#POPCULTURE | Barbieland: A real-world gateway to feminism
By Grandis Frias
Girls around the world receive Barbie in a box.
Her arms are tied onto the carton. Her accessories — shoes, bracelets, changing clothes — are wired together. Her teeth-showing smile greets behind the plastic film cover.
Since she came to the world in 1959, Barbara “Barbie” Millicent Roberts has become a 64-year-old icon with over 200 careers. Beyond her life as a girl’s rite of passage to adolescence, she is an astronaut, a lawyer, a doctor, and even a physicist.
In July 2023, Barbie the Mattel doll made her name as a blockbuster movie star.
A creation of artistic visions
Barbie (2023), directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig, follows the adventures of Barbie (Margot Robbie) in the Real World as she discovers the purpose of her creation as a doll and the realities of life as a woman.
It all begins when she leaves Barbieland — the matriarchal world of dolls — to visit the Real World after experiencing “glitches’’ within her body and mind. Accompanied by her then-codependent boyfriend Ken (Ryan Gosling), Barbie seeks to fix her malfunctions and finds a struggling woman named Gloria (America Ferrera), who works for Mattel.
Meanwhile, Ken learns about patriarchy in the human realm. Feeling unseen in his original home, he turns Barbieland into Kendom, resulting in male domination among the dolls.
The Barbies, then indoctrinated into servitude, learn to fight back. They retrieve their rights in the Supreme Court and, finally, after a string of gender battles and musical wars, Barbieland gradually works toward gender equality.
These multilayered narratives — from horses embodying patriarchy to humans setting foot in Barbieland — constitute a blockbuster that has made history as the first movie solely directed by one woman to earn $1 billion.
Having been seen by international audiences, Barbie has established its significance as a gateway to feminism by portraying the contrast between male and female struggles and how it unfavorably affects girlhood.
Barbie and Ken’s individual journeys revolve around the truths they learn about the gender-based conventions deeply inculcated in the Real World. She faces the adverse consequences of having to be “everything,” whereas he seizes power to stop being “just Ken.”
A boy’s journey and a girl’s misery
Although the promotions prior to the movie’s release centered around Barbie, Ken was a pivotal figure in the film itself. His character depicted how society treats men and women differently, highlighting the contrasting pathways of girlhood and boyhood.
On the edge of womanhood, girls become conscious of the trajectory of their life: a fate defined by their tragic coexistence with men. Although Barbie doesn’t gain this awareness immediately, she suffers this coexistence the moment she enters the Real World with Ken.
Barbie happily skates with her boyfriend, until she feels everyone gaze at her. The next second, she’s instructed to have a lovely smile — she should “do it more.” She gets maliciously invited by men for a conversation. She is catcalled by boys and distastefully stared at by girls.
She is non-consensually touched by a man. But when she throws a punch at her harasser, she goes to jail for assault.
Ken, on the other hand, also attracts glances — but of respect and adoration. He exchanges friendly nods with other men and receives compliments from women. Girls admire him, and boys idolize him.
He feels recognized when he sees men like him hold positions of authority. He enjoys a life where he, along with other men, can influence others: men’s faces are imprinted on dollar bills, men sit on CEO chairs, men solely occupy the United States’ presidential seat. Men dominate with their power in every single sector.
That brief exposure to patriarchy, followed by their adventures in the two worlds, left Barbie and Ken with opposing takeaways.
Barbie learned that being herself meant being defenseless against gender inferiority, female co-comparison, and essentially, the entire world run by patriarchy.
Ken learned that being himself would put him in power.
A gateway to feminism
When Kendom took over Barbieland, the established gender roles further emphasized the stark contrast between matriarchy and patriarchy when empowerment evolves into supremacy.
In matriarchal Barbieland, both Barbies and Kens could have careers, free from gender discrimination. Although the former held more positions of power in their society, Kens had autonomy — they could even proclaim “beach” as their profession. They possessed the freedom of possibly pursuing a life beyond being boyfriends.
