What "Barbie" Got Wrong About Patriarchy
Written August 29, 2023.
This piece’s title necessitates that I clarify what it is, and what it isn’t.
This is not an entry into the culture wars. It is not intended as a takedown of “feminized” society; not a men’s-rights tract, or a machismo manifesto. I enjoyed Barbie a great deal. I thought it was skillfully shot, smartly written, artfully staged, and sincerely intended: far more than can be said of most adaptations of corporate IP. Its sight gags, in-jokes, and Day-Glo production design make for a rich and compelling moviegoing experience, and its status as box-office sensation and zeitgeist creation is thoroughly deserved. Barbie’s satire is sharp and specific, and I enjoyed the experience of watching it, twice. But in thinking about the movie’s final stages, I became cognizant of the fact that Barbie fundamentally misunderstands its subject matter; consequently, it runs into a Fourth Act buzz-saw of its creators’ own devising. There was a better, more hopeful thesis about gender relations to be explored through Barbie’s plot, and in some deep and meaningful ways, the movie misses its mark.
What Gerwig and Baumbach don’t fully appreciate, or don’t wish to acknowledge, is the extent to which patriarchy is not a conscious system. It’s not a program or a policy choice - though many poor examples of each echo across American society due to its presence. “Patriarchy” as a term is more adjective than noun: it identifies an unequal social relationship, and sets a name to it. But it is not a government you can legislate against or mount a coup to overthrow; it’s not analogous to oligarchy or monarchy by virtue of being in the same word family. Shady cabals of powerful men are not meeting in top-floor boardrooms across the country to scheme against the advancement of women. They would never need to. Patriarchy is much more slippery and subtle than an agenda item.
Patriarchy, as I perceive it, is a set of attitudes reinforcing male superiority which we are socialized into from a young age. Men, women, and nonbinary persons are all steeped in its assumptions, and experience its effects. We see it manifesting in childhood, when boys start gendering their play and bossing girls around with phrases like, “That’s a man’s job!” We also see it in adolescence, when girls start telling boys to “Man up!”, grateful to escape the awkward burden of initiating sexual interest. Non-males are, of course, harmed by patriarchy to a greater degree, but I contend that harm is a universal byproduct of patriarchy. Any societal assumption which keeps people from a complete and accurate understanding of who they are is an assumption worth opposing. And this is why patriarchy is such an invidious concept, and such a difficult idea to place at the center of a pop-culture tentpole. We are all, all of us, far more complicit in it - and victimized by it - than we’d ever want to acknowledge.
The movie’s misunderstanding of patriarchy begins most vividly with its explicit introduction into the plot: through Ken’s discovery of The Real World. We see his eyes open wide with disbelief as he absorbs a steamy montage of Y-chromosome hedonism - Beer! Monster trucks! Hair metal! HORSES! - and we, the audience, are momentarily complicit in his wonder. Who might Ken be, we ask, if things were different? If he no longer defined happiness by whether or not Barbie chooses to look at him on a given day?
The movie is not long in answering. Unable to discard the vision he has glimpsed, Ryan Gosling’s Ken realizes he must share his dream to manifest it. His Ken-comrades, predictably intoxicated by the fantasies imparted to them from their more worldly leader, take things too far, and embark on a farcically laddish revolution against the gynocracy they have hitherto accepted without question. Having been brought up as beach decor, they do not have the Barbies’ grasp of the burdens and responsibilities inherent in any power relationship, and so they predictably fixate on the outward symbols and signifiers of macho male identity. They are unfit for leadership; indeed, they don’t want it. They want to party.
And so the pendulum of audience sympathy swings decisively back to Barbie, and Gerwig and Baumbach ensure it stays there. Having established through an infinitude of reasons why Barbie is the only rightful ruler of Barbie World, we can only cheer on her counter-revolution against Ken Land, and share in her desire to restore the enlightened principles of an all-female government. We know now without question that patriarchy is Very Bad - Ken Land is a hot mess! - and that fact in and of itself exempts the Barbies’ mode of leadership from question.
The unpalatable truth is that any version of this movie which doesn’t end in power-sharing between Barbie and Ken is, on face, unjust. But that plot is also the last thing that Gerwig, Baumbach, and their audience wish to see, since feminists could only interpret it as a betrayal of both their sex and hundreds of years of activist tradition. Sensitive to the stickiness of this problem, Gerwig and Baumbach elide it. Ken renounces his aspirations of becoming a political actor in Barbie World, and we accept this renunciation as natural, since his aspirations were cartoonishly proportioned from the jump. "To be honest, when I found out the patriarchy wasn't about horses, I lost interest anyways," Ken admits sheepishly, in the movie’s best and funniest line. And thus, disenfranchised by his own hand, Ken is freed up by the logic of the story to embrace his second-class citizenry. The “I Am Kenough” t-shirt, so intrinsic to the film’s virality, hides its message inside portmanteau and a rhetoric of self-love; look closely, though, and it reads, “I Am Unworthy.” Ken was, is, and will only ever be a constitutionally unserious person. He is only “Beach”: not a being of equal inherent worth. And that’s a facile and sweeping conclusion to reach about the net worth of four billion people.
Paolo Freire, a Brazilian pedagogue and culture critic popular in the world of progressive education, observed within societies a tendency for revolutionaries to adopt the practices and the logic - if not the outright ideology - of the previous ruling class in the years after their attainment of political power. To break this pattern, he believed, required a herculean task of consciousness-raising, and a top-to-bottom reformation of the systems whereby we educate and prepare our youth for their own ascendancy into positions of authority. Friere saw how failure to address inequity in this fundamental way meant that societies could - more often than not - only exchange one flavor of injustice for another.
Barbie fails the Freire test. It posits a world in which society’s ills can be remedied - but only once women do the hard work of discovering and nurturing the talents lying latent within their naturally superior selves, and using them to make a just claim for leadership.
This must be a comforting vision for non-males. Maybe it’s the belief necessary to sustain them through their dealings with the preening man-children we routinely elevate to positions of power. America Ferrara’s so-tough-to-be-a-woman monologue at the end, which catalyzes the Barbies into decisive action against their usurpers, is nothing if not heartfelt. But what’s most bothersome to me is that there's no space in this universe for a yes, and on questions of gender; no ear for what Ken’s inner monologue sounds like. Gerwig and Baumbach cannot allow both Kens and Barbies to commit themselves to a vision of mutuality. The binary logic of gender and power which the movie takes as a given forecloses such a possibility before it can ever make its way into the story.
The hard and inescapable conclusion is that women seeking just treatment and fair consideration must begin by modeling it; even towards men who have never yet proven themselves capable of reciprocity. To try and use sexism’s logic against itself, as a justification for dismantling it, only puts a person on the same low moral footing, and keeps the species locked in retributive cycles. To me, ending patriarchy looks like venerating true equality as an article of faith: something to bring up in young people as the highest aspiration, something to be believed in and worked for with all one’s heart, despite the fact you’ve yet to see it in the world. It requires laughing at yourself, and not at others. It requires forgiveness and forbearance and lots of boring active listening. It requires a Barbie with a better ending.
I’ll always love Allan, though. On him, I have no notes.