Barbie in the Longhouse - Part 1

“Humans make things up like patriarchy and Barbie just to deal with how uncomfortable it is”

Previously in this chapter:

Femininity is about Power explored the idea of femininity as a woman’s demonstration of control over her sexuality, her ability to balance appealing to men with earning the respect of society at large.

Painting over the Female inverted that frame: social respectability objectifies you even as it promises you liberation from being objectified; true power comes from embracing the femaleness that femininity tries to hide.

These are multifaceted subjects, deserving centuries of inquiry in art and scholarship. A brief essay series can only scratch the surface and, hopefully, provoke your curiosity. You certainly won’t expect a deep and subversive exploration of femininity, femaleness, objectification, and power in a mainstream Hollywood movie — a kids’ movie at that.

And if you didn’t expect it, you probably missed it.

If you haven’t seen Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023), this post will spoil the movie’s plot with copious quotes and screenshots. But the plot is quite shallow anyway, while the subtext and semiotics of Barbie are bottomless. I hope I “spoil” these for you even if you’ve watched the movie several times.

Children’s Story

On its surface, Barbie is a movie about 3.5th wave lean-in girlboss corporate feminism. The corporations in this case are Warner Bros. and Mattel, makers of the Barbie doll. The feminist message these corporations want to send their target demographic, young girls, is: watch our movie and buy our dolls.

That’s a pretty short message, and the movie has two hours to expand on it. What it tells young girls is: everything would be great if girls ruled the world and did all the jobs. Everyone would wear pretty outfits and party with their girlfriends and not have to talk to boys at all if they didn’t want to. The only reason girls don’t rule the world is a thing called “patriarchy”. But, no worries — girl power is gonna kick patriarchy in the pants and wear them! Now watch our movie and buy our dolls.

This message is, in a nutshell, corporate feminism. And since that’s what Barbie overtly tells young girls, the movie’s message to adults is: corporate feminism is a made-up story for young girls.

This isn’t an esoteric reading; the movie is quite explicit about it. Barbie starts with a scene of Barbies congratulating each other (but mostly — themselves) on their jobs, like president, author, and journalist, that we never see them actually perform. The president signs no executive orders and starts no foreign invasions, the author doesn’t drink while staring at a blank screen, the journalist doesn’t dox any bloggers.

A child sees a job as a cool outfit (purchased separately). She doesn’t think of a job as a responsibility. A young child is not differentiated from other children by much other than her sex, so if any of the 4 billion women on the planet are astronauts it means that she can soar above the atmosphere as well. A child doesn’t ask: how exactly did I end up here? Did other women give me a leg up or did “the patriarchy” allow me up?

This childish understanding of “female representation” somehow formed a core part of girlboss feminism, which was more concerned with counting the vagina/penis ratio in Congress or the Fortune 500 and not whatsoever with women actually helping women advance.

We quoted the same TLP essay in the previous two posts, so why not go for the threepeat:

I turn on the TV, and there's a marionette called Diane Sawyer interviewing 20 female Senators, the most in history, applauding and giggling as if cold fusion had finally been discovered. Of course it's a "good thing" that women are Senators in as much as not allowing them to be Senators is the bad thing, but other than that, what does it mean? That women are finally brave enough to run, or America is brave enough to hire them? It's not like the Capitol Building was turning them away, so why is this important?

I think the answer is supposed to be, "it's empowering to women", but you should wonder: when more women enter a field, it means less men did, and if the men stopped going there, where did they go? Why did they leave? I assume they aren't home with the kids, right?

I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to observe that at the very moment in our history when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless, and I'll risk the blowback and say that those are all stereotypes of women.

Corporate feminism argues that women are kept down by The System, and that “empowerment” means looking The System in the eye and demanding that it give you your due in an assertive tone. TLP says: are you retarded? That’s exactly what The System wants you to believe, so that it can give you the trappings of power instead actual power.

