![\"Margot](\"https:\/\/media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com\/image\/upload\/t_focal-760x428,f_auto,q_auto:best\/mpx\/2704722219\/2023_06\/1687956035697_tdy_pop_8a_barbie_feet_230628_1920x1080-o4v4l9.jpg\")
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The original Barbie fantasy<\/a> involved no Malibu mansions or impossibly arched feet or any of the famous doll\u2019s more recent multi-hyphenate ambitions of being an astronaut, an anthropologist and a entrepreneur \u2014 or any female fantasy at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The first Barbie, released in the U.S. in 1959, was modeled on a German sex doll named Lilli, a shapely plastic figurine who had blond hair, heavily made-up eyes, skimpy attire and a perpetual pout. Lilli was so popular among men in post-World War II Germany that she quickly evolved from a gold-digging cartoon \u201cfloozy\u201d to a three-dimensional fixture found dangling from rearview mirrors and on the shelves of tobacco shops, though never in children\u2019s stores. One modern journalist described Lilli as \u201can Aryan fantasy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n What exactly are we doing championing our most vivid cultural symbol of thin, straight, white womanhood?<\/p>\n\n\n\n This origin story, along with so-common-they\u2019re-clich\u00e9d criticisms of Barbie as perpetuating unattainable beauty standards, is why our collective saturation in what has felt like a monthslong bright pink release party for feminist filmmaker Greta Gerwig\u2019s forthcoming \u201cBarbie\u201d film<\/a> should give us pause. In a moment when teen girls\u2019 mental health crises<\/a> are at a disturbing high, Roe v. Wade <\/em>has been overturned, the gender wage gap has barely budged since \u201cWorking Woman\u201d Barbie hit the shelves back in 1999, and Black, queer, fat and disabled women \u2014 everything the original Barbie, and the one marketed in this summer\u2019s blockbuster, is not <\/em>\u2014 are still more likely to face discrimination of all kinds, what exactly are we doing championing our most vivid cultural symbol of thin, straight, whitwomanhood?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I know, you might be thinking: Relax, you feminist killjoy, and kick back with one of the many Barbie-branded pink drinks on offer this summer. While Barbie has indeed offered the diet advice of \u201cdon\u2019t eat!\u201d<\/a>reminded millions of little girls that \u201cmath is tough\u201d and cannot physically wear shoes other than high heels, her legacy absolutely encompasses far more than instruction in female inferiority. The big question as the general population heads to the box office is whether or not the nuanced commentary about Barbie\u2019s role in evolving feminism will be overwhelmed in the blinding pink haze of Mattel marketing that, at its core, celebrates a very familiar (and not always progressive) type of femininity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When entrepreneur Ruth Handler first spotted Lilli on a 1955 European vacation, she keenly saw potential in an American toy market dominated by baby dolls that constrained girls\u2019 imaginations to futures as mothers. Mattel released \u201cBarbie,\u201d who closely resembled Lilli, in 1959, marking a first step in a trajectory that undeniably expanded the range of futures imaginable to the millions of girls who would play with the iconic doll. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Baby dolls might have trained girls as mothers, but before Barbie, toys rarely encouraged them to imagine themselves as women<\/em>. As unrealistically perky as Barbie\u2019s breasts were (are), their very presence ushered in a new era in doll, and women\u2019s, history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Significantly, Barbie\u2019s fictional achievements often predated historical turning points we rightly link with women\u2019s liberation: \u201cSex and the Single Girl\u201d came out five years after Barbie was born, championing the life of a fashionable, sexually active career woman at a time when apartment buildings for young working women still had chaperones. Women were unable to get credit cards and bank loans without men to vouch for them until the 1970s<\/a>. Meanwhile, Barbie owned her Dreamhouse \u2014 which had no kitchen \u2014 as of 1962, she had a college degree and careers as a nurse and an executive, and she was neither married nor a mother. Today, Barbies of every race exist, as well as renditions that honor pioneers<\/a> such as Madam C.J. Walker, Billie Jean King and Jane Goodall. Any Barbie critique that ignores this pathbreaking past for one-dimensional caricature is incomplete and unfair. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This tension in what Barbie really <\/em>represents is what I think makes Gerwig\u2019s movie more than an extremely expensive infomercial, and it is what she is wisely emphasizing in interviews<\/a>: \u201cI am both doing the thing and subverting the thing.\u201d That\u2019s the kind of nuance we can expect from Gerwig, and it is the interesting ambiguity energizing the legions writing Barbie think pieces (including me) who do not usually spill much ink on branded movies from toy aisle bestsellers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For all the hand-wringing about whether Barbie is feminist or not, it is striking how little overt resistance there has been to this famous doll\u2019s being shoved in our faces more aggressively than ever. After all, Gloria Steinem described 1970s feminists as defining themselves in contrast to Barbie<\/a>: \u201cShe was everything we didn\u2019t want to be but were told to be,\u201d she said. Just 10 years ago, Berlin feminists burned the dolls <\/a>and protested a promotional Dreamhouse as \u201csexist propaganda.\u201d Today\u2019s Dreamhouse is a massive Malibu installation that dwarfs the one protesters stormed a decade ago, but it has inspired no such backlash. