The biggest problem with the Barbie movie is that it’s built on a lie, illustrated by the fact (as reported by Variety) that its marketing budget ($150 million) was bigger than its production cost ($145 million). It was marketed as a cheery, family friendly, and — most importantly — child appropriate movie when in truth it is far from it.
Instead, Barbie is a vacuous, man-hating, anti-family, anti-marriage movie that presents an utterly confused view of femininity — vacillating between seeing it as an essence of womanhood and (quite ironically) a weakness.
“From the opening scenes of little girls bashing their baby dolls on rocks in a symbolic rejection of motherhood to the final scene where Barbie is so empowered and self-actualized that she visits a gynecologist for the first time, the film criticizes women’s impulses toward motherhood, love, and femininity and leaves the lead character standing alone in the real world with no friends, no husband, no children and only the medical industrial complex by her side,” writes Libby Emmons in the website Human Events (“The new Barbie movie is an anti-motherhood, man-hating tangle of daddy issues posing as a tale of female empowerment,” Human Events, July 2023).
“While the film has been touted as a feminist triumph, it could be more accurately described as a tale of Barbie’s downfall. She goes from a woman who knows what she wants to a woman without a home, without friends, without family, searching for meaning, desperate to ‘be part of the people who make meaning,’ and trying to find herself in the barren depths of her own, neutered reproductive system,” she writes.
The movie essentially hinges on creating a strawman against masculinity (aka “the patriarchy”): Ken is a weak and effeminate moron, an underdeveloped boy, the kind that grew up without a strong father figure — emotional, vain, always demanding to be the center of attention, manipulative, controlling everyone. That is not manhood — that is just a scorned bitter woman’s self-delusion about the ex that left them for a more beautiful woman.
The alleged moral plea of the movie, the one supposedly justifying the vapidness of the entire exercise, was America Ferrera’s monologue. But even that falls flat as a misguided, completely self-centered, and unaware bit of whining:
“It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.
“You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people.
“You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining. You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood.
“But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So, find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful.
“You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.”
What’s so annoying about this spiel is how disconnected it is from reality, how utterly jejune, how passé. Male discrimination? In 2023, really?
The Philippines itself ranks among the world’s best places for a woman to live in, ranked fourth in the world in 2022 with the most women managers (including in media), had two women presidents, a former Chief Justice (and associate justices), and numerous members of Congress. The 2023 World, Business, and the Law report saw the Philippines having perfect scores for women in relation to “workplace,” “pay,” and “entrepreneurship.”
And yet the banal inanity of this entire speech could be simply exposed by exchanging “woman” with “man” and vice-versa — it is just a vain, self-pitying, infantile complaint not on the travails of being a woman but on adulthood. Each and every word describes a burden carried by any responsible grownup, woman or man. Get over it.
However, it is in this self-pitying, victimhood schtick that Barbie’s attraction precisely lies. So much so that “some women are even vowing to ditch their boyfriends if they don’t agree with the movie’s feminist message” (“Women are deciding to break up with their boyfriends after watching Barbie,” Unilad, August 2023). Aside from gratifyingly admitting that Barbie is indeed a feminist hit piece, it’s comforting to note that the movie does provide a public service: it at least makes woke women advertise their red flags and helpfully allow young men to escape the nut cases.
Which leads then to the truly damaging thing about Barbie and that is its feminist anti-marriage stance: glamorizing and idealizing the Eat Pray Love fantasy, of a woman’s life without husband and children, which reality exposes as a complete deception.
A new study (Peltzman, Sam, The Socio Political Demography of Happiness (July 12, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4508123 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4508123) found, accounting for “differences along standard socio demographic dimensions: age, race, gender, education, marital status income and geography,” including “political and social differences,” found that “being married is the most important differentiator with a 30-percentage point happy-unhappy gap over the unmarried” (emphasis supplied).
Barbie is just an overwrought self-absorbed solipsistic woke lecture that could ultimately harm the very women it supposedly sought to inspire.
Jemy Gatdula is a senior fellow of the Philippine Council for Foreign Relations and a Philippine Judicial Academy law lecturer for constitutional philosophy and jurisprudence
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