What if we did live in a Barbie world?
Made by women, for women, and where women call the shots. Imagine the Barbiearchy...
Hello friends, happy Friday.
Or Happy Barbie Day, should I say…
Have you seen one of the lines from the film that’s doing the rounds on social media? It’s actually spoken by Barbie’s smooth undercarriaged boyfriend Ken: ‘When I found out that patriarchy wasn’t about horses, I kind of lost interest,’ he says.
Oh Ken. We all wish the patriarchy was about nothing more challenging than ponies with rainbow coloured manes and sparkles emanating from their hooves. That horse has bolted, pal.
The premise of the movie (no major spoilers, promise) is that poor gentle Ken discovers how men behave in the ‘real world’, while Barbie is given a crash course in what it means to be a woman for the rest of us, ie. not in perfect, pink Barbieland where the blokes are our sidekicks and a woman has been president four times - as well as an astronaut and Nobel-prize winning physicist.
It’s the clever spin director Greta Gerwig has put on her film about a skinny plastic woman who, if she were real, would have to crawl around on all-fours, knobbled by the weight of her breasts. Basically, Barbie discovers that the message she’s been giving us about what it means to be a woman, and look like a woman, hasn’t been all that great.
The presumption, if that doesn’t sound too grand for a Hollywood movie about a toy, is that girls and women have been living in a Barbie world since she was introduced in 1959.
But what if we were?