BARBIE

As I sit in the movies, completely submerged and sunk in the world of Barbie and the beauty of Barbie land, slowly reading the meanings behind the scenes and the significance of the lines, shattered by what the Kens did to what seemed to me for a moment a piece of heaven and a place I would very much love to live in, I hear my date jokingly whisper to me how the Barbies seem much more happier now that the Kens took over the power and made the land their own and how they don’t seem “fake” anymore.

As I sit in the movies, surprised with that remark, stunned with the audacity and speechless to articulate, even though it was a joke, I think of the party that the Barbies threw in the beginning of the movie before the tragedy, I think of the hair, the makeup, the costumes, the music, the dances, the glittery decorations, the harmony between those beautiful women, their laughs, their innocence, their carelessness, their freedom, their achievements, their confidence and the absence of the uncomfortable touch of men behind their backs. I remember all of it and the joy I felt for a moment, the certitude of safety I would have felt there, the hidden guarantee that I unquestionably would have been happy to be there, it hits me as I express myself that the Barbies were not being fake in the beginning, that I was in the past convinced that other men knew better of what would make me, a woman, happy and thus make other women happy.

In tandem with all of that, it dawned on me the profound disparity of how men were treated in Barbie land (which after all is women’s land) and how women were treated in Kens land. It was almost impossible for men to be in charge without diminishing women, sexualizing them, literally transforming them into maids that only existed to shadow them as they serve them with a smile on their faces, miniskirts and shirts that show cleavage. I see men everywhere complain about how cruel, discriminatory, biased, unjust and simply wrongful the Barbies treated the Kens, I wonder how come men can compare the daily sexualizing, objectification, the disregard of women’s boundaries, the catcalling in the streets, the beach, even the hospital if you work in one. The unsolicited leaning men do towards you as they proceed to explain or show you something. The way they are praised for the bare minimum or how they never worry about things such as rape and proceed to make jokes about it as if it were the most natural thing to exist, the endless “words of affirmation” and “acts of service” that aim to diminish women, the fact that every time we see a woman on TV is only because she is advertising a shampoo in a sexy way or every time we show women as part of a political party is only to prove inclusivity or the fact that every time there is free access for women into bars or swim pools, the only goal is to attract more men (and money) there; I wonder how does that compare to what seems to be an insufferable inhumanity and total viciousness of Barbie, for simply not falling in love with Ken, as she lets him just be in her world, unbothered of what Ken would do, if she is not doing him any good at least she is not hurting him in any way, I genuinely do wonder, how the two spectrums of these two worlds can compare and if any man who watched the movie could ever think about Barbie land, where women lived happily, men were not suffering, they were not under any obligation, a tool of servitude or the victim of harassment, they were simply not the heroes, not the main character, not about whom revolves everything, do you ever realise women only wanted to be left alone just like the Kens in Barbie land, only one day in the real world.

The sympathy men feel towards Ken as he is somehow an extend of themselves is funny because when Ryan Gosling is playing this character filled with sarcasm and exaggeration of what is surrounding us to highlight and point it, you come to think of the entitlement men gain through their life time, how their niceness is only an act to sleep with you, even when you repeatedly make your intentions clear and you set your boundaries and express your withholding, their persistence and insistence that suffocates and sometimes forces you to change your mind is supposed to be seen as a romantic beautiful noble chivalrous gallant pursue and plan to gain your heart and get you to spend the rest of your life with them, but when you insist on your refusal, you see the face behind the mask , the simmering anger in disguise of patience, the delayed frustration and annoyance masked as forbearance, and when you repeatedly asked for a friendship and never gave any other intentions of initiating a romantic relationship, Mr nice guy makes a song about you, blaming you for where” he sees loves you see a friend.”

And then you are no longer as pretty as they told you you were, you are not as sexy as they let you once think you were. You are just another one. And because men establish unions when the ego of one them is hurt, even if that one is a movie character, even when that one is doll, the real life Ken community decided overnight that the woman who was the epitome and embodiment of beauty and attraction back when she was in the wolf of wall street as a sex distraction, sexy figure and a trophy wife, Margot Robbie, is now just “mid”. Well if she is indeed mid, excuse my language and lack of tact as I express myself quite bluntly for the first time ever on my essays, your opinion is shit, because I know beyond the shadow of a doubt and without a shred of uncertainty that the voice in your head that inspired you to say that Margot Robbie is mid right after Barbie, is the voice that speaks when you call a woman a whore for refusing to go out with you.

