The Plastic Feminism of Barbie

Is the new Barbie film feminist? Note: there aren't a lot of spoilers in this video essay.

Video by Ada Černoša and Verity Ritchie

Keywords: Greta Gerwig, Margot Robbie, body image, Girl Power, Riot Grrrl, Emma Watson

[kekoakaawa]

“Women truly can have it all….as long as they’re incredibly beautiful, of course.”

That always seems to be the punchline in movies.

[BlahLab]

"You can't girlboss without a bit of labor exploitation" is A+

[edeely]

Its honestly mind-boggling to see all the hatred from people toward this movie dismissing it as "woke feminist propaganda" when it has such a shallow, inoffensive concept of feminism.

[KarishmaChanglani]

The fact that Barbie, an extremely popculture safe version of feminism is something considered so abrasive just because it acknowledge a system over individual makes me really upset how behind we really are.

[kingrix]

How refreshing to see valid, legitimate criticism of the Barbie movie that isn't coming from an anti-woke dude bro.
I loved every second of this.

[charischannah]

I loved the Barbie movie, but I really appreciate your critiques. It features a surface-level feminism without digging deeper.

[yurck]

Living in a conservative country where even this "basic level feminism" is seen as extreme, I genuinely appreciate the movie for at least creating a talking point here, but also love your critiques, a point of view that I did not think about. Thanks!

[ggwpBC]

9:26 - I work in the toy industry, and this point here is one of the WEIRDEST things we see everyday. When you poll parents, the feelings towards diversification tend to go from neutral at worst, to really positive at best, negative perceptions are very rare. That said, diverse dolls do not sell. I mean, they do, but the gap is astronomical.
Blondes are usually always #1, Brunettes are a close second. And then you have this major gap between those two and every other ethnicity that is white-looking, and then you have black dolls.
So far, nothing out of the expected, except there is a very weird phenomena.
If a store owner sees that Blondes sell more and they want to save shelf space, they might buy just the blonde ones. Result? Blondes don't sell, or at least at a much lower rate than the market medium. Weird right? But if the same store take away a few blonde dolls from the shelf and adds diverse dolls, the diverse dolls will still not sell, but the blonde ones start selling at a much faster rate. And even weirder, often people of other races will still pick the blue eyed blonde over their own ethnicity, even if both are available.
Basically the current understanding is that either due to marketing, personal preferences, indoctrination, or anything else, people still prefer traditionally looking dolls, but because of the general awareness of the effects dolls have in girl's self-image, parents feel guilty about buying the product. But, when parents see that the brand is* socially aware (*we are talking about a very surface perception here), they feel more comfortable buying the product even though the doll is the same exact one they considered harmful.
This even happens with other issues, for example, baby toys sell more blue and pink if there is a neutral color like green, yellow or white. A socially aware parent doesn't want to buy blue for boys and pink for girls, but if they see they have the gender neutral option, they will happily buy blue for boys and pink for girls.

Basically, people want options to exist, but they still want the standard product.

(This doesn't fully apply to products that have known characters, so something like disney princesses or marvel heroes will work differently to some extent).

[ebetg]

the bumbling board room of men at mattel felt almost like weaponized incompetence, like “haha mattel can’t possibly have had ulterior motives, they couldn’t even get through an automatic gate 😜”

[paulinemoira]

Since i study sociology I sometimes have to remind myself, that most people don't think about social hierarchical structures like sexism as much as I do. During the scene in which Sasha's mom complains about all the expectation placed on women I seriously cringed, because of how obvious and well known those problems are. My mom and my sister cried during that same scene and afterwards talked about how cathartic it was that someone had put into words what they always felt like. And I'd rate at least my sister as relatively socially aware. That this kind of shallow feminism is to so many people groundbreaking is almost incomprehensible.

