#creative work made by women is often more heavily scrutinized than work by men

[cicadaknight]

okay i have more (critical) barbie thoughts under the cut.

i really did enjoy it overall. it was fun, cheeky, surreal. i loved the experience of watching it in an energetic theater. i even cried a couple times. but i’m baffled at how powerful it was for so many people when it fell so flat for me. honestly, maybe what i’m feeling is just because i’m trans and it didn’t resonate as strongly with my experience of womanhood or masculinity.

i keep coming across people using gloria’s monologue to dismiss criticism by saying “anyone saying barbie isn’t feminist enough are doing the exact thing gloria pointed out! women have to be perfect but it’s just never good enough!” Y’ALL. having issues with a high-budget, corporate funded movie that has the same milquetoast girl-power messaging you’d find in teen mags from the early 2000s… is not the same as oppressing women under patriarchy. you can critique media and still resonate with aspects of it. good grief.

another response i’ve seen to critiques (specifically of gloria’s monologue) is that the movie’s messages are meant for barbie herself! not for the audience! it had to be super tame and generic because otherwise barbie wouldn’t have understood! all those speeches and ideas are aimed solely at barbie who is learning about all of this for the first time! it’s not for you if you already get it! what?????? that’s not how media works and you know it.

also, the idea that it’s meant to be palatable for a “wider audience” so it couldn’t have included intersectionality without losing people. translation: “wider audience” means white suburbia? white men? cishet people? where the most “representation” they can tolerate is a 3 second clip of a voiceless barbie in a wheelchair dancing? or a black president barbie who mostly says one liners and disappears? a wider audience being the same audience every blockbuster is catered towards?

i’m just spit balling here, but i don’t think it would have been impossible to introduce some unironic nuances like:

america’s latinx character experiencing sexism differently from stereotypical barbie?

maybe not using mount rushmore repeatedly to symbolize who’s in power?

avoiding comparing bringing patriarchy to barbieland to indigenous genocide?

a harsher perspective on mattel’s role in all this? where the outcome isn’t just will farrell’s character griping that he doesn’t even want to be in charge, he just wants to be tickled? (wtf was that lmao)

making a more obvious statement that patriarchy isn’t just a symptom of men stumbling across power and relishing it but that it’s rooted in violent white supremacy and capitalism? i’m positive there’s a way to address that without going full blown academic feminist theory mode.

having the black, fat, and disabled characters speak more than 5 collective minutes? (but at least they had screentime at all, right? ✨representation✨)

explicitly queer characters instead of “weird barbie” and allan being coded as the outsiders to an otherwise regimented cishet universe?

but all those ideas are irrelevant, right? because the movie was just SOOO self aware and layered in irony and if i was smart enough and hadn’t missed the point, i’d know the writers were in on it all.