Franz Marc. Small Composition — II. 1914

364 — Reading Barbie as a Text of Culture: The Tragic Rejection of the — Universe: a Love Story — Part 2 Reality Is Relationships

Ken represents a longing towards shared identity without individuation (fusion), Barbie is pure individuation

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [October 1, 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.

Summary: This week, we continue reading Barbie as a text of culture. The starting point of the movie is the triumph of second-wave feminism, the liberation of the feminine from the constricting social role of the past, but it is marred by Barbie’s complete alienation from the truth of the Universe: a Love Story. This truth of Reality as relationship and evolution of relationships is pathologized and put in the mouth of patriarchy. Intimacy is shared identity in the context of (relative) otherness, but while Ken represents a longing towards shared identity without individuation (fusion), Barbie is pure individuation, pure otherness. Therefore, there can be no intimacy between them, no Barbie and Ken, even though Reality is Barbie and Ken — circles and lines — all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.

A New Story of Value and implicit stories told by culture

What are we doing?

We are articulating the ground of a New Story of Value rooted in First Principles and First Values — a Universal Grammar of Value as a context for our diversity — in response to the meta-crisis. There is a list of about fifteen crises that generate a cascading risk landscape, which we call the meta-crisis. We call it the second shock of existence — the realization of the potential death of our humanity.

• The first shock of existence is — at the dawn of history — the realization of individual death. It presses us into new gnosis, into new knowledge, into culture, into the best possibilities of what it means to be a human being. The first shock of existence begins the story of the evolution of love at the human level.
• The second shock of existence is the realization of the existential risk. Risk to our existence, the death of humanity, or the potential death of our humanity, when we enter into an authoritarian dystopia.

We are a community of revolutionaries, taking responsibility to evolve the source code, like da Vinci and his cohorts did in the Renaissance. There were about a thousand people involved in the Renaissance, and they said, we’re going to take responsibility. Most of Florence was not taking responsibility, but there was a small group who said: Okay, we can see around the corner, we can feel the gravitas of Reality pulsing in us, we are going to step up.

We are the quality of Eros.
We are the voice of She.
We are the evolutionary impulse in-person, individually and in this community, in this Unique Self Symphony.

We are not doomers, who say: we have violated all the planetary boundaries, there’s nothing we can do, it’s over. Nor are we the deniers, like most of the world, who can’t hold the possibility of apocalypse, and turn away from that radically. We call it pessimism, and we deny it, we bypass it. Then there are the dominators, who want to dominate the system, because otherwise it’s going to fall apart. We are saying, no. The doomer version, the denial version, the domination version — we can’t go there. Those are devastating. What we need is a new dawn.

A new dawn of what? A new dawn of desire.

A new dawn of desire means a New Story of Value, which answers three questions:

• Where are we?
• Who are we?
• What ought we be doing?

Those are the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism that are at the core of a New Story of Value. A New Story of Value means a New Story of desire, because desire implies value, and clarified desire equals value.

For a concise summary of what we’re doing here, check out What is One Mountain? What are we doing here? (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) and Love or Die.

One of the foils we are using to tell the New Story of Value is exploring the way culture tells stories through movies. In order to tell the New Story of Value, we need to tell it in response to the implicit stories that are being told today in culture. We’ve looked at about ten movies in the last couple of years, and the one we’re looking at right now is Barbie. (We did week one Barbie last week.)

We are going to use Barbie to articulate, more sharply, more clearly, the New Story of Value, but this is also a mini-course on how to read texts of culture (which is not available anywhere else).

We need to be able to become the new human. We need to move from homo sapiens to Homo amor — the new human and the new humanity.

We need to be able to do sensemaking, and sensemaking is the ability to make sense of Cosmos, because Cosmos lives in me.

• I can only do that if I know how to read the texts of my own interiors and if I know how to read texts of culture.
• I can only do that if I have a story of value — the First Principles and First Values that allow me to make sense of what’s happening around us.

We are in a time between worlds and a time between stories. We are reading texts of culture in order to evolve the very source code of culture, which I believe — based on everything I know, having worked on this 19 hours a day for last 20 years — is the only way to respond to the meta-crisis, and the alternative is suffering of unimaginable dimensions for generations.

THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE
Barbie is the most dangerous movie ever made. Not dangerous 
in a good way. Not in the way of Xunzi who writes: I came to 
speak dangerous words, I ask only that you listen dangerously. 

