Barbie solved feminism—did you hear? Or rather, as Helen Mirren’s narrator tells us in Barbie’s Kubrickian opening scene, the Barbies of Barbie Land think that they “fixed everything in the real world, where all women would be happy and powerful.” But the Barbies of Barbie and their many career paths didn’t install a feminist society once and for all … neither did the Mattel Barbies of the real world … and neither does the actual film, Barbie, despite its stunningly existential tightrope of a plot, which caused more than one young girl in my theater to flutter with questions like, “What’s a gynecologist?” and “What’s the patriarchy?” Which made this Blogger Barbie feel—to quote Stereotypical Barbie when she’s experiencing that oh-so-womanly rite of passage of sobbing at the bus stop for reasons she doesn’t totally understand—“achy … but good.”
Did one of those little girls also ask her mom to take her to the bathroom the moment Barbie and Ken Rollerbladed out of the colorful and charming Barbie Land and into the crises of self awaiting them in the real world? Yes, she did. And did she then ask to go to the bathroom again just as one of the humans in Barbie Land, Gloria, began expressing to a handful of newly radicalized Barbies that to be a woman in the world is to balance a million patriarchy-fueled, contradictory expectations? Also yes. But if millions of little girls around the country decided to take their fourth bathroom break during a soaring monologue mostly meant for their moms, maybe that’s OK—they’ll discover the Sisyphean nature of being a woman on their own one day. It’s also fine because awaiting those children when they got back was a different scene that elicited equally confusing reactions (more hysterical laughter than cathartic sniffles this time) but that will hopefully linger in their psyches until at least freshman year of college. Let me put it this way: If director Greta Gerwig can save one generation of young people from thinking that they need to be able to explain The Godfather—or sit there patiently while someone explains The Godfather at them—then she will have done her job. (Also, why is it Greta Gerwig’s job to advance the progress of feminism when the movies next door can simply be about men and their obsession with legacy?)
Barbie didn’t quite dismantle the patriarchy, but it may have put a small dent in its armor by making fun of it so much. Once Barbie and Ken travel to the real world to cure Barbie’s flat feet and thoughts of death (listed in order of importance), Barbie discovers that she hasn’t done as much for women and girls as she’d been led to believe, and Ken discovers the sweet, sweet smell of patriarchy. He’s wooed by its proximity to horses, attracted to his direct access to power and respect that comes simply by way of being a man; immediately, he decides to bring this delightful concept back to the formerly matriarchal Barbie Land. The Kens go from being wildly camp to being painfully realistic. From Kens to—all at once—men. Incredibly specific men. Men you’ve met before. Men you may not have realized, until they were hilariously reflected back to you by Barbie’s cast, are upholding the Mojo Dojo patriarchy one smug vinyl collection at a time.
There’s some serious, existential shit going down in Barbie, but my goodness, are they also funny about it. When a group of tweens calls Barbie a fascist and she cries out, “But I don’t even control the railways or the flow of commerce!” I nearly choked. But surely, no scene kept my theater laughing longer and harder than when Gloria, a group of revolutionary Barbies, and Allan (there are no repeats of Allan) realize they can upend the burgeoning Kensurrection by simply using the Kens’ own toxic masculinity against them. “It’s not about how they see us,” Gloria tells the freshly radicalized Barbies. “It’s about how they see themselves—Ken Land contains the seeds of its own destruction.”
Barbie is very much a film about being a woman (and/or doll) in the world, but being a woman in the world is often about navigating men in the world. It’s somehow our job to understand them even better than they understand themselves to get them to treat us better, respect us more, and stop telling us how to lift weights in gyms. It is very fun, and very cool, and we spend our lives trying to figure it out before we spend the rest of our lives trying to reject it. Maybe for now, we can all take a load off by just making a lot of jokes at masculinity’s expense? I dare any man who’s watching Barbie not to relate to at least one of the types of guys Barbie Land’s Kens rapidly devolve into. (For my part, I certainly felt nothing when one of Depression Barbie’s features was watching the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice for the 15th time. I felt NOTHING.)
