#which is interesting bc barbieland is a worlds reversed thing

[starlooove]

The way "you are kenough" still praises men for the bare minimum

[genderkoolaid]

#I see the points being made here#and OP will probably be mad at me for this#but like I’m currently in school for gender and sexuality studies#and in my gender and media class we watched and discussed this film#but we disagreed with ur very thesis. my class made th point that the Kens ARENT oppressed in a 1:1 comparison how women are oppressed irl#the kens are not treated as equals. they are infantilized. but they are not subject to the violence that women in the real world face#Barbie goes to the real world and immediately feels an undertone of violence and sexualization#the kens are never treated that was. there’s no violence against them#important to the film is that Gloria Doesn’t dream of Barbie land. she hasn’t even thought the place could exist#Ken tho HAS imagined a world where he gets what he is owed in Barbie (fighting the urge to cite the film)#the kens are mistreated in barbieland I won’t argue they’re not#but the way the kens treat the Barbie’s Vs how the Barbie’s treat the kens are so vastly different#the kens are treated as an afterthought in Barbieland.#in Kens patriarchy the Barbies are treated as literal servants expected to cater to the kens every whim#those two things are very different#also like WHAT are u talking abt with Gloria she never wanted to change her world to be matriarchical?#Barbie was trying to inspire Gloria into girlpower bc she felt unfulfilled at her job?

So for one, as I said in my reblog above, it wouldn't make any sense for there to be the sexual violence women face in Barbieland because it is canonically a world inhabited by asexual dolls who lack genitalia or even the knowledge of what sex really is. The Ken's patriarchy is directly based off the real world, which is why they are sexually harassing the Barbies, but its learned behavior.

My interest is less in what the in-universe non-Barbie women and more what the movie itself was aiming to do for the cis women audience. A big part of the hype around the movie was the idea of Ken being in the objectified, secondary position women love interests were usually put in. The point of Barbieland is to be representative of women's fantasy- which makes sense, because that's also what Barbie is meant to be. The conceit of Barbieland was that it was a role-reversal fantasy where women had all the control. They talk in the movie about how the Kens have no government representation, and at the end they joke about how the Kens will still have extremely limited representation after the events of the movie, clearly meant to parallel women's lack of representation in government. And honestly I wouldn't have a problem if they did this and didn't take it too seriously- its a fun bit, and it fits with how the Barbie franchise has always portrayed Ken.

But they go out of their way to draw parallels between the Kens in Barbieland and women in the real world, and then don't interrogate how the Kens' desire for patriarchy compares with the audience's desire for the fantasy role-reversal matriarchy. Ken's character isn't just in the role of secondary love-interest, he's explicitly uncomfortable in his role in this society. And the Kens are, frankly, entirely right to be angry and it confused me and my friend when we first saw it that the movie really ignores that. I've seen people say this movie pointed out how the patriarchy affects men because Barbie tells Ken to be his own man… but it was never the patriarchy that did that to him? The patriarchy obsession was a coping mechanism when it was the Barbiearchy that made him base his entire identity around being Barbie's boyfriend- another purposeful, direct parallel to how misogyny works IRL.

And the thing is there is no matriarchy IRL! Men's issues DO stem from the patriarchy! But Barbieland makes no sense as a lens to view that through since, in the canon of the show, the Kens are oppressed (in ways which make sense for the rules of their universe). And I feel like this goes alongside what, in my opinion, is the movies biggest weak spot, which is the fact that its feminist takes are extremely lukewarm. The whole big Feminism Speech was literally just Gloria saying "hey, double standards exist and they suck!"

In my opinion, the plotline about Barbie choosing to be human in a world of suffering is a lot better exploration of womanhood and misogyny than anything the film tries to say about patriarchy directly. It places Barbie as the Everyman figure, but in a way which (if I can get way too deep about this movie) focuses on womanhood as humanity. Barbie chooses to be a human who will suffer because she is choosing to be a woman who will be oppressed by misogyny. She finds beauty and meaning in humanity and womanhood and womanhood-as-humanity, and she makes the decision to embrace that with full knowledge of how it will cause her to suffer. That was really beautiful and impactful to me, and it annoys me how the only thing people talked about is what I feel is the weakest part of the plot.

In my opinion, if you are going to draw those parallels between the Kens and IRL misogyny, and you are portraying Barbieland as a role-reversal fantasy, and part of the plot involves the oppressed Kens finding out about patriarchy (which, like Gloria, they literally could not imagine such a world exists), its just a huge missed opportunity to not make any commentary on that, on how oppression can lead us to desire revenge that makes us more concerned with our personal freedom than resisting oppression in every form. I'm not drawing a line between the Kens and the women of the movie, I feel the Kens are a parallel for the women who are watching the movie to see the Kens being treated like women are, because thats exactly the mindset the Kens have when recreating the patriarchy.

And personally I feel like that's part of the reason why the Barbies aren't sexually harassing the Kens. It might make them too unlikeable, and the viewers may not enjoy having the people who are supposed to be living in the Feminist Fantasy World be sexually assaulting others- its too dark to be part of Barbie's character arc.

re; your last post about cisfeminists going "what if men experienced misogyny?"

your points are exactly why i don't like the newest barbie movie. the ciscentric nature around kens being a second class citizen compared to barbies makes me really uncomfortable, since it wasn't handled with care or marginalized men's experiences in mind.

just this idea of "look! men are the oppressed ones here! isn't that so fucked, and unlike anything that's in the REAL world?" that they play with and make jokes out of.

Yeaaah I had similar feelings. I enjoyed the movie & honestly found the plotline about Barbie's humanity to be well done, but the gender thing was like. grade school baby's first feminism and people acted like it was groundbreaking just because it said literally anything about gender.

The whole Ken plotline could have been interesting if they did some sort of commentary on how the desire to reverse oppressive dynamics just recreates oppression. The whole idea of Barbieland was the its the inverse of how women are treated irl, but the movie never takes seriously the idea that, by this logic, the patriarchy is the Ken's Barbieland, and real-life women fantasizing about Barbieland is no different than the Ken's fantasizing about our patriarchal world. But the movie just.... does not take it's own creation of Ken Oppression seriously. The Ken's desire for the patriarchy is invalid and bad and obviously deserves punishment, but the viewer's desire for the oppressive matriarchy of Barbieland is entirely justified.

Obviously it's literally a silly movie about a doll lady but if they are going to try and Make a Point About Gender, then imo they shouldn't have literally made the Kens oppressed and treated it like it meant nothing. They couldve made some point about how what the Kens were doing was bad, but it was no different than what the human main character lady wanted to do in Barbieland– being so focused on escaping their own suffering that they don't actually care about oppression when its not affecting them. But instead they just... made a joke about how the Kens are being treated like women! They don't have voting rights and no one cares if they get them! This is fun and normal!