August 6, 2023

I haven’t always had the best relationship with Mattel’s Barbie Doll. As a boy, the dolls we played with were called “action figures” and had “Kung Fu Grip,” not endless accessories. I’m sure my GI Joe took a few rifle scopes on the Barbies that lived across the street. I do remember my Evel Knievel doll driving his motorcycle at full speed into Barbie’s Malibu Dream House, causing screams of horror and delight. There was one boy in my small town that was known for beheading Barbies and hiding their heads on the “trail” behind our houses. As far as I know, he’s still trying that in a small town.

When I became a feminist sociologist, my war on the doll became more academic. She was a perfect example of gender socialization. Barbie was an early teacher of girls that their looks were their most important asset. Yeah, they could become doctors or astronauts, as long as they stayed skinny and their feet were forever contorted for high heels. When Talking Barbie appeared in the early 90s, with lines like, “Math is hard!” it made my point for me. I delighted my students with stories about the BLO (Barbie Liberation Organization) that secretly swapped the voice boxes of Barbies and G.I. Joe’s, so Joe said things like, “Let’s go shopping,” while Barbie now said, “Vengeance is mine!” 

When it became clear that our neighborhood in Portland was generating more female babies than boys, in a very Portland way, we declared it a “Barbie Free Zone.” My daughter, Cozy, has never had or wanted a Barbie and I take that as a win.

So I figured the MAGA boys would be thrilled with a movie that encouraged their wives and little girls to become anorexic and worry more about shoes than votes. Lord, was I wrong about that.

The Barbie movie has now passed the one billion dollar mark (after only 17 days in theaters) by taking what Barbie was and turning it on its head. Director Greta Gerwig turned the “problematic” doll into an epic feminist dissection of patriarchy that actually names patriarchy, and, boy, are the boys triggered. I’m waiting for Kid Rock to blow away some Barbie dolls with his AR-15 and Jason Aldean to write as song called “Try That In a Small Town, Girls.” But why are these men so aggrieved by a movie about a doll?

First, let’s get his out of the way. “The go woke or go broke” chant from the bigots on the right was just revealed as a great lie. Barbie is one of the biggest movies on earth and is the biggest movie on earth directed by a woman. I took my daughter to a sold out screening on a WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON. Woman and girls applauded at the end and hugged each other. “I finally feel seen,” said a woman in the row in front of us. The MAGA cult can brag about how many Bud Light workers have been laid off because of their hissy fit, but the amount of money Barbie will make is a tsunami compared to the ripple Cleatus caused at Anheuser-Busch because he traded in one shitty beer for another shitty beer.

So this feminist sociologist has a two-part answer.

The first is that gender socialization starts before we are even born. There’s a reason female babies are aborted at a higher rate than male babies. (Just ask China and India where all their women went.) A person’s value is (still) based on their sex. Patriarchy begins in the womb. And that socialization is non-stop through our lives. Even the most radical feminist has internalized male supremacy. Ask yourself, are there any empowered women in congress who dare to fly their grey hair? I mean, how old is Nancy Pelosi? She’s like Methuselah. But she’s gotta dye that hair because there’s a different standard for women. We get the message that men and women are “opposites” and that “It’s a man’s world” from our family, our schools, our religion, our peers, and the media. Constantly. God is a man. Eve was created for Adam. Father knows best. Becky is a slut. And on and on and on. Life in plastic, it’s fantastic.

No wonder patriarchy feels natural.

In the 1990s, I did an experiment with my students to convey the “natural” feeling socialization gives us. I’d ask them to spend a day wearing their watch on the other wrist. They’d report being disoriented all day long. Now that no-one wears watches, I ask the students to leave their homes for one hour without their phones. Those that actually dare do it, describe going into convulsions, not being able to function, fearing they might miss a text or the opportunity to take a selfie. That’s how patriarchy works. A fish doesn’t know it’s in water until you take it out of the water. Then it gurgles, “WHAT THE FUCK!!!!”

All the Barbie movie does is take Barbie and Ken out of the non-patriarchal Barbieland and plop them into very patriarchal America. The difference is immediately clear to Barbie. Ken is thrilled that everyone is looking at him. But for Barbie, it feels more like, well, violence. Later, she says of her brief time in reality, “Men look at me like I’m an object, girls hate me.”

The film does an excellent job of doing the opposite for the audience. With humor and pathos, it holds a mirror up to us and our persistent power dynamic. Every girl and woman, whether or not she calls herself a feminist, understands the countless ways this power dynamic plays out in their daily lives, but for men it must be shocking. Like when Toto pulls away the screen revealing the real “wizard” of Oz, Barbie pulls away the screen that women have any meaningful equality in 2023. America Ferrera’s rousing “It’s literally impossible to be a woman” speech has resonated with women and girls across the political spectrum, but for many men, it must sound like an indictment. And watch them fall into the ludicrous “Feminism is about hating men” trope.

Holding the reality of patriarchy up to men (conservative and otherwise) is like asking them to leave their homes without their phones. It’s a full body reaction. Seeing females as just as human and entitled as they are is contrary to the messages about gender that we are told from the womb. They can’t handle it on a cellular level. And the anti-woke mob wants to declare the planet (not just America) a Barbie Free Zone for much different reasons than my little parent group. The men on Fox News and the men on TikTok are bashing Barbie’s messages of equality. But all those men came from a woman’s womb, so they better take a deep breath.

So the first reason is the emotional shock a glimmer of truth about patriarchy gives to the fragile male ego. They imagine themselves becoming a dickless Ken in a world where their demands for attention go ignored.

The second explanation for the Barbie Backlash is just the cultural shift we are in right now. America is changing. There are more women working than men in the current economy. And there are more people of color moving into the white enclaves of suburbia. The Father Knows Best ethic of the 20th century is fading, but it’s not going down without a fight. Ron DeSantis’ war on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is a perfect example of the new Jim Crow. As Susan Faludi outlined in her brilliant 1993 text, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, throughout history, every time women have made gains towards equality, there is a sustained cultural push to put them back in their subordinate role. And we’ve been in a hell of a backlash. It includes incels, ending legal abortion, and Donald “Grab ‘em by the pussy” Trump.

The chorus of men who are so challenged by a doll are the same men who were freaked out by Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” zooming up to #1 on the pop charts in 1972. “What will happen to us if women have all the same privileges we have?” they quaver. “It won’t be privilege anymore!” This is a cultural moment where straight white cis-gender men feel like their “natural” authority is being challenged (it is) and is evaporating (it’s not), so they are rushing to the barricades, hoping to make America 1953 again. As Gloria Steinem once told me of this moment, the abusive husband might win. But maybe, just maybe, we’ll finally break free.

The oxymoron of “conservative women” has always vexed me. Why would any woman participate in an ideology that sees her as a less autonomous version of men? Of course, the answer is we reward them for doing so. They are tools of the status quo, so you will hear some women complain about “woke Barbie.” But a lot of those Trump-voting women are sitting in packed movie houses right now feeling very validated by the very simple effort Barbie attempts in just trying to humanize girls and women. That theme of humanization is central to the film and the long historical arc to smash patriarchy.

Feminism is the radical idea that women are human beings and are entitled to all the basic rights and privileges that men humans have been afford through time. The final scene in Barbie makes that point in a very simple (and hilarious) way. The massive success of Barbie might not mark the end of patriarchy, but is a sign the that women and girls of Gen Z, including my daughter, are not going to be put in any pink toy box so easily. And there will be plenty of their male peers who will see the great benefit of that. As Ken says at the end of the film, “To be honest, when I found out the patriarchy wasn’t about horses I lost interest.”