If these niche stereotypes feel like indictments—they should! Let them wash over you. Feminism, even in Barbie Land, cannot center men’s comfort (unless it’s to lure them into a false sense of safety in order to overthrow them in Barbie Senate). I could have watched at least 20 more minutes of the kinds of Kens that immediately developed under the patriarchy: Just off-screen must have been the guy who keeps bringing up this little-known author he loves, Kurt Vonnegut, or the Ken who absolutely falls to pieces when he has a common cold, or the Ken who “looked everywhere” for the thing that you found in two seconds, or the Ken who’s offering you unsolicited career advice in a field you’ve been in longer than he has. Love that guy! But he didn’t make the cut. These are a bunch of the other kinds of guys, according to Barbie:
The Guy With a Podcast Idea
Yes, this guy comes up before the Kensurrection scene, and I may be stretching it to fit my own narrative here, but it’s my blog, and the Barbies and I are dismantling the Kens one guy at a time. So here goes: When Will Ferrell’s Mattel CEO explains to his underlings that a Barbie’s escape into the real world could have consequences more dire than anything they could possibly imagine, one of them thinks his absolute hardest and comes up with this: “Like … a podcast hosted by two wise trees?”
And to me? Hearing that come out of this guy’s mouth? That’s amore. Thank you, Greta Gerwig (and Noah Baumbach, if you helped), for putting my lived experience on film. Because I happen to be a woman who semi-frequently has to inform men of all types that part of my job is hosting podcasts, which inevitably leads to an oft-repeated conversation that I will show you only my side of and let you fill in the blanks:
ME: Oh, really, what about?
ME: Oh yeah, with your brothers?
ME: Uh-huh, and it would be about …
ME: Oh cool, just the things you guys talk about normally, but on a mic.
ME: Oh yeah, I agree, people would love that, it does sound like a unique twist on the medium, and yes, it really is that easy.
This is always a very fun conversation for me because it tells me that these guys are more interested in how they would hypothetically do my job than in how I do my job that I actually have. And I can now rest assured that they would also be more interested in how a tree would do my job—as long as the tree was a man.
The Guy Who’s a Self-Described Cinephile
I’m gonna guess that for guys at The Ringer, and guys reading The Ringer, and guys doing a Barbenheimer double feature, and any guys with a physical media collection, this one cut the deepest. And that’s why they went for it first in the montage of guys. The lowest-hanging fruit: the guy who wants to explain The Godfather to you, no matter how many times you tell him you’re all good on that front. After Issa Rae’s President Barbie has been deprogrammed and deployed as the next Barbie decoy, she uses the most surefire distraction tactic: telling one of the Kens she’s never seen The Godfather before—and she goes the extra mile by pronouncing it God-FATHER, like she’s never even heard the word spoken out loud before. And no Criterion Collection guy could let that slide. Ken quickly corrects her pronunciation, tells her that The Godfather is “a rich blend of Coppola’s aesthetic genius combined with Robert Evans and the architecture of the ’70s studio system”—information he has no idea she has any context for—and vows to start the movie over and talk through the entire thing, all for her enhanced enjoyment of The Godfather.
Just a few scenes before this, we had a tween ask her mom and a Barbie whether they were “Shining” each other while they shared memories, and this guy is gonna explain The Godfather? How very dare he.
The “You Don’t Know You’re Beautiful” Guy
There is simply nothing more fulfilling than when a guy feels that he is uniquely positioned to inform you of something that just might blow your mind: You’re actually really beautiful. And when he can be the first to discover it by removing the glasses that were making you less attractive to him—well, that’s a really empowering moment. For him.
