Barbie is back. Following the success of Greta Gerwig’s iconic blockbuster, which grossed over $1.44 billion worldwide, Mattel Studios, Universal, and Illumination have signed a deal to develop a new animated Barbie feature for the big screen. No official release date has yet been set.
Gerwig’s film became a pop culture touchstone of twenty-first-century cinema, though it received mixed reactions from conservatives. The day after it was released, Ben Shapiro posted a YouTube video in which he “DESTROYS The Barbie Movie For 43 Minutes,” bemoaning the film as “woke” propaganda, particularly through its supposed portrayal of failed masculinity. But underneath the layers of pink plastic fantastic, the film uncovered some profound truths about how men and women complement each other. Far from being a trophy of woke, the film was subtly subversive and hinted at a “vibe shift” toward a more realistic, even classical, understanding of gender.
Riffing on the opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film begins at the dawn of creation, where little girls dream of being mothers when they grow up. They cradle baby dolls, imagining the families they will one day care for. For millennia, this is where most women derived meaning and fulfillment—from prioritizing family over an office cubicle. Enter Monolith Barbie.
Barbie isn’t a mother. She’s an eternally hot young woman. Depending solely on her costume, she can be a supermodel, a president, a Supreme Court justice, or a mermaid. The little girls stop cradling their dolls and start smashing them up against rocks. Why be a mother when you can be literally anything else? In each broken piece of doll, the thoughtful viewer may see abortion, the advent of the pill, the dominance of Sex and the City feminism arriving in the stunning crash of the sexual revolution. The meaning of womanhood has changed forever, and the little girls reckon the grass will be greener on the other side.
It’s against this backdrop that the film transports us into “Barbieland,” a supposed feminist utopia. Women run the entire show. They are CEOs, astronauts, and politicians. The main Barbie (dubbed “Stereotypical Barbie” and played by Margot Robbie) throws house parties in her pink mansion. There’s only one pregnant Barbie in Barbieland—and she is the butt of jokes and sneers. “Midge was Barbie’s pregnant friend,” quips the narrator. “Let’s not show Midge, actually. She was discontinued by Mattel because a pregnant doll is just too weird.”
Then there’s Ken (Ryan Gosling). We aren’t exactly sure where he resides in Barbieland, or what he does besides being Barbie’s adoring accessory. Ken is the embodiment of failed masculinity. For every inch of power that Barbie claims, Ken has only weakness. “She’s everything! He’s just Ken.” So goes the tagline of the film.
Barbieland depicts the damaging extreme of hardcore feminism—when “equality between the sexes” tips over into “girls don’t need men whatsoever.” We’ve seen this scenario emerge victorious in myriad Hollywood blockbusters. Ahead of Disney’s controversial Snow White remake, for example, we were told the princess won’t be waiting around for a prince to save the day. Too often, #girlpower has come at the expense of the role of men as fathers, husbands, and leaders.
Dejected and emasculated by Barbieland, Ken’s world is revolutionized when he discovers “patriarchy” while on a trip to the “real world”—downtown Los Angeles. He takes this newfound hypermasculine ideal back to Barbieland and wreaks havoc by converting the land into “Kendom.” The Barbies are turfed out of their homes and made into maids and maidens, serving drinks to their Kens and affirming their greatness with no real partnership or benefit. Stereotypical Barbie is given the not-so-enticing offer of being Ken’s “long-term, long-distance, low-commitment, casual girlfriend.” For the most desirable woman in Barbieland, it couldn’t be a bigger slap in the face.
The movie refers to this ideology as “patriarchy,” but in the more common parlance of Internetland, this strain of thought is often captured by those claiming to be “red-pilled”—as in, awakened to hidden truths, including the damage feminism has wrought on men. Many such men react with bitterness, turning to sources like Andrew Tate and Pearl Davis, who rile up anti-women rhetoric and diminish girls as silly, vindictive, and inferior.
Margot’s Barbie sits astride these two increasingly polarized social dogmas—limitless feminism and reactionary anti-feminism—and points out the flaws in both. Societal solutions that pit the sexes against each other will ultimately end in disaster for both parties.
Not only is this true for society, but for families and individuals, too. Polarization between career-obsessed #girlbosses and disillusioned “red-pill” men can only have contributed to the serious decline in marriage in the West. In the U.K., adults in 2021 were 44 percent less likely to be married than adults in 1991. According to Civitas, marriage will have all but disappeared on the British Isles by 2062.
Marriage, as traditionally understood by the vast majority of human civilization, is based on the premise that an unbreakable, dependable partnership of the sexes is the best scenario to support men, women, and the children that they will likely raise together. It’s borne out in the data. According to the Office for National Statistics, getting married makes people happier with their lives than earning big salaries, and married people report higher life satisfaction than singles or cohabiting couples. Fathers in the home are one of the strongest safeguards against adolescent poverty and crime. Women who are married are significantly less likely to be the victims of violent crime. Men who are married are less likely to perpetrate violent crimes. Children who live with married parents report better mental health. They are typically exposed to the unique balance of feminine nurturing care, and masculine adventurism and competitiveness, which creates the perfect blend for development.
Barbie may not have intended to champion traditional marriage, but it does. The moral of the story is this: She’s not everything, and he’s not just Ken. Barbie and Ken may not end up together, but the other residents of Barbieland make the critical realization that partnerships that enable men and women to flourish equally lead to a much better society.
Yet even in a Barbieland that makes space for men, our lead Barbie is not satisfied. As she dreams of what she truly wants, the audience is shown a montage of women—not of astronauts or billionaires or CEOs, but mothers and daughters, engaging in the reality of relationship and family. Barbie has the world at her feet, but it’s nothing compared to the connection of flesh and blood, the intergenerational care of motherhood and daughterhood.
Barbie ultimately turns away from the plastic feminism of Barbieland to seek this meaning and purpose in the real world. In her final scene, she declares to a receptionist that she’s there for her gynecologist appointment, affirming the biological reality of the female body.
We shall see if the new Barbie movie will continue this trajectory of quiet subversion against the dominant feminist narratives of our day. The world is beginning to question if the formula for happiness really requires sacrificing marriage and children to sit in an overly air-conditioned cubicle office, generating profit for a corporation that could replace us without a thought next week. Some women want to pursue that life, but for many, it’s a trap and a path to unhappiness. If the Barbie franchise can continue to lean into exposing the truth, it will be to the cheers of women everywhere.
