Thoughts on Barbie (2023) and The Romance of Patriarchy

How is Barbie (2023) engaging with and subverting cultural constructions of gender and gendered expectations?

Hello and welcome to this thought™ thing on Barbie (2023). This may be the first in a series of thoughts™ on this movie because I had many of them and would like to organise/expand on the ideas so they’re articulate and substantial. So stay tuned for that!

Obligatory “this is my reading and experience of the film”. Will it make sense? Who knows!

In talking to my extremely smart friends (you know who you are🥰) about this movie, one question we raised is why are the Barbies in Barbieland are so quick to fall for Ken’s idea of patriarchy? This got me thinking about the illusion of empowerment, and what patriarchy might promise women in order to get them to buy into the system which ultimately harms them and the men who benefit most from it. It also got me thinking about how some viewers have criticised the movie for having Barbie and Ken not end up together in the end.

Today, I’m exploring both those ideas and how they might be interrelated and woven together.

According to Teresa L. Ebert:

"By producing the female subject as complemented and completed by her relation to a male partner, patriarchy naturalizes sexual identity, masking the cultural construction of the feminine, thereby continually reproducing women in a subordinate position."¹

I think Barbie (2023) is playing with this in multiple ways. Firstly, Barbie flips or subverts this by having Ken play the role of the feminine in this dynamic, wherein he is the one who is constructed as a being that complements Barbie and completes her — he is [described as] her accessory; Barbie and Ken are almost inextricable in the sense that Barbie always falls in love, always falls in love with a man, and the men could all be seen as stand-ins for Ken. The movie is right when it points out that it’s always “Barbie and Ken”. Barbie came first, she is the default (as men are the default in Patriarchy), and the Kens are secondary (just like women under—you guessed it—patriarchy).

Secondly, I think the narrative also confronts this directly by not having Barbie and Ken end up together. I read this as the movie trying to divorce them from the interdependence of their creation, granting them both agency, autonomy, and independence and ultimately attempting to break the pattern of the cultural constructions and social scripts Barbie came from.

I think this is a feminist narrative that helps the Kens reject the gendered social script(s) that entangle the hetero-normative idea of value and masculinity with the possession and attention of attractive women, and also helps the Barbies reject the complimentary social scripts that see them devalue and dismiss the Kens as objects (accessories) rather than people.

I think discussing the lack of a romantic arc for Ken and Barbie as though it’s a shallow empowerment narrative rooted in suggesting “she doesn’t need a man”, or that women’s empowerment lies in their singledom, is a misreading.

Could the movie have done this by having Barbie and Ken end up together in the end? Maybe. But the quote “you can’t heal in the same environment that is harming you” comes to mind; I think giving them distance and independence is a key part of Ken’s growth, and that in order to become a fully autonomous being that values himself rather than relying on external (Barbie’s) validation, he needs the benefit of distance. I think this distance also puts a stopper on the idea that the women are going to be subject to extreme amounts of emotional labour during the Kens’ journey towards self-realisation and equality, while also implying that the Barbies and Kens are still approaching their mutual growth through community and collaboration.

In real life, identity is not static and dictated by biology.

Rather, it's a result of privileges and obstacles that our culture(s) ascribe and assign to certain characteristics.² In Barbieland, identity begins as extremely static. The Barbies are not people with complex psychologies, idiosyncrasies, and shifting ideas. We have "Weird Barbie" who is weird, "President Barbie" who is President Barbie, "Pregnant Midge" who is just pregnant and called Midge. The Kens are just Ken. They do things like Beach, except Alan, who is Alan.

The Barbie who breaks the identity mold is Margo Robbie's "Stereotypical Barbie", who suddenly isn’t so slaved to her assigned characteristics such as unarticulated feet, hyper-positivity, and extreme blindness to her own lack of agency and the social inequalities she’s both surrounded by and contributing to.

One of the biggest difficulties of feminism is trying to convince men that the feminist movement is not about "man-bashing" or flipping the power dynamics so that it's women devaluing and oppressing men instead. Barbie (2023) plays with this in a few ways, and I have a few complicated thoughts on the depiction of the Kens (as a stand-in for men) and whether I ultimately love it or not, but the one that’s most relevant to my thoughts in this piece is this: When Ken brings patriarchy (which, unfortunately to everyone's dismay, isn't really about horses) to Barbieland, elevating the Kens to a position of power like none they've ever had before, it isn’t actually fulfilling or rewarding for any of them.

Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being. When we love maleness, we extend our love whether males are performing or not.

- Bell Hooks (The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love)

The hyper-masculinity and hyper-patriarchy of Kendom is built on performance. In the most literal sense, the Kens perform a song on the guitar for four and a half minutes while maintaining award eye contact. In another literal sense, none of the Kens have a distinct identity or personhood, and so are performing a simulation of manhood.

