Daniel Gabriel Rossetti. Lady Lilith. 1866–1873

357 — A Critique of Barbie as a Text of Culture: The Failure of Eros Between Barbie and Ken as a Form of Existential Risk

In the Barbie world of the loss of polarity between masculine and feminine, the failure of eros leads to the diminishment of attraction and sex.

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [August 13th, 2023] given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay.

Edited by Elena Maslova-Levin. Prepared for publication by Jamie Long.

We are going to step into culture in a really shocking way

We are at a special moment.

I am about to fly tomorrow to Europe, to Belgium, to our 11th annual deep-dive Mystery School.

The Mystery School is, in many ways, the heart of the revolution. This is the place where we come together —

• to tell the New Story of Value,
• and to actually feel each other,
• and to go to the next level on the story.

You can of course join online, and there’s still about four places to join in-person. There’s going to be about 95 or 100 of us there, which is our maximum. We are basically all filled up, but we’re looking for just a couple, trying to fit up a couple of more people in rooms. It is an unbelievably important gathering.

And I just want to say one small thing.

One of the great revolutionary acts is to refuse to conduct your life only on Zoom. It’s fantastic —

• that we have this community,
• and that this is the heart of our revolution,
• that we meet every week, and we pour our hearts into the technology, and we animate the technology with Evolutionary Love, and we can feel each other through it.

That’s gorgeous, and we need it. The ability to use Zoom, to create an online community is — without question — part of the evolution of love. At the same time — and this is a very, very big deal — we also have to meet in person, where we have to find each other, where we can hug each other, where we can feel each other in person. We have to bring those two together.

We are going to do this deep-dive into Barbie and Oppenheimer, and it’s a a special moment. We are going to do this wild ride.

We are going to step into culture in a really shocking way.

We are going to start with Barbie, and we are going to go to Oppenheimer.

I am assuming lots of people have not seen Barbie. That’s okay. Barbie is one of the highest grossing movies in the world now. It’s in the top, I think, 25 of all time. It’s done a billion dollars. It’s now about to move around the world. It is a very fascinating movie that I want to really recommend that everyone see it. The reviews on Barbie don’t have the slightest clue what it’s about.

This movie has entered culture, and the Barbie doll is in culture. Barbie is the doll that women have grown up with for generations — around the world — playing with. The movie is a very subtle movie that gets it exactly half right and exactly half wrong. I want to ask everyone to take the time to see the movie afterwards, especially if you haven’t seen it.

This conversation will really open up a whole new way of understanding the movie — but I I don’t really care about the movie, we don’t have any obligation to understanding Barbie in the world —

• We are interested in understanding The Universe: A Love Story.
• We are interested in understanding Eros.
• We are interested in understanding what the new human and the new humanity is.

Three crises happening at the same time

Let us first notice that the meta-crisis is happening at the same time as the gender crisis.

Isn’t that interesting? The meta-crisis that’s happening around the world is happening at the exact same time where we have this massive crisis of what does it mean to be a man, or what is a man, and what’s a woman? The complexity and confusion around that issue is enormous. I would call it a gender identity crisis. That’s one.

Two, there is a crisis of sexuality: we don’t have a sexual story, we don’t have a sexual narrative. We have a crisis of desire.

And three, there is an actual meta-crisis of existential risk, in which we risk the death of humanity — or, through various forms of what we call TechnoFeudalism, we risk turning reality into a kind of Skinner’s box. (Skinner’s box is a box in which rats and pigeons are controlled by the controllers of the box, even though they’re unaware that they are being controlled.) These are two kinds of existential risks: the death of humanity, and the death of our humanity. We’ve talked about that many times.

Just notice that there are no coincidences in the Intimate Universe.

The fact that the gender crisis and the crisis of desire are happening at the exact same time as the meta-crisis is significant.

Both the movie Barbie and the movie Oppenheimer speak directly into this.

One of the things that we do in One Mountain is: we sometimes look at the texts of public culture.

• We looked at the Dune movie.
• We looked at Avatar for a number of weeks.
• We’ve looked at Don’t Look Up.

We’ve done very deep dives. I did, with my friend Aubrey Marcus, Guardians of the Galaxy, and we did one on The Lord of the Rings that hasn’t played yet. Reading the texts of culture is a very big deal.

And the two major movies in North America that are on their way to Europe, this summer, are:

• Oppenheimer — it’s about Robert Oppenheimer, who was the father of the atomic bomb, and who conceived the Los Alamos project.
• This Barbie movie, which blows the box office.