The “Here, Let Me Show You” Guy
One of our longest-standing guys, the “Here, let me show you” guy used to have only one move in his bag: copping a feel while insisting that only he can show a woman how to hold a pool stick (or a golf club, or a tennis racket, or basically any athletic instrument) correctly. But now these guys can cop an intellectual feel, too, by approaching an unassuming woman at a coffee shop to show her how to use the Select tool in Photoshop that she’s already actively using, or offering her financial advice they heard on a podcast and wrote down in the Notes app on their phone, or giving her unsolicited writing advice on the internet. Love! That! GUY!!!
The Guy Who Does DuoLingo With a Mildly Uncomfortable Fervor
He’s not in the montage, but this is such a specific guy that I thought surely no one else knew about him—but he’s in this movie! Every time we see Gloria’s husband (played by America Ferrera’s real-life husband, credited only as “Esposo de Gloria” because feminism), he is loudly participating in a DuoLingo lesson or poorly (and even more loudly) attempting to use the Spanish he’s learned in said lessons. Which is kind of sweet when you think about how he’s trying to brush up on a second language that his wife and daughter both seem to speak. But it’s a little less sweet when it’s noted that his dedication to DuoLingo means he doesn’t even know or care that the same wife and daughter have disappeared to an alternate universe/imaginary land/secret town in Sweden. The number of friends’ husbands who are never not doing DuoLingo in the background of our FaceTimes … it has to mean something. What are they plotting? What are they planning? Why does a streak on an app hosted by a cartoon owl mean so much to them?! (Another stellar Barbie joke: That husband exclaims, “Si se puede!” to Barbie at the end of the movie, to which Gloria drolly cuts back: “That’s a political statement.”)
The Miscellaneous Guy’s Guy
There are so many tiny moments in the Ken Land montage that don’t necessarily draw the full picture of a guy, but they’re so specific they must point to some kind of niche guy out there somewhere, even if I haven’t personally encountered him yet. And I feel even more sure of this because, in preparation for this piece, my editor pointed out a number of times that Ken uses PXG golf clubs, which he described to me as “aggressively male golf clubs.” I have now watched this movie three times, and not only does this collection of words still not mean anything to me, but I never once noticed any such aggressively male golf clubs. (Imagine finding out your coworker is a golf guy this way! Put it in the next monologue!)
Within Ken Land, there are guys obsessed with giant trucks; guys who have only one leather recliner in their Mojo Dojo Casa House; guys who do that hand-snapping thing when they agree with their fellow guys; and of course, the guy who can’t just enjoy things in a chill way and has to get multiple expensive watches the moment he develops an interest in expensive watches. Plus—and this one isn’t even technically a guy—one of the Barbies explains her brief stint under the patriarchy as akin to “being really invested in the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League.” Take that, Warner Bros. Discovery—you’re a whole kind of guy!
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The Guy Who Swears You Have to Hear It on Vinyl
If I told you the Barbie movie mentioned Stephen Malkmus, would you believe me? What if I told you that a guy mentioning Stephen Malkmus from Pavement unprompted is a whole kind of guy? Just sit back, relax, and be lulled into a trance by the dulcet tones of … that guy talking over Stephen Malkmus from Pavement to tell you how Stephen Malkmus really channeled Lou Reed on this one. No, shh, you really have to listen.
The Guy Who Wants a Long-Term Long-Distance Low-Commitment Casual Girlfriend Who Magically Becomes a Bride Wife When He’s Ready
Just as Barbie is given two shoe options by Weird Barbie when it’s time for her to head out on her identity quest, only to find out that the Birkenstock was the only real option, when Barbie returns to her Dreamhouse to find that Ken has turned it into his Mojo Dojo Casa House, he tells her that she can return home only as his “bride wife” or his “long-term long-distance low-commitment casual girlfriend.” But with these guys, there’s only ever one real option, because even in Barbie Land, a long-term long-distance low-commitment casual girlfriend doesn’t just magically turn into a bride wife. Because a long-term long-distance low-commitment casual girlfriend guy won’t become a wife guy until he wants to, and that will have nothing to do with you, Barbie. (Plus, Ruth Handler never created Barbie to wed.)
