granted myself permission to wear it with impunity.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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"Closer to fine” features in several places in the film.
When I was growing up in the 90s and 00s, playing with Barbies (and my mom's old Barbies), boys like my older brother told me pink was stupid, Barbies were stupid, girls were stupid. Like kids do, away from the ears of our parents. I rebelled, of course, Barbies in hand. (My brother is now the proudest dad of a little girl. Character growth.)
There's something so gratifying to me about a 2 hour celebration of pink, of the way women and girls play with Barbie, that beat the best box office estimates. When the film's Mattel CEO (Will Ferrell's character) said they used pink sparkles to keep girls down, I felt that. The feminists I knew told me often that I had to dial back my femininity to be taken seriously by in male-dominant spaces. Yet, as I meditated on what the brand meant to me growing up, I realized that my cast of Barbies and their tiny clothes taught me that I could be whatever I wanted--astronaut, doctor, Dorothy Gale--without looking less feminine to make men comfortable. I don't dress for them. I dress for myself, like I dressed my Barbies for myself.
All that being said--why aren't there thinkpieces about how Hot Wheels makes teen boys notoriously bad drivers, or things like that? Why are we picking on Barbie from a grown-up's perspective while ignoring the way little girls PLAY with Barbie? It's so patronizing to little girls to tell them what messages they are getting from their toys, without entering into their world and seeing what messages they make in imaginative play.