Both of them blow the box office away. I want to show that these two movies are deeply related, and they are related to the deeper issue, which is always Eros.

It is always the goddess.
It is always She.
It is always the Field of Desire.
So let’s start.

Feminine and masculine, level one: he is in charge

First, I just want to put a framework in place. I’m going to talk about three levels of relationship to our own feminine or masculine, to our own man or woman.

For now, I’m going to use the words man and woman synonymously with masculine and feminine.

I am obviously deeply aware of the fact that men are both feminine and masculine, and women are both feminine and masculine. There is a lot to say about that, and we are going to do a huge dive at the Mystery School into the new human and the new gender, and what that means. We are going to critique both gender ideology (the leveling of differences between men and women) and the old gender view. We are going to try and create, for the first time, a new view of gender. What’s Homo Amor’s view of gender? We are going to do that at the Mystery School, but for now, I just want to use masculine and feminine, and man and woman together. I am not going to make the distinction, to make it easy for our conversation.

Let’s see if we can do this.

Level one is the classical feminine — let’s call it level-one woman and level-one man. I want to identify ‘level-one woman’ as the classical woman of, let’s say, the fifties in the United States or in Europe, before feminism.

• Her job is to be somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother. It’s not enough to be somebody’s daughter, you’ve got to be somebody’s wife or mother. You’ve got to take care of them.
• You have to look beautiful. You have to look beautiful all the time, because that’s what you’re supposed to do.
• You’re supposed to never lose your cool.
• Your job is to be the perfect woman.
• And of course, you need to be recognized by a man. If you’re not recognized by a man, it hasn’t worked.

That’s the job of the feminine. I am not taking the time to give a full description, obviously. But this is level one: the job of the feminine is to seduce the man, to get a husband, in order to have a relationship, in order to have stability and security, in order to have children, in order to raise the next generation, or whatever it might be.

The man is, of course, the classical fifties man.

• He’s got to be a protector and a provider, and he is the person in charge — it is classical patriarchy in all of those senses.
• He needs to have a wife, clearly, and he clearly is moved by the feminine, but in the end, he is in charge.
• He is making the rules.
• He is being the doctor, and he’s being the lawyer, and he’s winning the Nobel Prize, and he’s the politician — and she is in a support role.

How does sexuality work between them?

Sexuality between them is: fundamentally, he is in charge.

We don’t even have any laws against sexual harassment, they don’t even exist. I mean, it’s so dramatic is that in many states in the United States and countries in Europe, marital rape — being raped by your husband — isn’t even on the books. It’s not even illegal, that didn’t even exist. You are supposed to submit to your man. No one had written anything about the G-spot. My dear friend Robin, who joins us often in One Mountain, her mom actually wrote the book, The G-Spot. She just passed at 102. She was a student of Reich’s. But this is before, we are at level one. This is before The G-Spot was written. It’s before feminine orgasm actually had a place that was dominant in the modern world.

(Let me be clear, in the ancient world, it was much different. I am talking about just the last 100 years, I am not talking about all of history. I am talking about the classic vision of the last 100 years.)

Feminine and masculine, level two: the disappearance of polarity

Then you go to level two. Level two, as we are going to see, is where the movie Barbie happens. Level two is: it’s not about the man is in charge, and the woman supports. It’s egalitarian.

• The man has become more sensitive and more kind, and he is reading a little Rumi, and he is more of a sensitive New Age guy, and he is a little more in touch, just a little bit.
• The woman has got a job, and she’s gotten into medical school, and she’s gotten into law school, and she’s winning some Nobel Prizes.

There is more of an equality between men and women, and men and women are partners now. That’s the ideal role — they are partners.

But at this level too, it gets a little complicated. This is where Barbie is going to start, and it gets complicated for a couple of reasons.

One, sexuality starts to disappear.

I am going to say something very wild and funny, and not so funny. In most liberal households, classical liberal households around the world, in most marriages, there is almost no sex at all. That’s just true. No one says it out loud, but basically, not much sex happening in marriages all over the liberal world. That’s just true.

Now, why?

It’s for a bunch of reasons. One is, there is no story of desire; there is no sexual narrative. That’s not our topic today.