Barbie has one message: there is no love story. Barbie and Ken 
are an ontological illusion. Einstein wrote, separateness, the 
separate self, is the great illusion. Culture claims through
Barbie that the love story is an illusion; only separation is real. 

Barbie is wrong. There is a love story. Barbie and Ken love 
each other desperately, Barbie and Ken need each other, and
Barbie and Ken are fully unique and autonomous. The great 
contradiction of autonomy and communion is resolved in 
love Ken and Barbie, and Reality is Ken and Barbie, Barbie 
and Ken — all the way up and all the way down the 
evolutionary chain

Barbie Land: we’ve got it all worked out

Barbie opens with this scene where you see Barbie in a bathing suit, the original doll — and then we are told that Barbie has evolved. Barbie went from being the classical level-one Barbie (a housewife, a beautiful woman raising the family) to integrating the second-wave feminism, claiming of the beautiful and gorgeous and intrinsic role of the feminine in all dimensions of society.

The first wave of feminism is the early suffrage, the very first feminists both in Europe and in America in the mid-19th century. The second-wave feminism explodes in the early 60s. Betty Friedan writes The Feminine Mystique, and feminism explodes. All of a sudden, Barbie is everything: she’s a doctor, and she’s a lawyer, and she’s a gardener, and she’s winning Nobel Prizes, and she’s an entrepreneur. There is this sense that now we have equal rights and everything is solved, a utopian sense that we’ve got it all worked out.

That’s how the movie opens.

We meet a woman who is called Stereotypical Barbie. She is the protagonist of the movie. She is perfect, she is accomplished, she is smart, she is elegant, she is poised — and as we noted last week, none of that is for Ken. That’s just who she is. She is the second-level integrated feminine who has claimed a lot of her potential capacities that had been split off in culture.

And yet, we have the fragrance that she is also stepping out of her relationship to Ken. By Ken, I mean the very fact that there is a love story at all, the very fact that relationship matters. She is in her own place, and she’s got it all worked out.

They are all living in Barbie Land. Barbie Land is the world of ideas. It’s the world of what I would call platonic forms, if you will. Plato has this idea that there is the purified, clarified form, the structure, the clear idea. If you just embody those clarified forms, then everything works out very well. The more you are dissociated or alienated from those forms, the more things break down. But of course, Plato and Barbie Land didn’t account for the complexity of the world, the messiness of the world, the contradictions in the world, the experiences in the world that actually can’t be dealt with through Plato and the platonic forms.

That’s how the movie opens. There is this beautiful scene in the beginning of the movie, where one of Stereotypical Barbie’s friends says: Oh, for me, logic and feeling work really well together, and there is no contradiction at all, and my ability to fully experience my feeling doesn’t diminish my logic, and my logic doesn’t diminish my feeling, they are in complete and perfect balance.

It is an idealized world in which everything fits, and everything is whole, and everything is the way it should be.

We are going to start from there.

Let’s take a look at a clip. This is a clip that we looked at last week, and I want to look at it again a little more deeply.

Lines and circles — all the way up and down the evolutionary chain

We have talked before about a structure called lines and circles. It basically means, as we began to unpack last week, that there are line qualities and there are circle qualities in Reality. Lines and circles are geometric structures of Reality itself. Lines and circles are inherent in the structure of Reality, all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.

A scientific way of talking about line and circle might be attraction and repulsion.

• Attraction: I’m allured towards, I’m drawn towards, I want to be in the circle with you, I want to be drawn towards you, we want to create communion together.
• Repulsion: get out of my space, I am independent, I am autonomous.

Autonomy and communion, or allurement and autonomy, are another way of talking about lines and circles.

There are about ten qualities of line and ten qualities of circle, and each quality has a light expression and a shadow expression. Line and circle is phallus and yoni, but phallus and yoni is a human expression (although it started earlier in the mammalian world, but ultimately it gets very distinct in the human world). That’s an expression of a deeper quality in Cosmos.

• The quality of line engenders in men. Not only in men, but there is a particular quality at a certain moment in time, there is an intense quality of line that lives within the masculine. At certain moments in time, it gets more intense, and at other times, it’s less intense, but there are strong line qualities that live in the masculine. They live in the feminine too, but are often more pronounced in the masculine.
• Circle qualities engender in the feminine. Some of that engendering is cultural, and others pieces of that engendering are essential.