In Barbie, the oppressed Kens ask for representation in the halls of power and are granted a lower court judgeship which they happily agree to since they still get to wear the robes. If that wasn’t on-the-nose enough, the narrator then spells it out:

Well, the Kens have to start somewhere. And one day the Kens will have as much power and influence in Barbie Land as women have in the Real World.

Greta Gerwig lampoons “representation feminism”, she knows it’s cucked and demeaning. She got her start acting in independent movies that she co-directed and co-wrote, mostly with her boyfriend. Her first two studio movies, Lady Bird and Little Women, grossed 5x their budget just like Barbie would go on to do — a streak that very few directors, regardless of gender, can hope to match.

Greta wasn’t given the power to direct a $300 million movie because society decided it’s time to let more women do it. She grabbed that power for herself by proving more talented and bankable than 99.9% of her competitors. The secret of corporate feminism is that corporations don’t care about feminism or patriarchy or women or men — only about their shareholders.

Why does this seem to fly over so many viewers’ heads? Gerwig doesn’t want the average woman watching Barbie to reflect on the differences between them, the vast gaps in talent, accomplishment, work ethic, and intelligence. It flatters the viewer to think “Greta and I are in this together, fighting the patriarchy”.

As we’ll see in a bit, Barbie does strongly hint that adulthood means facing some uncomfortable questions. For example: am I not living the life I wanted because I chose narcissistic narratives over agency and duty? But the average Barbie-goer just hopes to relax as the pastel colors and upbeat music revert them to the peaceful brain-state of a 6-year-old watching cartoons. Gerwig isn’t going to rub their face in it.

Patriarchy

The word “patriarchy” appears about every 5 minutes in Barbie. The dictionary tells me it’s “a system or society where power is held by men”. It’s a bit suspicious then that not a single man appears in the movie at all.

The Kens are not just little boys, but little boys as seen through the eyes of little girls: obsessed with horses and trucks, posturing at each other with “beach offs”, acting out to get mom’s attention, socially naive. They are past the fart-joke stage but, crucially, have not yet entered sexual pubescence. Developmentally, they are perhaps 8-10 years old.

The CEO of Mattel throws tantrums when challenged, likes being tickled, and insists on pressing the button in the elevator. You couldn’t paint a more accurate behavioral portrait of my oldest kid, who is about to turn 3.

Then there’s Gloria’s husband, who only appears in two brief scenes in which he is learning to speak words. That’s pretty faithful to my younger kid, who is yet to turn 1.

There is actually one man in the movie, an adult who takes insults in stride and faces his responsibilities with stoicism and bravery. It’s this guy:

A movie about a system where men hold power has only one man in it, and he has, the movie tells us, no power. So what could they possibly mean by “patriarchy”?

The movie explains what it means in Gloria’s memorable lecture to Barbie:

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.

Barbie calls this sermon “giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy”. It is not just a monologue but a magic spell: instantly snapping the other Barbies back to their “true selves” instead of the decrepit servitude of… tennis practice? Getting investment advice? Watching The Godfather?

Here it’s worth it to pause and discuss the idea of Straussian reading. People often use it to mean “projecting my own politics on the text”. For others, it means “any reading done by Tyler Cowen”. But Leo Strauss himself laid out profound and very specific insights on the topic, most notably in his seminal Persecution and the Art of Writing.

Strauss claimed that philosophers are always at risk of persecution when their work touches, even obliquely, on the politics of the day. Thus, they strive to convey two meanings simultaneously in their work: an exoteric, surface meaning that kowtows to dominant mores, and an esoteric meaning that contradicts them. They use specific techniques to point at the esoteric, such as creating parallels between seemingly unrelated sections, or leaving deliberate contradictions unaddressed.

A key technique for pointing the observant reader towards the true meaning is utilizing a shift in energy. The voice of orthodoxy should go at length, in an “unspectacular and somewhat boring manner which would seem to be but natural”. The core of the subversive stance is then stated in brief, “in that terse and lively style which is apt to arrest the attention of young men who love to think”. The writer can’t tell you explicitly “here’s what I really mean”, but he can hope you will notice when the tempo picks up.