I think this reinforces the need to have Ryan Gosling's Ken and Margo Robbie's Barbie get together in the end, because their independence might allow them to stop performing and start simply being. The song the Kens sing even includes the line of realisation “I'm just Ken and I'm enough. And I'm great at doing stuff.” And again in a literal sense, Margo Robbie’s Barbie literally becomes in the end. She becomes a human.

Ken’s patriarchy promises the men power, and promises the Barbies…what?

Why do they fall for Ken’s Kendom, his Mojo Dojo Casa Houses, the Kens’ need to talk about the rich blend of genius and triumph that is The Godfather (1972)? What made the Barbies buy into their own disempowerment, condescension, and objectification?

Is it promising an end to Girlboss-shaped Feminism?

Girlboss Feminism reinforces the glass ceiling, pits women against each other, and has them contribute to the system they’re struggling in. It doesn’t ensure that all women are included, empowered and treated fairly.³ In Barbieland there isn’t really anyone to compete with—there’s only ever one Supreme Court Justice Barbie and only one President Barbie, and none of them compete for the Kens’ attention, for example—so that isn’t particularly relevant to the Barbies, but there is a kind of “woman excellence” narrative that holds them to high expectations (whether they feel high or not). All of the Barbies are incredibly smart, talented, and competent. Given the fake nature of the feminism Mattel is selling little girls in the film, it feels like extreme Girlboss Feminism, empowerment through extreme competency and high achievement, that also devalues the Barbies who don’t perform and succeed in the same impressive ways (see pregnant Midge and Weird Barbie).

This is one of the critiques levelled at Barbie as a brand too—that it’s selling the idea of greatness and success to such a degree that it loops back around to being oppressing.

That is a looooot of pressure, and I think Ken’s patriarchy offers the illusion* of lower expectations.

Something I joke about sometimes is “Why did women ever fight for the right to work? Ugh!”. It’s completely hyperbolic and I only joke about it with people who understand it’s a joke and that I really wouldn’t want to go back to a time where women were very much dependent on men. That being said, I can kind of read this into the Barbies’ ease of buying into patriarchy. I don’t know that anything in the movie specifically confirms this or provides a big hint, but I do think it’s open to interpretation, and thus this is a valid hypothesis. There are plenty of accounts online from women divorcing their partners, citing that they were convinced to become a stay-at-home mother, only to realise years later that they’re doing the majority of the labour needed to keep a household and a family running.

*A common way that patriarchy adapts is by providing an illusion of choice and progression in specific situations.⁴ One thing the movie shows is all the work the Barbies are still doing once they’ve stopped their real work (presidenting, doctoring, supreme court justicing, etc.). They do a lot of emotional labour for the Kens, get up and grab them beers, cook their food, listen to them talk about the rich blend of genius and a triumph that is The Godfather (1972), and more. In the same way that domestic and emotional labour isn’t valued under patriarchy—is often not acknowledged as being labour—and the Barbies realise the reality of what they’re being asked or made to do.

Also, there’s one line that stands out to me. One Barbie says “You can be brainwashed, or you can be ugly.” We know that the Barbies value their own perfection, even if they don’t have the language or a particularly deep awareness of this, because beauty (or how they look) is something that comes up in dialogue several times throughout the film. Cellulite, flat feet, perfect outfits, etc. In order to be happy, they want to be pretty. If they’re been conditioned to value this and think that way, and the only option is to suffer or be brainwashed into believing they’re pretty, I can see why some of them would choose it—or rather be fooled into it, since these social and cultural scripts are insidious and often perpetuated through ignorance.

Lastly, I wonder if they’re all quick to fall for patriarchy because once Margo Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie starts breaking the mold. When Weird Barbie became Weird Barbie she was ostracised—what happens when Stereotypical Barbie, status-quo barbie, begins to change and question her identity? When she decides to go on an adventure to the Real World, leaving them all a little uncertain, destabilised, and curious? She is no longer pretty, no longer stiff-footed, no longer dressed perfectly or able to float gracefully down to her car, no longer able to walk properly or eat properly because the food has gone off and everything is changing, and “change is terrifying”.

Ken comes home, the enlightened hero, with answers.

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Those are my thoughts™ for the week! have you seen Barbie? What did you think? 👀

1. Teresa L. Ebert | The Romance of Patriarchy: Ideology, Subjectivity, and Postmodern Feminist Cultural Theory (1988)

2. Robert Jensen | Men's Lives and Feminist Theory (1995)

3. Amy Walsh | The end of Girlboss Feminism (2021)

4. Priya Ahluwalia | When Empowerment is an Illusion: Navigating Patriarchy at Home