In other words:

• Line and circle are qualities of Cosmos, they exist all the way down the evolutionary chain — the world of matter, the world of life, and the world of self-reflective human mind.
• In the human world, they engender in men and women, with a primary engenderment of line qualities in men, and a primary engenderment of circle qualities in women. But all women have line and circle qualities, and all men have line and circle qualities.
• Some of the line and circle qualities in the human realm are purely cultural, pure social constructions, while others are essential qualities that live more essentially in men and women.

Why?

Well, because what we call gender is both a social construction and it also has a dimension that’s real, that lives inside of men and women. That’s why there is a hormonal uniqueness to men and women, and there is an anatomical brain structure unique to men and women. There is a male brain and a female brain; there is a male hormone structure and a female hormone structure — those are both real. There is lactation: women create milk, they have breasts, they breastfeed, they have wombs. They have qualities of nurturance and caring that are uniquely available in that feminine form. Men have greater upper body strength; they don’t have the risk of miscarrying during childbirth, because they’re not doing childbirth. There are obvious objective essential distinctions — and that’s just a starting point.

There is also what we now know as neuroplasticity. It means that even anatomical brain structures can gradually shift, transpose, and evolve. While we might begin with a male and female brain, for example, both the male brain and the female brain evolve. The male brain might absorb more and more circle qualities, and the feminine brain might absorb more and more line qualities.

So —

• we have essential differences between men and women — there’s a different quality to the feminine and masculine. Let’s call it Hawaii and New York. Hawaii: feminine, New York: masculine. They are different qualities. Bali and London, they are different qualities. We know those qualities are different, they are the sensual Field of Eros that engender in these two ways.
• And yet, there is no sharp distinction. We are more than just men and women. We are some unique combination of line qualities and circle qualities. We are not just men, we are not just women — we are a unique gender, a unique interpenetration of line and circle qualities.

That was a very, very short summation of a huge piece of the New Story of Value.

Ken is acting out the shadow of the line quality

Now, with that in mind, we go to that clip that we just saw.

What do we see?

Among the qualities of line —

• Line thrusts forward, line competes.
• You are either higher on the line or lower on the line. Line creates hierarchy.
• Line is always: I am on this side of the line, you are on that side of the line.
• It distinguishes, in very beautiful ways, and analyzes. It makes decisions.
• It moves forward, it’s directional.

Its shadow quality would be drawing a line in the sand, as we literally just saw in that clip, and fighting over nothing, just in order to express my desire to distinguish myself from you. Not a real distinction, but a false distinction. Not a real Eros of distinction, but a false arbitrary distinction.

In this beginning scene, we see Ken acting out the shadow of the line quality. He is saying, I’m going to beach off against you. Last week, we analyzed in depth the scene, a little later, when he smashed into the wall. We talked about this in terms of the hero, and the critique, the undermining, the mocking of the very notion of hero.

Now I just want to look at the shadow line quality. Ken is going to have a fight, with this other Ken persona, this other man on the beach. What are they fighting about? Nothing. It’s a shadow line quality.

Then the feminine comes in. Barbie separates them. You absurd dumb men. She doesn’t say it out loud, she smiles. But it’s obviously an absurd argument. The only person who is unique, the only vague hope for a future is this minor character (like a minor character in Shakespeare), Alan, who says there is just one of me. Alan is this vague hope for a new possibility that never gets played out in the movie. We are going to meet Alan later.

The Universe: a Love Story in the mouth of patriarchy

But what essentially does Ken say? He says, and the narrator says, and this is a theme that runs through the movie, Ken says this again and again at different key points in the movie:

I only exist in Barbie’s gaze. When Barbie looks at me, I exist.

After Ken smashes into the wall mindlessly, trying to attract and allure Barbie’s gaze, what’s the first thing that he said? He needs to be seen in Barbie’s gaze.

The movie mocks that. That’s the male expression of the first-level feminine that makes herself beautiful only to be seen in the male gaze. The critique of the male gaze at level-one feminine, where I dress up to attract the man, to seduce the man, perhaps in order to gain security, or because in some sense, I feel like I don’t fully exist outside of the male gaze. There is an enormous feminist literature on interrogating and critiquing the tyranny of the male gaze. That level-one feminine is now transposed to Ken, who is expressing the same shadow of the level-one feminine, but this time on the masculine side. We talked about that last week.

Is Ken totally wrong?
He is not.

There is the pathological version of codependency, where I can only locate myself in your gaze. That’s one pathological version of codependency: I don’t exist outside of your gaze.

However — and here, let’s open our hearts, let’s dive in — it’s also true. There is also a beautiful and gorgeous realization that, in some sense, I literally don’t exist without your gaze.