But there is another reason, which is there is no polarity. There is this equal partnership, and everyone is working really hard at being equal. But there is no polarity, and this means there is not the play of magnets. When you have these two roles — he is the provider, and she is the homemaker — there is this polar balance between them. There is attraction and allurement, and then there is also autonomy. When you have these very different defined roles, there is what’s called polarity. My friend John Gray, back in 1990, wrote a lot about polarity, not in his Venus & Mars book, in a different book. He wrote several very big chapters on polarity. In the modern egalitarian couple, they are both working, or — track this — only she is working.

Stay with this for a second, my friends, because it’s also going to be key to the movie Barbie. A very, very important book, written in 2011, which conquered the American markets, is called The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, written by a woman — an Israeli woman, but classical Western liberal. She writes for Slate. It’s basically about men not having a job — manufacturing jobs ending around the world, women becoming more and more the primary breadwinners (about to cross the 50% line where most homes actually have a woman as a primary breadwinner, not a man).

Wow! The woman doesn’t have to be a homemaker. Contraception has created a split between children and sexuality. Women are working, they are getting jobs, they are employed — and women began to ask the question, why do we need a man?

• I can have sex when I want to, if I want to.
• I don’t need a man in order to survive, in order to make a living.
• The communication is not so good between us anyways, because they never understand what I am talking about, so why do I need a man?

That becomes this big question.

The polarity is gone. The protector/homemaker is gone. You’ve got this either equal relationship, or you have the woman as the primary breadwinner — so where is the polarity?

How does polarity happen?

It’s got to happen in a new way. Something new has to happen. Unless that something new happens, unless there is a new relationship, unless there is a new quality of relationship, the polarity disappears — and with the polarity, what else disappears?

Sexuality.
Isn’t that amazing?

It’s a combination of several things:

• First, sexuality is available outside of the home, so lots of people find ways to have sexuality outside of the home.
• Two, there is pornography, which changes the game. Instantly available pornography changes reality, not just on the male side, but on the female side, number two.
• Number three, which is a very big deal, the sense of desire to be sexing disappears — because sexing was part of this larger relationship, this larger polarity, this larger wholeness.

But as men now don’t have jobs — you have this huge class of men all over the Western world who have lost manufacturing jobs, and are not in the small 5% of the elite of lawyers and accountants and bankers and doctors (the overwhelming majority of men are not in that category) — they’re not being primary breadwinners, and women are saying, I am not attracted.

Just like men have often been attracted to the body of the woman, women have often been attracted to the body of the car. By the body of the car, I mean the capacity of the man to be a protector. Actually, many women objectify men, just like men objectify women. It works on both sides. When you don’t have the male protector, a lot of the objectification and the attraction actually disappears.

That’s level two.

We have this level two, in which it’s not actually feminist and cool to be a sexy woman in the same old way.

• You are not supposed to be seducing men.
• You are supposed to have an independent identity, to be independent of men.

However, in the second stage, in this classical feminism, becoming this new woman actually means becoming more like a man. I become more like a man —

• I’ve got a job,
• and I am not doing the hot sexual thing anymore,
• and I’ve got to hide my emotions because I am supposed to be in the workplace. And why am I getting all emotional?

And men don’t know who they are, because there are these huge millions and millions and millions and tens of millions of men all over the world who aren’t the protector. They are not the people who are earning the money. Unless I have a strong sense of identity from someplace else, who am I?

That’s our frame.

We haven’t gotten to level three. We are going to be talking about level three at the Mystery School.

It’s girls’ night every night forever!

With that in mind, we are going to go to Barbie.

Barbie opens with these perfect women. We are in Barbie land. (And who knows if we’ll get to Oppenheimer, but let’s at least try and do Barbie. Maybe we’ll do Oppenheimer next week; we’ll have that marriage happen maybe next week. Let’s go deep into Barbie right now.) And friends, you’ve got to see it this week if you haven’t seen it, because this is a cultural document.

So — Barbie opens, we are in the world of Barbie. In this Barbie movie, there are two worlds. There is the Barbie world and the real world.

This is shamanic and interesting. There is this very subtle connection between the real world and the Barbie world that takes place when a girl plays with her doll:

• If a girl plays with her doll in an ordinary way, the two worlds remain separate.
• But there are certain moments where the girl who’s playing with the doll can get in a certain kind of mood, where that mood somehow enters the doll, and then enters the doll world.

The worlds are supposed to be separate — but every once in a while, some travesty, some disaster, some catastrophe happens, and the worlds mix. That’s what is going to happen in this movie.