After Gloria monologues for two and a half minutes uninterrupted in an “unspectacular but natural” style, the movie jumps to a fast-paced montage that shows the Barbies being “liberated”. This montage shows, in a terse and lively style, the glaring contradictions between every single word Gloria said and the Barbies’ actual experience “under patriarchy”.

“You have to be thin, but not too thin.”

No, you don’t! Look at the previous screenshot: Cowboy Ken is perfectly happy watching The Godfather with a clinically obese Barbie!

"You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead.”

No, you don’t! None of the Kens demand that the Barbies lead anything, or look out for other people, or answer for anyone’s behavior, or any of that. Literally the only expectation Kens have of Barbies “under patriarchy” is, if they just happen to pass by the mini-fridge, to bring them a brewski beer.

“Never fall down, never fail, never show fear” come on now, seriously?

Gloria’s accuses Ken of “brainwashing”. He’s a clueless boy who discovered what trucks are 5 minutes ago in a school library. Was he supposed to have become an expert mass hypnotist? When Barbie and Gloria return to “patriarchal” Barbie Land, they don’t find out that Ken lied to the Barbies or coerced them. He just asked if they want to trade all their normal responsibilities for beer delivery and they immediately agreed.

The Kenland Barbies aren’t conflicted or uneasy about this, there’s no tension between grand narratives and their immediate experience. They unanimously report being happy and relaxed. The former president doesn’t say “I hate pouring beers but I guess the advancement of civilization demands that the Apollonian male spirit take the reins”. She says: “this is so much better than being president!”

It is Gloria who has to kidnap the Barbies into an unmarked van, stare them in the face like an interrogator, and admonish them like a mother does a misbehaving toddler. This procedure is called un-brainwashing. Get it?

Gloria’s Revolution

It’s worth pausing on the character of Gloria herself. She constantly complains about the patriarchy, and yet there isn’t a single instance in the movie where a man stands in her way. Her husband is a pre-lingual infant. Her boss doesn’t recognize her talent because she never actually shows him her designs or ideas. She finally does so after her daughter pushes her to, as a parent would push a child.

In fact, all the parenting we see in the movie goes from Sasha to Gloria, not the other way around. Gloria’s politics are an imitation of Sasha’s Tumblr-born proclamations about “sexualized capitalism” and “cultural appropriation”. The big “reveal” of the movie’s second act is that Sasha was ready to leave childish things behind, it is Gloria who wanted to keep playing with dolls. At the “darkest hour” point of the Kenland plot, it is Sasha who literally grabs the wheel from her mom and drives her back to save the day.

Go back to her monologue: what would it look like to not have to balance conflicting demands? To not be capable of both assertiveness and empathy, care and ambition? To not be held responsible for anything? To not have to diet? That is the life of a little child.

Gloria’s character is a perfect mirror to Ken. They are both children frustrated by their powerlessness, struggling to grow up, looking to blame their lack of agency on others. They are natural mimetic rivals. After the “liberation”, Gloria insists that the Barbies not just reclaim their government but also that they gratuitously hurt and degrade the Kens on their way.

Ken just wants to live in the tallest Mojo Dojo Casa House, watching horses on TV. And Gloria? She likes a short skirt and a looooong house.

At its core, Barbie isn’t a political allegory or even an advertisement for toys. In the penultimate scene of the movie, the “voice of wisdom” character admits that “humans make things up like patriarchy and Barbie just to deal with how uncomfortable it is”. What’s real is the discomfort, not the other stuff.

Barbie is a fundamentally coming-of-age story. Not Gloria’s or Ken’s or Sasha’s, but Barbie’s. It’s a story of embracing the discomfort and contradictions that come with being a grown woman. It’s a story about rejecting the longhouse and finding your independence.

It’s a story for part 2.