I don’t exist unless you’re placing your gaze on me.
You are the air I breathe, and I flower and I bloom through your gaze.

That’s the nature of Eros, and that nature of Eros is not merely a human construction. It’s the nature of Reality. What the movie is doing is putting the belief in The Universe: A Love Story in the mouth of patriarchy. Ken is going to gradually incarnate patriarchy throughout the course of the movie. In the beginning, he’s just shadows or remnants of patriarchy, he’s not there yet. He’s going to incorporate patriarchy in a greater and greater, and more and more dramatic, fashion.

Ken, who’s going to later incorporate patriarchy, is expressing the belief in The Universe: A Love Story — but in pathological form. This is a pathologized version of The Universe: A Love Story.

What does The Universe: A Love Story say?

The Universe: A Love Story says: all of Reality is relationships, and there is no Reality that exists independently of relationships, which means there is no such thing as a thing.

If you read Pauli, Plank, Schrödinger — the founders of quantum mechanics — you get this sense that they understand, in a very profound way, that there is no such thing as a thing. That’s what modern physics tells us, the new physics (which is about 100 years old). Physics has taken many deeper directions, but the ground of the new physics stands, and the ground of the new physics says there’s no such thing as a thing.

The world is not just matter. Matter itself is a set of relationships. It’s a set of allurements.

We call it matter because we need to give it a name. We call it an atom, a molecule. An atom is the building block of matter, but what is an atom?

An atom is a set of allurements and autonomies. It’s a line and circle relationship — because Reality is Eros, and Eros is neither line nor circle. Eros is the unique dance between lines and circles. It exists between protons and electrons, which come together in that relational structure in which they can actually feel each other. They can, if you will, see each other. They recognize each other. There is intimacy between subatomic particles.

No intimacy without individuation, no individuation without intimacy

Intimacy means something very specific.

Let us start with the intimacy equation, one of the interior science equations of the New Story of Value:

Intimacy = shared identity in the context of (relative) otherness + mutuality of recognition + mutuality of pathos (feeling) + mutuality of value + mutuality of purpose.

• we create shared identity — we don’t actually exist without each other;
• there is mutuality of recognition: we recognize each other, we see each other;
• from seeing each other, recognizing each other, we feel each other. We have mutuality of pathos.
• We have a shared Field of Value together,
• and that creates a shared purpose.

The realization that Reality is relationship means that, in some sense, the proton and the electron exist fully only in relationship to each other. You can’t actually tease them apart. An atom is this place in which proton and electron gaze on each other, and that gazing, that mutuality of recognition, generates the atom. They feel each other, and they have a shared value, and their shared value is they both want to create something new, which is called an atom. That’s their shared value, their shared Eros, which allows them to have a shared purpose.

In the actual nature of Reality, Reality is Barbie and Ken. Ken is pointing to something true. He’s saying: no, actually, I don’t exist outside of Barbie’s gaze. But it’s a pathological version of that truth, because he is looking for fusion with Barbie before he is individuated.

Intimacy means shared identity in the context of otherness. Ken has lost the second part: he doesn’t have a sense of being Ken. That’s one of the things that the movie correctly points to:

• Ken needs to individuate, he needs to become Ken.
• Barbie needs to individuate, she needs to become Barbie.

That’s a correct understanding in the movie.

But they need to individuate in order to create intimacy, because intimacy means that there is no Barbie without Ken, and there is no Ken without Barbie. And yet, there is not just Barbie-Ken. There are Barbie and Ken who create not fusion, Barbie-Ken, but union — Barbie and Ken, Ken and Barbie — a larger whole.

The movie, paradoxically, gets a dimension of the intimacy equation (intimacy equals shared identity in the context of otherness):

• Ken ignores the otherness.
• Barbie is pure otherness.

For her, Ken is a joke. She is nice to Ken, and she is polite to Ken, but she is mocking Ken. Oh Ken, you’re a beautiful hero, look how beautiful you beach — but it’s not real, as we are about to see in the next clip. She is completely alienated and dissociated from any sense that her identity is in any way bound up with Ken.

She is purely Barbie.

Ken doesn’t have a sense of being Ken. Ken has to individuate — but we individuate in order to create a larger union. The only true individuation is in the context of a larger union. The only mature individuation is the context of a union. I’ve got to individuate as a Unique Self, but my uniqueness is not just my being a separate self. I am a unique expression of this larger Field, this larger communion. By individuating uniquely, I can then create, with you, a new, unique, larger union and a new intimacy.