The movie opens with the Barbie world, and all the women look perfect, and the star of the movie is named Barbie. She is the Stereotypical Barbie doll. All of her friends are perfect, with perfect makeup and perfect hair, and perfect bodies — but they are in a women’s world. This is really important. They are in a women’s world, and they say: All the girls in the world are really supportive of Barbie because Barbie has allowed them to be doctors, and lawyers, and Nobel Prize winners.

Because Barbie begins as just a classical level-one woman. She seduces her man. She looks beautiful. That’s how Barbie begins, but then the Mattel toy company up-levels Barbie. Barbie begins to become all sorts of things. She becomes a doctor, and a lawyer, and a Nobel Prize winner. We are in Barbie land, and all the Barbies are really proud of themselves because they say, we are empowering women all over the world. We are showing them how to be doctors and lawyers and Nobel Prize winners. That’s Barbie.

Who is the girl? Barbie.
Who is the guy? Ken.

Ken has these perfectly ripped abs, just like me. (No, I’m just kidding. That’s not true. In my dreams.) Ken has got this perfectly ripped body, he’s gorgeous, and his shirt is, of course, always wide open. When we first meet Ken, the narrator says: Ken only feels good if he is in Barbie’s gaze, if Barbie looks at him.

What does Ken do? Ken has no job. Very interesting.

Barbie herself has moved from level one to level two. That’s what the movie says. The movie doesn’t say level one and level two, they don’t use these words, but she is first a classical 1950s girl, and then she moves to level two, where she is powerful. We see like eight scenes of Barbie being awarded a diploma, Barbie graduating from graduate school, Barbie becoming a doctor, Barbie being a law professor. Barbie has gotten to level two.

What about Ken? Remember Barbie and Ken?

Ken has got no job. Ken is not a lifeguard, Ken is not a lawyer, Ken is not a doctor. What does Ken do? Ken beaches. The word beach, beach as a verb.
Ken beaches, that’s what he knows how to do.
Ken beaches — that’s what Ken does.

Now, it looks cute in the movie — but when you begin to listen carefully, it’s actually pathetic and tragic.

Ken has no job. Barbie will look at Ken and she’ll smile at Ken. There are lots of Kens on the beach, and Barbie smiles at them, and looks at them — and when Barbie looks at them, they feel great. But then Barbie goes back and Ken says, can I come to your house tonight? And Barbie says, sure, because we are having a big girls’ party. Ken comes to the house, and Ken dances, all the different Kens, the men dance with the women — and then the women throw them out. Barbie says, it’s girls’ night tonight, and it’s girls’ night every night forever! Meaning, we don’t need Ken. Ken leans in, he is reaching for some sexuality — and Barbie is like, who are you? She doesn’t even know what sexuality is.

We are going to find out later, when Barbie and Ken go to the real world, and they have this conversation with the construction crew, Barbie says to the construction crew: Oh, me and Ken are very beautiful and we are very perfect, but we have no genitals. Because the Barbie doll has no genitals.

And what’s the point? The point is there is no sexuality happening. There is no Eros there. We are at this level-two place, in which men don’t have a role, and women are doing girls’ night forever. But the polarity has gotten completely lost.

It’s fascinating.

You have to go to the real world

Now stay close, it gets even more interesting.

There is no Universe: A Love Story at level-two Barbie. This is where culture is, this is the story that culture is telling.

There is no sense of polarity, no need to be a man/woman story. (When I say man/woman, man/man, woman/woman, let’s take all the LGBT thing for granted, although the Barbie movie — interestingly — skipped it. The Barbie movie just did man and woman, which was the bravest thing the whole movie did.) Basically, the movie stops at level two. There is no room for Ken and Barbie, they don’t have genitals.

Now, what happens? It gets completely wild. We are going to do deep cultural analysis, and it’s gorgeous.

Barbie is at the party, and then in the middle of this incredible dance number at the party, she says, you know, I’ve been thinking about death.

The music stops.

Thinking about death? Everyone stops.

I’ve been thinking about dying. Everyone stops like, oh my God, you’re thinking about dying? It ruins the whole thing, and then there’s this uncomfortable silence — and she says, and I am dying to dance. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief — it’s okay, we are dying to dance.

The dancing goes on.

There is this weird thing, this malfunction: she is thinking about death, and she can’t understand why.

