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Barbie Isn’t Anti-Men — It’s Anti-Toxicity
Patriarchy does damage to us all, and Barbie (2023, dir. Greta Gerwig) clearly depicts that.
We went to see Greta Gerwig’s Barbie at the weekend and I was honestly surprised by how much I engaged with it — it’s a fun, entertaining flick, but where it really took me by surprise is in the three-dimensionality and nuance it applied to the male-female divide in the film, and especially the care it extends to its male characters.
As a gay man and especially as a trans one, I’m often left a little cold when it comes to some films’ explorations of gender dynamics — they often end up simplifying gender roles to a simple binary where men and women exist as homogenous blocks of society, assuming all men are masculine, all women are feminine, and assuming that all of them are cis and straight.
Barbie is refreshing for a few reasons — there aren’t many films where the titular female character proudly proclaims she hasn’t got a vagina — but one thing that really stood out to me was the variety in the male characters and the way that the film really criticises patriarchy whilst realising the ways in which patriarchy harms men in similar ways that it does women.
I honestly felt pretty seen and reflected in the character of Allan, who exists very…