But in a patriarchal world run by males in the Supreme Court and Casa House owners, the Barbies were reduced into servants. The Barbies, who were once dolls manufactured to let girls know of dreams aside from motherhood and matrimony, were now uniformed maids at their boyfriends’ beck and call. Their Dreamhouses, which they built with earnings from their own careers, were now owned and run by their boyfriends.
Juxtaposed against Ken’s life in both worlds, the Barbies’ journey evokes the important truth of feminism: women are simply asking for independence.
This is what feminism is about: for women to have a choice. They don’t fight to undermine men’s rights; they fight to be as recognized and respected as men are recognized and respected. They simply want to be represented in conversations that matter.
Barbie’s first step to that fight is acknowledging that something is wrong with the two worlds — that one population shouldn’t rule over the other. The sense of superiority and inferiority among the two sexes manifests strongly in men and women, respectively, resulting in what the Real World calls double standards.
Realizing that Barbie is starting to self-deprecate because of those conventions, Gloria delivers a thought-provoking monologue about double standards. She states that the concept argues that women are expected to be everything and do everything, just to make up for the fact that they exist — that they take space in a world founded on male entitlement.
Barbie debunks those standards by recognizing that women don’t have to be extraordinary or stand out from the other girls. It emphasizes the importance of girls knowing that they can dream, feel, and speak on their own.
These ideals being explicitly shown in Barbie makes it a significant opportunity for the general audience to be introduced to feminism and gender equality. It’s a blockbuster screened to millions of people, marketed to young girls.
A piece of social relevance
Beyond those implied themes, the film leaves more queries of self-reflection for all viewers, such as questions of why women leaders like President Barbie (Issa Rae) are so rare on a worldwide scale.
Barbie evokes a central question that often attacks the existence of misogyny: if not usually legally enforced, why are sexist standards being assumed by society, especially women? How did exposure to patriarchy make the female characters internalize those conventions?
The answer? We live in a society built on those standards — where men take or are granted positions of the highest power in almost all industries.
We exist among long-lived patriarchal institutions established by colonial forces that erased non-gender-prejudiced cultures. As a result, most of us are born into multigenerational traditions and dogmas, tracing back to the first civilizations, that rarely ever give us a chance to see what’s outside the box of female tragedies.
Unlike in Barbieland, predetermined gender roles — often shaped by history — imposed in our preconditioned society take away the freedom of choosing what type of person we desire to be.
Fortunately, the characters of the Gerwig-directed film were wise enough to realize the issues of having one superior gender, and progress to dismantling gender inequality in Barbieland.
However, as humans in the actual Real World, we face a much longer path toward equality. Barbie does an astounding job at portraying this reality by depicting how ignorance, extending to real life, has completely different outcomes for men and women. For as long as this ignorance is instilled in both genders, these fates will never truly change.
Men can become Allan (Michael Cera) to stand with and fight alongside women. Still, they would be safe. But if that is too exhausting, they can turn out to be Ken to go above and beyond their lives without knowing anything about feminism. Still, they are safe.
Women can embody feminism like Gloria did or roam around the Real World clueless of their own struggles like Barbie was. But their fates will be the same. They will still live the female miseries as patriarchy rules almost every nation and industry.
A heartfelt reminder for girls
Those female fates as results of miseries have occurred to generations of women.
Since the beginning of civilization, women have fought for everything. For their education. For their claim to their wombs. For their salaries to be equal to that of male workers. For their partners not to cheat. For their independence from abusive marriages. For their children to see that they too are experiencing life for the first time. For their places on stages that matter.
That fight gets passed on to girls in every generation, in numerous forms, and it becomes exhausting.
That fight manifests as a struggle in Barbie’s long journey to self-acceptance. It depicts how crippling it can be to define an identity when standards for being “good enough” are set in society — when all she sees is how she should be.
That’s girlhood, as raw as it can be: fighting to be good enough.
But when Barbie finally learns to let go of those expectations — both from the Real World and herself — to deeply feel who she is, she becomes human.
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie ends with an important reminder for girls to let go of that fight: to set themselves free from the lives they thought they would have, and to actually live the one they possess. To just be.
Above all, Barbie opens the eyes of its audience that a woman can indeed be anything — not everything, but anything.