But if you ask me truly what being a woman is, beyond the disrespect of men and the problems they inflict on both women and men, because men do suffer indeed as well in other ways, I would answer with the scene in which Barbie still feels bad for Ken, even after all the horrible things he did to her and it is somehow a feeling I have experienced as well, with a soft pinch of hope that somehow, she will find in her heart some power and will to love him, as wrong as it seems, as bad as it is, as disappointing as it looks.

Moving on to another point, I would like to turn our attention to capitalism’s attempts through the years to corrupt and demonize Barbie to profit institutions such as pharmaceutical industries and the cosmetic business.

From a simple doll we played with as kids without any further ideas in the recesses of our minds or any subconscious notions about how “harmful” she is or how she is “setting unrealistic beauty standards” to our society, who decided at some certain point that Barbie was the devil incarnated to feed off our insecurities and make us feel bad about ourselves?

It was just a doll, never in my life as a kid I thought that I would want to look like a stereotypical Barbie, never in my life have I dreamed about having long thin legs, blonde long soft hair, blue eyes, smooth skin, until I was told it was okay I did not look like that and that I was pretty “the way I am” and that I needed representation with a brunette Barbie.

Representation, where does it end? I am tired of our society being so fragile that it feels the need to represent everything and call it empowerment rather than acknowledging that this is all a large scheme to rob and brainwash us into thinking that it was okay to have an endless number of sexes or genders for example.

And I am at my wit’s end with the on-going “normalisation” of things I didn’t even know existed or thought of pretty to begin with until I was invited to “accept” them.

When I used to see a best friend of mine laugh, beautiful lines around the corner of her eyes formed, I thought that was so pretty, I thought it added radiance to her smile and made me feel the warmth and truth of her emotions. Later on in life I find out that those lines are named crow’s feet and that it was “normal” to have them, it was “okay” to have them, they don’t make women any less pretty and they were a normal part of the process of aging. I “don’t have to” get Botox to “fix” those wrinkles if I have them.

And somehow, they went from what I thought of as mere beautiful lines that express tenderness, affection, softness, friendliness to something I take huge proud of that I still don’t have and that I will attack with Botox once they will make an appearance on my face because I don’t want to be okay with something now that I know it is wrong and that I am self-conscious about it, there is no going back.

And I hate that I never saw beyond hips anything but a simple part of our bodies, but now that hip dips are okay and “beautiful”, I have to actually love them and say they look hot and nobody should be ashamed of having them.

I don’t want to love my or anyone’s hip dips or cellulite or stretch marks. As a matter of fact I don’t think they are beautiful, I don’t think saggy breasts are beautiful, or that hyperpigmentation is okay, or that c section scars are acceptable or that gummy smiles are attractive.

I don’t think of anything as anything truthfully because I simply have never seen those things as I never saw Barbie or any other doll as rival or an enemy that threatened me and made life hard for me, a thing many women on the internet agree upon to too, I was never in a competition with her until everyone around me started pointing out those “defects” that “were not defects” and that I am supposed to be at peace with and empower other women to accept and cherish and hold huge pride of.

We were all okay until we were pushed to be okay with things we didn’t even know existed or never even saw in ourselves.

If I were to be a kid again, and if you ask my 23 years old self right now, I simply want a Barbie, as blonde as she comes, as thin as she is, as perfect and stereotypical as she could ever be because I could and would never care less about her, I would have just enjoyed playing with her, because that is its purpose, that is what she was made for, she wasn’t invented to make me insecure and then convince me that I looked okay only to softly push me to get Botox and lip filler and work out intensely and eat as little as possible while counting my calories because while it was okay to not look like Barbie, it was definitely not so great to look like myself and I am not talking about a hairy overweighed self who encourages bad life habits and pushes an unhealthy agendas everywhere as an okay life style but simply a healthy just existing human who didn’t read beyond the lines of every inch of her body and who wasn't under the attempts to be persuaded that it was fine not to look like Barbie, the same way no one reassured little boys when they didn't look like their Batman dolls.

To end this essay, going back again to the first point of the blog, if supposedly the movie is offensive and degrading to men, wouldn’t be so noble to close an eye on it and to just let this one pass because there are endless movies that are degrading to women, yet we were obliged to consider it as art and forced to appreciate it, or at least not take it that personally or that deeply?

If Barbie is offensive, and at some point sometimes I wish it was, until when do men have to go through what women go through so that they can finally understand and sympathise with them and see that change is necessary?

And whether the movie is actually insulting or not, to some extent, a marginalised demographic in cinema (women), needs productions like Barbie, to escape, only for a temporal lapse, the truths of a not so pleasing world.