Why I won’t take my 12-year-old daughter to see Barbie
Jon Miltimore
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My 12-year-old daughter asked me last weekend to take her to Barbie. I couldn’t do it — even though taking my children to movies and devouring buckets of buttered popcorn is one of my favorite things in life.
The movie was being cheered by all the wrong people.
FEDS MUST CURE THEIR EDIFICE COMPLEX
“Barbie slips in heady notions about sexualization, capitalism, social devolution, human rights and self-empowerment, under the guise of a lucrative, brand-extending trip down memory lane,” gushed Rolling Stone.
Uh, no thank you, I thought. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m not a fan of featuring “heady notions” on sexualization in children’s movies.
Since then, my feelings have changed a little. The truth is, I’d be lying if I told you part of me didn’t want to watch Barbie. Part of this is just FOMO (fear of missing out) since Barbie has generated a ton of buzz and an impressive $162 million at the box office. But the other part is that I’m curious about the ideas in Barbie.
So far, much of the media commentary around Barbie has been polarizing (a sharp contrast to critics and viewers, both of whom love the movie). Conservatives have described it as “a two hour woke-a-thon.” Ben Shapiro went so far as to light Barbie dolls on fire in response to the film.
Meanwhile, legacy media are already talking about giving Ryan Gosling (who plays Ken in the film) an Oscar for his masterful portrayal of “male fragility” through the lens of the patriarchy — a theme reportedly featured heavily in Barbie.
But other reviews of the film suggest Barbie’s message might be a bit more nuanced.
Katie Pickles, a historian at the University of Canterbury, writes that the film actually shows that “matriarchy can be just as damaging as patriarchy.”
Apparently this happens after Ken discovers the patriarchy in the real world and takes the ideology back to Barbie Land. From here, the film takes “a dark turn,” Pickles writes. No longer simply an accessory to Barbie (Margot Robie), Ken “dances, prowls and flexes to steal the show.”
In other words, Ken decides he wants his own identity. In doing so, he flips the script. He turns himself into a victim, whining “about blonde fragility and every night being a girls’ night.”
“This is where the movie is at its most profound. Ken, not Barbie, is the victim of sexism,” Pickles writes. “As Barbie has flourished, Ken has been left behind. Kens are the objectified, excluded second sex.”
This actually sounds like pretty good writing. Brilliant even. It’s also smart marketing. Exploring the patriarchy in this way is a great way to “rehabilitate” Barbie, a character long despised by feminists for allegedly promoting an unrealistic body image to little girls.
So yeah, part of me wants to see this movie. That said, there’s something unseemly about using children’s toys as vehicles to explore postmodernism. One of the beauties of Universal Pictures’s recent Super Mario Bros. Movie was that it was just a fun movie about an iconic children’s character. No politics. No ideology. Just good storytelling.
Disney’s recent struggles show the pitfalls of infusing movies, especially children’s movies, with politics and ideology. But Warner Bros., which purchased the film rights from Sony Pictures in 2018, might have managed to get the balance right with Barbie right.
The problem is the film is still training people to view the world through the lens of intersectionality, power, and oppression.
This is why I won’t be taking my daughter to the film. I’m trying to teach her not to view the world through this prism. Instead, I want to teach her simply to see people as individuals, all of whom should be treated with love, respect, and dignity.
This task is hard enough in today’s world. We’re trained to see one another in terms of identity — of oppressor and oppressed. And all accounts suggest that Barbie leans into this paradigm, even if director Greta Gerwig manages to do it in a clever and engaging way.
These ideas, even when given careful treatment, fall far short of Barbie’s simple message in Toy Story 3.
“Authority should derive from the consent of the governed, not from the threat of force!” Barbie tells the tyrant Lots-O’-Huggin’ Bear.
Amen. We don’t need ideology in children’s movies. But to the extent that we do, I’ll take Locke over Foucault any day.
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Jon Miltimore (@miltimore79) is managing editor of FEE.org, the online portal of the Foundation for Economic Education. Follow his work on Substack.