Is Barbie So Woke It’s Based?
That is what I keep hearing from younger guys.
Okay, obvious baseline statement: Barbie. Was. Not. Made. For. Me.
Also, the sky is blue, water is wet, and poop smells like poop.
That doesn’t change the fact that by any objective standard Barbie is a substandard story and is heavy handed politically. Starting with little girls apishly smashing their baby dolls to pursue the influencer lifestyle of the very first influencer, Barbie (We don’t talk about Lilli, no, no, NO!). We get these ghastly prolonged diatribes by spoiled, wanna-be Mercedes Marxists whose only complaint is that they aren’t being spoiled even more. Then there are the Mattel executives who are shown to be all white, males. Which is ultra mega-bullshit. A quick scan of their website shows that Mattel’s C-suite is about half women and by the way, Barbie’s division has ALWAYS been run by women.
Then there is the final scene where Barbie opts to leave Barbieland, live in the real world, and visits a gynecologist because she has grown a VAGINA(!). Granted, that bit was undoubtedly a leftover from when this thing was an Amy Schumer project, but it’s there.
But the people saying it’s secretly based aren’t talking about Barbie, they are talking about Ken.
I will freely grant that Ken was the only character with an identifiable story arc, but younger guys are seeing something more in him than that.
And this part is where Barbie really wasn’t made for me.
I was part of the last generation of American boys who were taught to revere masculinity and manhood. And it was nothing deliberate, it was simply expected. A man’s importance in society was taken for granted because it was simply baseline reality. The Millennial and Zoomer boys were raised in a world where media reviles masculinity and where girls are constantly, deliberately taught that women are important with no mention at all of men being important. Girls were being taught all their lives that they would never actually need a permanent relationship with any man and when they got a little older it was admitted that well if you are really certain you swing that way, men are useful for pleasure but nothing else.
“Girls, in any successful marriage one of you will be the flower, and the other will be the pot. And you girls are so lucky to live in a world where the government will be your pot.”
Yeah, I know, geezers like me tend to snarl at the men of today for being pussies but the truth is, I’ve never walked a mile in their shoes. I never lived in a world where 35% of single women say they aren’t in a relationship but a whopping 65% of single men say they aren’t in a relationship either. I’ve never lived in a world where I know from the start that my chances of getting into a good college will be abysmal unless I claim I’m gay and have more genders than a dog has fleas. I wasn’t raised in a world where the entire education system is geared only toward college and if you fail to get in then you are a useless drone even if you are good with your hands.
For those guys, Ken actually had something to say. None of the Kens had houses in Barbieland, none of them had jobs, none of them had any kind of purpose at all. Except trying to please their Barbie. And the Barbies didn’t really like any of the Kens, they weren’t real to them not as people.
When Ken went to the real world he read about the patriarchy and how men can be anything just by being men. Since he was a man he thought he could get any job he wanted and it turns out that just being a man doesn’t actually qualify you to be an Astronaut, Surgeon or Lawyer. Nonetheless, Ken’s world was changed forever when someone paid him a compliment and showed him a little common courtesy.
So Ken brings the patriarchy to Barbieland. When Barbie, her owner, and her owner’s horrible daughter get to Barbieland they find that the Kens and Barbies are having real relationships now and love it. Can’t have that, so after a skin-crawling feminist diatribe the Barbies trick the Kens into fighting each other over them, overthrow the Patriarchy, and go back to the status quo where the Kens had nothing.
For men who are Millennials and Zoomers, Ken is their One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He fought the system and failed.
Art can be created accidentally when the maker is just trying to throw some garbage at the wall to see what sticks. And at the end of the day, if art has been created, even accidentally, different people are going to interpret it differently.
That said, I still think Netflix Narnia is going to be utter crap.