Then, Barbie wakes up in the morning, and she is thinking about death again. Her breath isn’t good in the morning — and remember, she is called the Stereotypical Barbie. The Stereotypical Barbie is always perfect — her hair is always perfect, she always looks great, she’s always perfectly calm and perfectly fantastic. But she wakes up in the morning, and her breath is bad, she’s thinking about death again, and her feet are flat (meaning, they don’t go into high heels). She goes to the beach and she says:

• Oh my God, my feet are flat.

The Barbie dolls tell her:

• If you have flat feet, you’ve got to go to Weird Barbie.

Weird Barbie. There’s this one weird doll that got discontinued. You’ve got to go to Weird Barbie and talk to her. She knocks on the door of Weird Barbie, and Weird Barbie says:

• Oh my God, you’ve got flat feet!

And then she picks up her skirt and she says:

• Look, you have cellulite (meaning, your legs aren’t exactly perfect, you’ve got cellulite).
• Oh my God, that’s terrible, what am I going to do?
• The only thing you can do to save yourself is, there must have been some connection made between you and someone in the real world. That’s what’s going wrong. You’ve got to go there and break that connection, and if you break that connection, then your flat feet will be gone and your cellulite will be gone.

She doesn’t want to go to the real world, but she has no choice.

She gets in her little Barbie car, and she starts moving towards the real world.

Barbie doesn’t need Ken

She starts moving, moving, moving towards the real world. You’ve got to take a car, and a boat, and a plane, and a submarine, and a helicopter. It’s this long trip, cartoon trip — but as she starts the trip, she sees Ken in the back seat.

Ken has come with her. Because Ken loves her. You get this, friends? Ken has got no job, but Ken loves her, and Ken doesn’t even feel like a man if he is not in Barbie’s gaze. But he can’t say that, it can’t be done.

They begin to move to the world of real people.

They get to the world of real people, and they look. They get to Santa Monica in Los Angeles, Venice Beach in Santa Monica in Los Angeles. They are wearing these Barbie clothes — Ken’s wearing his Ken Barbie outfit, and Barbara is wearing her Barbie clothes. And there are all these cool LA people, and they look at them like you guys are crazy, you guys are completely crazy, so they change their clothes.

And then they realize this is weird: no one is thanking them for being Barbie and Ken, people are looking at them like they’re weird and crazy. They are a little devastated.

Then there is this construction crew I told you about. They start whistling at Barbie and making fun of them, and she goes over and says:

• Why are you guys whistling? I don’t understand, I am sensing a little violence in that whistle. And do you know how we are? We are built like this, we are always perfect; we have no genitals.

And the construction crew looks at them like who are you, you’re crazy.

Barbie and Ken go on their different journeys — each goes on an entirely different journey. I am not going to take you on the whole journey, but I want to jump to the end now.

What happens?

In the end, Barbie has to move beyond being Barbie, but she doesn’t quite get there.

Barbie has got to realize: Oh, poor Ken, he doesn’t have a job, he’s just dependent on me. She says to Ken, Ken, you’ve got to be willing to be Ken, just as Ken, which is great.

But it’s very clear that Barbie doesn’t need Ken. Ken embraces himself as being Ken, but he doesn’t know what that means. He says, Oh, I’m Ken — but Ken remains pathetic, he doesn’t have a sense of what it means to be a man. Barbie, in the very last scene in the movie, decides to stay in real people’s land.

The last thing that happens in the movie is, she goes into an office and she says: Oh, this is my gynecologist, women’s doctor (meaning, she is getting a vagina) — so the movie ends with Barbie reclaiming her sexuality and Ken not reclaiming his. Ken doesn’t know his masculinity. What Barbie does at the end of the movie is she reclaims her ability to be sexual, but not with any particular Ken.

That’s how the movie ends.

Ken is desperate for patriarchy

The journey in between is fascinating. It is one of the most fascinating journeys you can imagine, but it doesn’t get home. It doesn’t get to a place where Ken and Barbie have any real reason to come back together. In other words, we don’t get to level three. We get to exactly where culture is today: Ken realizes:

• I’ve got to have an identity as Ken, and not be dependent on Barbie.

But Ken says, I want to do patriarchy. Ken goes to the real world, and they tell them about patriarchy. He says:

• This is really cool, I like patriarchy. But I’m not a doctor, I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a professional, I’m not a Nobel Prize winner, so patriarchy doesn’t work for me so well (remember, it’s talking about the men who are in the manufacturing class). But I’m going to do patriarchy even without a job.

