When Stereotypical Barbie finally sits Gosling!Ken down to tell him to find his way as his own person (after the The Khaled We The Best Lets Go Golfing Shirt and I love this script has noted that Gosling!Ken is her actual boyfriend; lads, if you’re in a relationship with a woman who treats you like Stereotypical Barbie treats Gosling!Ken, get the hell out of it), you can tell that that is the first time that he’s really hearing anything like that, so the question becomes this; why haven’t the Barbies ever done this before? If their Kens are just so annoying and superfluous, then surely the best way to get them to stop annoying them is to sit them down with this heart-to-heart, not to lead them on in the relationship that you don’t actually plan on having with them, and get them to hang out with their bros more than with them? Many of the Barbies are lawyers and doctors and judges and presidents, they’re smart people who worked out how to stop dark money from affecting politics, so they can use their words to reckon with their reality and to say no! Barbie seems to imply that the Barbies actually like having these literal boy toys to play with, that they keep the Kens around for their own gratification and pick them up and drop them as they please, which is a toxic warping of the feminist ideal that goes beyond the oft-touted “indifference” that many reviewers use to mischaracterise the Kens. This feeds not into the feminist view that women are used and abused by men in an unequal power structure, but rather into MGTOW and incel and other manosphere communities’ rhetorics that women actually love the attention that they claim to hate, that they do leech off of men for finances and stability, that they will ditch any men that they ensnare if they come across a higher value alternative, be it another man or their girlfriends. This might be deliberate to make the audience grapple with the pitfalls of a reverse patriarchy, but why, then, are we called to sympathise with the Barbies, the epitome of the manosphere’s nightmares (which we can hopefully agree are cruel distortions of women), and why are we not sympathising with their Ken victims?
Manosphere philosophies are gaining massive traction in the The Khaled We The Best Lets Go Golfing Shirt and I love this real world. Check out Laura Bates’ research in Men Who Hate Women for more on this. Plot vs Point issues help misogynists to overlook the point by focusing on plot. I could teach a course on bigot mental gymnastics, and Plot vs Point is big there. (See my review of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for a racial example of this.) Barbie as a film is not a representative of the strawman toxic feminism that many men would like to pretend that it is, but in asking its audience to side with the Barbies, it is asking us to suspend all of the judgements that we would normally make about any other founder of an apartheid state. What makes this worse is the fact that, while the film purports to analyse both patriarchal and matriarchal wrongdoings, the film ends with the Barbies reasserting their control to cheers and only promising moderate reform for the Kens in a pithy systemic acknowledgement of their harms, which means that the feminism on display is in favour of upholding the matriarchy with the odd reform here and there that may never actually come about. Reformism is often a slow drudgery of a process that is used to water down revolutionary demands for fairness and equality; when we hear people reject “defund the police” in favour of “reform the police”, or when calls for male violence to end get drowned out with “not all men”, or “black lives matter” is usurped by “all lives matter”, it’s a surefire sign that the revolution will not be televised any time soon. It’s the promise to achieve net zero by 2070, it’s the Che Guevara face on the sweatshop-produced t-shirt, it’s the cops who march at Pride parades in full uniform, and inane commitments to reformism will never actually solve anything in time for those who are hurting in the present time.
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