[arlequinelunaire]

The other funny thing about a Frida Kahlo Barbie is that a lot of Kahlo's paintings weren't child-friendly in the slightest. I'm also reminded of how the movie Coco treated her as a punchline

[SorosPhuvix]

The movie felt a lot like baby's first feminism. So while shallow for those more well versed in the movement, for a stunning amount of individuals, the Barbie movie pried open their eyes for the first time. For that alone, I am grateful, for I hope those people keep following that feeling leading them into deeper critical thoughts on the world around them. For that alone, I am more pessimistic than I was before.
Thank you for the video.

[MK-exfe]

I’m glad you touched on the mean spirited portrayal of sasha. She’s the movie’s “feminist”/anti barbie mouth piece but she’s also a hyper feminine mean girl bully. Despite feeling harmed by barbie her only role is to realize that Barbie is important to her mom and that she needs get over herself and shut up. Terminal case of activist character.

[annaitsy]

On your note about them ignoring the factories and workers -- in the movie, directly after Ken begins living in the Mojo Dojo Casa House, there's a brief scene where the CEO excitedly says, "These are flying off the shelves!" and we see a warehouse full of already-packaged Ken houses being loaded onto trucks. There are no design meetings. There is no production. The CEO seems almost surprised by its existence. It's implied that the decisions in Barbie World just... magically make toys in our world come into being. When we consider how they're trying to turn the lens away from Barbie as a product made in factories, and make us not think about the labor issues and constant plastic pollution... that little scene gets really unsettling.

[loulou]

I liked the movie, although it isn‘t a feminist masterpiece. I also knew that it won’t be anti-consumerism or anti-capitalism (Mattel as a brand was involved). I just enjoyed watching a well made hollywood movie. A pleasure I allow myself once in a while.

[lias]

I remember sitting in the movie and thinking it was odd how they trivialized the higher ups of Barbie as “silly little guys” when in fact they’ve profited off of the commodification of little girls’ insecurities for decades, all while perpetuating harmful stereotypes about femininity and covering it up with appropriated “girl power”.

[unriginal]

I feel like this movie did a better job as a critique of toxic masculinity and toxic male in groups (I.e. manosphere and similar) rather than the feminist extravaganza it was perceived and presented as.

[Alliebomba]

One of the things that struck me as weird in the movie is that Ryan Gosling's Ken recognizes that he and the other Kens have been marginalized in Barbieland, which leads him to invert the social order and create a cartoon-stereotype of patriarchy. Then, Margot Robbie's Barbie and America Ferrera's Gloria restore the matriarchal status quo and put the Kens back into their place as second-class citizens (but also grant them token representation in minor political roles, dangling the carrots of self-actualization and eventual systemic change to placate them). It's weird to me because the movie acknowledges that a hierarchical gender-caste system is a major problem in this universe, but it doesn't actually aspire to systemic change. It just puts the Barbies back on top of the hierarchy and stresses the importance of individual fulfillment.

I want to give the movie credit and believe that this was the satirical point they were trying to make (self-actualization as distraction from systemic problems), but I genuinely cannot tell if that's what the film creators intended.

[RebeccaTurner-nyxx]

1. Margot Robbie has been paid $12.5 million for her lead part in Gerwig’s movie.
2. The workers on the Barbie doll assembly line are paid $2 an hour.
3. Therefore, to earn Margot’s money, each worker would have to work 6, 250, 000 hours.
4. Given their 12-hour shifts six days a week, this amounts to 1, 669 years of utterly tedious and repetitive labor.

[jujubs]

After watching the movie I was left a little disappointed in the message. I wish this movie was about aging because they set it up pretty well. Revealing that Barbie was actually the mother's toy made me cry like a baby because it meant that the mother loved Barbie because it was her connection with her daughter. That rant at the end? It would have been way more powerful coming from Sasha instead. As girls, we expect to get things like height, boobs, womanly curves and beauty. Instead, we grow hair in places we don't want, we gain weight really quickly, and we start to bleed and ache every month. We stop being innocent girls and become sluts and bitches. This is why Sasha is so angry, and she projects that anger onto her mother, who is seemingly happy living in a patriarchal world. It would have been beautiful to see a mother and daughter bond over womanhood and the struggles it brings with it. Also, Barbie telling the old woman she's beautiful would have just fit better in a story about aging.