Does everyone get this? This is really deep. Ken decides in the movie, I am going to do patriarchy, but without having a powerful job, just because I am a man. Wow! Does everyone get how pathetic that is and how tragic that is? In other words, Ken is desperate to do patriarchy:

• I am in charge. Kens are in charge. But I don’t have a job, I haven’t run a successful business, I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a doctor, I’m not a successful accountant. I’m just doing patriarchy because I am Ken.

My friends, I want you to get the pathos of that and the tragedy of that. None of the reviewers have actually caught the tragedy of this. That is where the majority of men are in the world today. We want patriarchy to be going on — but we actually haven’t done the achievements of patriarchy, we are not even in the achievement class, in that 10%. We want it to be patriarchy just because I am a man, and I’m just going to embrace my Ken-ness.

The problem with that is, it doesn’t work —

• because I actually don’t have a Unique Self,
• and I am not Homo Amor,
• and I don’t have a new vision of relationship. There is no new vision of desire here.

There is no new narrative of desire. There’s no new vision of relationship, what we call role mate to soul mate to whole mate. It doesn’t exist, literally doesn’t exist. There is no narrative of desire. There is no sense of what I should be if I can’t be a lawyer, a doctor, a powerful person. What should I do? We have no idea. That’s number one.

Barbie sees no reason to have a man. Barbie doesn’t need him. She says: Oh, Ken, I’m so sorry that we had girls’ night all the time. You can have boys’ sometimes. Then he moves to kiss her and she says: Yo, go away, I’m not interested in that. But she goes to the real world, and she goes to the gynecologist to get a vagina — meaning I don’t need men for sex, I can do sex, I’m going to get my vagina. But why would I need a man for that (and certainly not a permanent man)?

Ken has this incredible line in the movie. He says to Barbie at the most poignant moment, I always thought this would be our house together.

There is not one drop of feminine empowerment in Barbie

There is a key moment earlier in the movie, where the men basically make themselves the men in charge, and all the Barbies — the Nobel Prize women, and the doctors, and the lawyers say:

• Forget the Nobel Prize, we just want to serve the man. Because we were so lonely having our Nobel Prize, and being lawyers and doctors. We’ll just serve the men.

All these accomplished women just go to serve the men, and then there’s this key figure in the movie who wakes the women up from that terrible idea.

Do you get what happens?

The women at level two get lonely. The women get lonely, and they can’t figure out how to get back into a relationship with the man — so they go back to level one. But then they realize it doesn’t work, they get woken up.

But what did they get woken up to?

Back into level two, without any level three, without any new vision of feminine desire. In other words, in the entire Barbie movie there is not one drop of feminine empowerment. This is supposed to be the great feminine empowerment movie, but there is zero empowerment. It’s empowerment of women to have sex like a man, meaning: I just have my vagina, but I don’t need men. I can have sex however and whenever I want.

• There is no need for there to be The Universe: A Love Story.
• There is no need for there to be relationship.
• I’m going to go back to being a doctor, lawyer, Nobel Prize winner.
• I’m going to go back to the real world, I’m going to embrace my humanity and my death, but why would I be in a relationship?

That’s actually exactly where it gets to. It does not get beyond that — because that’s where culture got.

This movie is supposed to be the great movie of feminine empowerment, but there is not one second of feminine empowerment in this movie — because feminine empowerment means you are empowered as a woman. To be empowered as a woman means:

Yes, I can be a doctor, for sure I can be a lawyer, because men and women can both be doctors and lawyers, but I also want to be a lawyer in a way that’s not the way a man is a lawyer. I want to be just as good a lawyer, but I want to bring in my feminine.

What is my feminine?
What does it mean to be a woman?

Why is it that there are anatomical differences between men and women, there are hormonal differences between men and women, there are obviously body differences between men and women? The world did produce masculine and feminine — so I don’t want to be a lawyer, doctor, Nobel Prize winner, and give up my feminine. I want to integrate my feminine.

So, there is no feminine empowerment.
And there is no masculine empowerment.

What does it mean to be a man when I’m trying? It’s pathetic. The men are trying to do patriarchy without a job. Do you get how pathetic that image is? Basically, it mocks men. There is not one good male hero in the movie. It’s filled with women heroes, which is why people say this is feminine empowerment. The heroes are all women, that’s true, but there is no vision of feminine empowerment. You’ve got women heroes, but they’re not being feminine. They’ve just become men. There is no integration, no new narrative of what it means to be the new woman.

Who is the level-three woman?