Reality is the evolution of relationships

The movie is mocking the notion that I only exist in your gaze. It is expressing this notion in pathological terms.

• Level one is the pathological version. Pathological version is a fused identity: there’s no me without you, there’s no you without me. There is no me at all. That can’t be true. If I am only I because I am seen by you, and you are only you because you are seen by me, then I am not I and you are not you. There’s just fusion. We need to individuate.
• Level two is: we individuate. No, no, we are not just fused. We are individuated. I don’t want to be fused with you, I want to be in some sort of partnership with you — or I don’t need you at all. I am individuated, I am separate from you. That’s what Barbie is saying: there is no love story, I am just Barbie. There’s this realization at level two that intimacy can’t just be level-one shared identity, it needs to be level-two intimacy: shared identity in the context of otherness.

But then if you read the intimacy equation more clearly, it says intimacy = shared identity in the context of (relative) otherness.

It’s not absolute otherness: we are part of the same Field. We actually don’t exist independently of each other, we don’t exist independently of the larger whole, and we don’t exist independently of unique relationships that take place within the larger whole.

In other words, Reality is not made up of things. There are no things in Reality. All things are relationships. Reality is, at its core, relationships. That’s what Reality is.

1. Reality is relationships.
2. Reality is evolution.
3. Reality is the evolution of relationships.

That’s the nature of Reality.

Ken is actually pointing to a truth, but the movie mocks that truth.

What’s the truth?

I don’t exist independently of your gaze. Without mutuality of recognition between us, there is no me.

Ken gets that, but he gets that in a pathological version. He knows the truth, but he doesn’t quite know how to articulate it. He doesn’t know how to be Ken, and then say to Barbie: Oh my God, I’m now going to be Ken, and then from that place of being Ken, I’m going to create this shared intimate communion with you.

He doesn’t know how to do that, and Barbie doesn’t know how to do that. Neither Ken nor Barbie know how to get to level three, which is intimate communion in the context of individuated Unique Self: we are Unique Selves coming together forming a unique We. We are intimacy — shared identity in the context of relative otherness. That’s real intimacy. They haven’t gotten to that yet.

The movie stops at pathologized versions of level two, because that’s where culture has stopped.

Before we take the next step, I want to say one more thing. Ken says I’m going to beach off.

What does beach off sound like? It sounds like I’m going to beat off. It’s this male masturbatory moment — but not in its beauty. It’s not the beauty of a masculine self-pleasuring, because the masculine has lost its own access to the beauty of its self-pleasuring, much like the feminine has.

Self-pleasuring is an act of enormous beauty. It is being madly in love with the Field of Reality that lives in you — but that’s not available. I’m going to beach off — it’s got this sense of degradation.

It’s this line quality in its shadow form.

It’s this desperation to feel alive by drawing an arbitrary line in the sand, which is often what male masturbation becomes. Pornography began as a structure to allow for male masturbation, but not in its beautiful sense, not in the beautiful sense of self-pleasuring. It’s just a subtle play in the movie on beach off and beat off that plays in the background.

Kiss is at the very heart of Reality

Now let’s go look at the next clip.

That is a brutal scene.

Ken tries to kiss Barbie. Why is he trying to kiss Barbie?

Because as the great Christian mystic Meister Eckhart almost said (I’m paraphrasing him), Reality is kissing itself all the time. Or, as the interior sciences in Hebrew wisdom say, Reality is sod ha-nishikin: it’s the secret of the kiss.

It is the kiss that’s at the very heart of Reality.

He leans over to kiss her. Why does he lean over to kiss her? Because he is messed up? Because he is pathological? No! Because he is The Universe: A Love Story in person.

Is he leaning over in order to abuse her, to sexually harass her? No, he is yearning.

As my dear friend Warren Farrell points out in his writing, the masculine — in the way that culture is structured — risks rejection 500 times when the masculine moves towards the feminine. The masculine has to take risk after risk after risk, and he details around twenty five different moments in which the masculine can be rejected. All of that is encapsulated here, there is incredible vulnerability. He is reaching forward, and what’s the look on Barbie’s face? What are you doing? She is not in the Field of allurement. — because Barbie is saying, there is no love story.

The movie is pathologizing the sense that there is a love story. We pointed out a couple of ways that it happened last week. It is pathologizing the kiss, which is the core of Reality.

What does Ken say? He says, could I stay overnight? And she says, why, why would you stay over?

There is nothing for us to do.
There is nothing between us.
There is no shared identity.
There is no yearning that’s real.
There is no longing that participates in the Field of Eros.
There is no Field of Eros.
There is no Field of allurement.
There is no Field of Value.