The Guy With a Guitar
All of these guys culminate in the no. 1 guy. The most powerful guy there is. The guy who somehow proliferates through every generation of guys with the most unearned confidence, the least amount of self-awareness, the most enduring inability to read a room. If you open your mind to it, it’s actually kind of impressive. The absolute choking laughter of recognition that crackled through my theater when Barbie pretended to agree to be Ken’s LTLDLCCGF, only for him to immediately reply, “Come on in, I’ll play the guitar at you.” And it only got louder when those opening notes of Matchbox Twenty’s “Push” rang out …
Women know this guy; guys know this guy. I think guys who are this guy even know they’re this guy, but they don’t know how to stop being this guy. They don’t know how not to hold uncomfortable eye contact for four minutes with an initially willing participant who is now regretting ever sitting down on this concrete dorm balcony. Patriarchy is a prison, and if a man’s instinct to not pick up a guitar and sing at a woman who clearly does not know what to do with her eyes, hands, or face while he does so holds the key to escape, then we will well and truly never be free.
The song of choice from the guy who plays guitar changes not only with every generation, but with each passing year: My senior year of high school was scored by many deep, longing performances of “Crash Into Me” by the Dave Matthews Band. Just one year later, my freshman year of college featured nonstop serenades of a slowed-down acoustic version of Outkast’s “Hey Ya.” And yet Gerwig managed to choose the perfect song to convey the degree to which this performance was for Ken and not Barbie … it’s just so perfectly that guy. The final pan out to reveal that all the Kens in all of Ken Land are singing “Push” at their LTLDLCCGFs—again, I think of that little girl who made it back to her seat just in time for this scene and hope that maybe Barbie has saved a generation of young people from such torture.
The What Are You Doing on Your Phone Guy
Of course, for the Barbies, tapping into all of these guys is just a ploy to distract them and turn them against one another, and the strongest weapon in their arsenal is the inevitability that if a guy is expecting your attention and you suggest, even for a moment, that he does not have it—he will unravel entirely. What are you doing on your phone? Looking at an American Girl Doll meme your friend sent you, probably, or reading a tweet about what weird thing Bethenny Frankel did on TikTok today, or silencing an alarm that goes off at this time every day and you have no idea why and you can’t be bothered to change it. It’s not that serious!
But that’s where you’re wrong—in the court of guys, not giving them your full attention precisely when they want it is actually the most serious possible offense, punishable by a tantrum, jealousy toward an unknown and made-up party, and/or an entire Kensurrection, capped off by an original song sung by Ryan Gosling that will be in your head for the next calendar year.
The Guy Who Finally Figured Out How to Express His Feelings, but Made Everyone’s Life a Living Hell Along the Way
One of the least funny-haha but most funny-oh-no moments of this film is when Barbie explains that she’s not happy with Ken but still doesn’t want to hurt him, and Gloria has to remind her: “He took your house, he brainwashed your friends, and he wants to control the government.” These are, uh, the stakes when women take on the emotional burdens of men simply because they cannot figure out how to express themselves on their own. “I’m a liberated man, I know crying’s not weak!” Ken cries to Barbie later, clearly furious that he’s crying. The movie eventually makes its way to some sort of “We can all be equal in Barbie Land” ending, but let’s be real: Barbie still had to solve everything and hold Ken’s gorgeous, tanned hand through his first existential crisis, while she was out here at bus stops figuring hers out all on her own (with the help of a ragtag sisterhood, of course). But still, when, in the final moments of the film, the camera pans to Gosling’s Ken in his tie-dye “I Am Kenough” sweatshirt, you could have run a Barbie Corvette with the electricity that zipped through every finger in the theater as they (OK, we) immediately started googling where to buy that sweatshirt. I guess the Barbie movie didn’t solve the patriarchy or capitalism—but hey, at least we got to laugh at some guys.