There’s no level-three woman, and there is no level-three man. The difference is that women still come out as heroes. In the movie, the women still are the heroes, and the men are actually tragic and pathetic. There isn’t one positive image of the man in the movie. We get to the Mattel boardroom in the movie. She goes to the real world, and she goes to the Mattel big office building, and they get to the office where all the board members are men. And it mocks all of the men, it’s a terrible vision of men. These are the patriarchy guys, and they are shallow, and they are superficial, and they are idiots. And there is this key woman in the movie, a woman and her daughter, they are the heroes — and then we meet her husband at the end of the movie, and he is an idiot.

Here’s what we got, I want you to get where the movie goes.
This is the major blockbuster hit. It takes us to level-two men and women.

• At level two, the woman is the hero. She has succeeded in being a man, but she hasn’t embraced any new dimension of the feminine. Even sexuality, she does like a man. There is no new experience of feminine desire, of feminine power.
• There is no vision of the masculine at all. There are no masculine heroes in the entire movie, which is exactly where we are in culture, where the feminine is almost identified with the good.
• The feminine is identified with the good. The feminine has no shadow. She doesn’t need a man.
• And the masculine is pathetic. He’s trying to do patriarchy without a job, essentially. This is an incredibly pathetic view of a man.

The one big action scene of men is men fighting with each other, where the women get the men to fight with each other. Since they can’t get women, they fight with each other, and there’s this huge, hilarious battle scene between the men fighting with tennis rackets — an insane, choreographed, very funny, and very tragic and pathetic scene.

The Dark Goddess of Oppenheimer

I want to invite everyone to see the movie this week. See Barbie, and see Oppenheimer. The other movie we are going to cover in the Mystery School is Guardians of the Galaxy. No one needs to do anything, but if you want to — and you would have a great week — see Barbie and Oppenheimer. But then, see the three episodes of Guardians of the Galaxy, one to three.

I did promise Oppenheimer and Barbie. I am not going to go into Oppenheimer now, I’m just going to say one thing. This is just a tease.

Who is the Goddess in the Oppenheimer movie? Who is She, who is the Goddess? There is a central figure who’s the Goddess in the Oppenheimer movie. The Goddess is Jean Tatlock, the communist woman that he has an affair with.

It’s the only nude scene, happens twice in the movie, and it’s a new way of doing a nude scene in a movie. It’s done really elegantly and beautifully. But she is the Goddess — and in the movie, the Goddess commits suicide. I want you to get this. You have to watch the movie knowing that she is the Goddess.

Jean Tatlock, a woman who was a communist in the 40s, who was very close to Oppenheimer. He wanted to marry her, she didn’t want to, so he gets married, but he remains with her. Even after he started the Atomic Energy Project at Los Alamos, she calls him and he goes to be with her for a night, then he refuses to see her again, and she commits suicide. A very complex story, but it’s very important. She’s the Goddess — both in her beauty, and she is also the Dark Goddess.

In every tradition, you have what’s called the Dark Goddess.

• Kali in Kashmir Shaivism and Hinduism is both light and dark. She is complicated.
• The Shekhinah in Hebrew wisdom is both the em nor’a, the terrible Goddess, and the beautiful Goddess.
• She is Lilith. She is a Lilith goddess. Lilith is this complex, deeply alive, deeply erotic, deeply intelligent, deeply sexual Goddess, and the man cannot quite hold her.

Jean Tatlock gets Oppenheimer in an enormous amount of trouble. He loses, in the end, his security clearance in 1949, because an attempt to take him down uses the Jean Tatlock story, and her suicide, and his visit to her.

The texts of culture: it’s all happening in me

Last night, I looked at about 20 reviews of Barbie and 20 reviews of Oppenheimer, and they are all — tragically — the superficiality of culture. They are just jokes. I apologize for being so harsh, but they are so superficial, and so pathetic, and so tragic.

When I say these are the right readings of Oppenheimer and Barbie (which I am saying), I am not saying that that was the conscious intention of the filmmakers. A movie becomes a text of public culture which is a Goddess text. This is Eros speaking. It doesn’t matter what the filmmakers were thinking. In other words, there is a power to the movie, which is way beyond the conscious intention of the filmmakers.