This is what we said last week, when we talked about ChatGPT-4. When you ask ChatGPT-4 — which is an expression of machine intelligence, an oracle summarizing where culture is — it tells us that value is not real, and that love as a value is not real. It’s a social construction. It’s made up. There is no Universe: A Love Story.

What does that mean? There’s no girlfriend and boyfriend. That very structure doesn’t actually exist for Barbie, other than as an artificial social structure when she says to Ken, in the first scene we saw, you are so brave, after he has idiotically smashed into the barrier, in order to obsessively, pathologically gain her gaze, in a tragic sense.

• A kiss can be part of the polite social convention, but there’s no ontology of the kiss.
• There is no ontology of Eros.
• There is no ontology of girlfriend and boyfriend.

She says, you can go now. Who can feel the rejection in that?

Then she says, it’s Girls’ Night, and then she says, every night is Girls’ Night. And then she says, every night is Girls’ Night forever.

Forever is a quality of eternity.

Falling in love means I am blown away by your beauty, I can’t live without you.

I don’t mean falling in love in the romantic sense of we are gonna get a U-Haul and move in together — there is a much wider sense of falling in love. I can fall in love with 30 people, with 30 men and 30 women. There are ways in which we have a much smaller circle of people that we really fall in love with. Maybe it’d be one person, maybe two, maybe three; there are different levels of falling in love. We were doing a major event in 2014, and our Board Chair then, who has been a dear friend over the years, John Mackey, who founded Whole Foods, turned to me and I turned to John, and we said, I am in love with you.

Falling in love means I don’t have identity without you. We have shared identity in the context of otherness, for real. It’s deep, and it’s real. There are many different levels of falling in love, but when you really fall in love deeply, you say, oh my God, forever, forever!

Falling in love has a quality of forever. And in the movie, forever has been hijacked out of a love story. Not intentionally, the writers aren’t doing this intentionally; they’re not philosophers taking intentional philosophical stance. Culture speaks unconsciously through the pens of the scriptwriters — they say, Girls’ Night is forever.

There is only a narcissistic I, a neutered I.
There is no Eros.
There is no girlfriend and boyfriend.
There is no kiss.

Barbie cannot say I love you.

And as she walks away, what does he say? He says, I love you too. What does I love you too mean here? It means she doesn’t know how to say I love you.

I love you too is placed in the mouth of this pathological emasculated masculine — who is caricaturing the masculine, not embodying the masculine. All he can say is, I love you too. He is a caricatured version — but he’s actually reaching for something real. But she can’t say it, it doesn’t exist for her.

Stereotypical Barbie cannot say I love you.

Stereotypical Barbie is — in these three levels of the masculine and feminine — is feminine level two, who has asserted her autonomy and no longer has any sense of needing a man.

At level one — in the healthy forms of level one — there is a sense that men and women need each other. There is some polarity between men and women, there is some sense that we are playing different roles and we need each other.

We correctly want to liberate ourselves from the constriction of those roles, so we go to level two. And in the classical level two in culture — I am not talking about the movie now — there is the sense in which women individuate, which is healthy: they break the tyranny of the feminine role at level one. But then they get to this new place, which is, why do I need a man, what do I need you for? There is no love story. Wow, that’s tragic!

And the masculine at level two feels like, who am I? I knew what it meant to be a hero when I was the primary breadwinner. But now, in so many houses across the world, the man is not the primary breadwinner; less and less men are primary breadwinners.

What does it mean to be a hero?

Less and less men are heroes in war, thank God — but what does it mean, to be a hero?

Who am I?

When masculine sexuality is demonized, when the essential nature of the masculine is portrayed as inherently brutal by much of second-wave feminism, I don’t even know what it means to be a hero. I am completely lost — so I’m going to be a hero by beaching, this arbitrary mocked version of the hero.

And yet, Ken is holding this longing for the love story.

The movie is placing that longing in the persona of Ken, who’s going to be fundamentally mocked throughout the movie. Ken is never going to be redeemed in this movie. He’s going to have certain moments where we have some sympathy for him, but Ken will not be redeemed in this movie.

Doesn’t that just break your heart?

Join weekly Evolutionary Sensemaking with Dr. Marc Gafni every Sunday in One Mountain:

Join Dr. Marc Gafni and the entire community in an evolutionary celebration this and every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths. Click here to register for free.

Evolutionary Spirituality | One Mountain Many Paths