As I have shared with some of you before, when I spend a night with Lana Wachowski (who made The Matrix and V for Vendetta) and her partner, Karen, in Chicago, and we were reading the V for Vendetta and The Matrix movie, I said to Lana:

• I don’t care what you think about the movie, and the fact that you made it is very nice, but that doesn’t give you more authority than me. In other words, the fact that you made the movie doesn’t mean you’re right about what it means. It just means you know what your intention is. You don’t know what the movie is saying, you can’t make that claim.

And she said, that’s absolutely true. She completely got that.

Both Barbie and Oppenheimer are actually great movies. Oppenheimer particularly, but Barbie is a great movie in its tragedy, and it’s reaching for something. There is this desperation in it, and it comes out completely empty, but it captures — unintentionally — precisely what culture is.

In order for us to become Homo Amor, we need to begin to learn how to read the texts of culture, because these are actually sacred texts of culture, unintentional sacred texts, and so we need to know how to read them.

To sum up: watch Barbie and Oppenheimer. And if you can, see all three Guardians of the Galaxy. The Guardians of the Galaxy are incredibly important movies.

My friend Aubrey Marcus and I, we are about to start a movie channel at some point, and Aubrey challenged me. He said, what can you say about Guardians of the Galaxy? On Aubrey’s invitation, I did a deep dive into Guardians of the Galaxy for three nights all night, and I watched them and wrote to myself, maybe 60 or 70 pages, analyzing the scenes in Guardians of the Galaxy.

Now, why did I know that it would work? I knew it would work for a simple reason. Guardians of the Galaxy swept a certain part of culture. It swept 20 to 50–55 year olds, something like that. The senior boomers didn’t get it, but Aubrey’s whole crowd loved it. My friend Aaron, who’s a football guy, Aaron loved it. This whole world loved Guardians of the Galaxy — and I knew if everyone loved it, there must be something happening there that’s real. And it turns out that it’s fascinating.

But of course, none of the reviews get it. You’ve got to go deeper. When I say none of the reviews get it, I don’t mean that in an arrogant way. It’s just true. You be the judge after we do Guardians, you be the judge whether we got it at a whole different level or not. But it’s not because we are smart. It’s not about being smart, that’s not the point. The point is, you’ve got to feel into the inside, you’ve got to treat every dialogue with respect, and notice that it’s not the intention of the filmmaker, it’s what actually happens.

Guardians of the Galaxy — I am just going to give you one hint — completely changes our relationship to trauma. It changes our relationship to Unique Self. It changes our relationship to love, to Eros. Everything changes. It’s unbelievably important — this silly movie, which has a raccoon as one of its stars. Rocket the Raccoon, Ugis, is one of the stars, and Rocket the Raccoon turns out to be very serious.

If you really want to do it seriously, if you want to really challenge yourself to read cultures — this sounds like it’s easy, but it actually takes enormous energy and commitment to do anything well. If you do Guardians of the Galaxy, you’ve got to watch all three and trace the development of the characters through the three movies. If you can read these texts, you can actually become Homo Amor. In other words, by knowing how to read these texts and beginning to develop the Eyes of Love that can look at culture and understand the play, we can move to transform culture.

Because everything happening in Guardians is happening in me. That’s the thing.

It is all happening in me. If I cannot read it in Guardians, I cannot read it in me.

I can go to a therapist from today till tomorrow, believe me, the therapists are the people who are reading Barbie exactly at that level-two way. It’s a therapeutic culture that created Barbie. It’s tragic.

Being able to read Barbie is not a cute assignment. It’s a deep Vipassana practice — actually being able to read the text of culture. Barbara Marx Hubbard and I loved to talk about movies, and in our Holy of Holies, I would do movies with Barbara — go over a movie and analyze a movie. These are really, really crazily important texts of culture.

We are just getting started. Oh my God, love mad, friends, Homo Amor to Homo Amor. The revolution has got to be super serious — but also, we’ve got to laugh, we’ve got to celebrate along the way, so don’t forget the popcorn. Mad love from here in Bretton Woods.

And maybe the last sentence is, Bretton Woods was to create a new world order that failed. It lasted till maybe 1972 when Nixon unhooked the dollar from certain standards, and the whole Pax Americana that kept the world together for 40 to 50 years is falling apart, so we need to create a new world order. In other words, the New World Order established after World War II has actually collapsed. The Bretton Woods’ order has collapsed.

Here we are in Bretton Woods again, and we’re here to create a new world order. We are here to create a new world, and we are here to create a new human and a new humanity. We’ve come back to Bretton Woods to get it right.

Mad love, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. What a crazy, crazy delight to be with you!

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