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As much as we might need a feel-good summer movie, we should not ignore that bilious misogyny is unfortunately the backdrop against which the Barbie World of eternally young, hot plastic dolls exists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If anything, the critique is of a newly unapologetic commercialism contaminating the film world. Indeed, \u201cBarbie\u2019s\u201d marketing rollout is so ubiquitous that it feels like a rare monoculture event: In addition to the sneakers and seltzers and pool toys and Xbox accessories, even Googling the lead actors yields an explosion of animated pink sparkles. While such considerable investment by Mattel raises questions about Gerwig\u2019s creative freedom, as the writers\u2019 strike grinds on and exposes Hollywood\u2019s sexism, among other injustices, the most undeniably feminist thing about this film might be that a principled woman \u2014 for being which Gerwig absolutely has the bona fides<\/a> \u2014 inked a huge deal for a summer blockbuster about girls\u2019 consumer culture. You go, girl! <\/p>\n\n\n\n But as ironic and interesting as I trust Gerwig\u2019s rendering of Barbie to be \u2014 even under Mattel\u2019s oversight, since the company clearly understands that edginess moves merch more effectively than bland endorsement \u2014 I am not sure that immersion in Barbie World is what our world needs right now. Gerwig has remarked that she was struck by the fact that if Barbie were a real woman, her breasts would be so heavy that she would be forced to crawl on all fours. I was also struck when I learned this back in middle school and remember feeling disgust and relief as I interpreted it as a sign that Barbie stood for an antifeminism that was receding in my lifetime. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So Barbie\u2019s starring as this summer\u2019s main character does not exactly strike an inspiring note at a time when real, live men give interviews<\/a> about choosing to marry sex robots because they cannot talk back or reject sex so violent that their limbs and heads detach. More commonly, real, live women travel abroad in unprecedented numbers<\/a> for plastic surgery that kills or disfigures them in order to achieve a \u201cperfect body,\u201d while most of us do not even realize we, too, are chasing the more mundane human impossibility of a poreless face every time we swipe on a smoothing Instagram filter. As I write, the question of whether Margot Robbie is hot or just \u201cmid\u201d has ignited the misogynistic \u201cmanosphere<\/a>,\u201d leading at least one actual media outlet<\/a> to legitimize this sexist stupidity as actual news. These audiences, it seems, are not game for the subtle feminism of the Barbie film but are always up for objectifying a hot blonde.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All the fawning over Barbie reminds me of a question New York Times <\/em>editor Jessica Bennett posed last year of the \u201cfeminist reclaiming\u201d of another buxom, blond 20th-century icon<\/a>, Pamela Anderson (who was often compared to Barbie<\/a> and had her own doll made in 1991). Is it not possible that our current appetite for \u201credemption\u201d films about figures such as Anderson, Britney Spears and yes, Barbie, is an excuse to objectify these women yet again, albeit now with a self-righteous gloss of feminist virtue? <\/p>\n\n\n\n It can be hard to unravel exactly what is going on, especially as \u201cbimbo feminists<\/a>\u201d \u2014 self-described \u201cleftists with their tits out\u201d \u2014 celebrate plastic surgery and condemn academic elitism, a stance that can be hard to distinguish from a retrograde endorsement of busty airheads. High femininity and hard-core feminism are hardly incompatible, but the danger in such formulations has always been confusing the crop tops and lip injections for liberation itself, when a patriarchal society is often far more comfortable embracing the sexy trappings while leaving underlying power structures intact. Barbie has often symbolized such hollow emancipation: In 2016, journalist Peggy Orenstein found that college women celebrated casual sex as empowering but were deeply insecure about \u201cgenital self-image.\u201d The ideal? A \u201cBarbie vagina<\/a>,\u201d achievable by cosmetic surgery that made the outer labia appear fused together, just like the plastic doll.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sex of any sort does not seem to play much in the PG-13 film \u2014 a smart move to maximize audience \u2014 as the previews imply that Barbie is basically chaste. The Barbie movie might be not a feminist magnum opus but just a pretty pink summer flick, which is fine. But as much as we might need a feel-good summer movie, we should not ignore that bilious misogyny is unfortunately the backdrop against which the Barbie World of eternally young, hot plastic dolls, not to mention the beach full of sidelined Kens, exists. Tradwife influencers become TikTok famous by recommending wifely submission, while \u201cfemale Andrew Tate\u201d Pearl Davis<\/a> tells her millions of followers that the 19th Amendment should be repealed and divorce should be outlawed (Tate, an icon to millions of young men, remains on house arrest for rape and human trafficking charges<\/a> in Romania). <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ll definitely be watching for the feminist artistry and fizzy pink fun, but embracing Barbie too enthusiastically feels a little like what the Andrew Tates and Jordan Petersons of the world would love women to do. The recent reversals to women\u2019s progress have been so fast and furious that we should really reflect before being too readily swept up in an intoxicating swirl of Barbie pink. The shallowest version of Barbie has always been her most famous and damaging form, and is not the feminist icon we need.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, historian and author of “Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession” Barbie’s evolution into feminist fantasy was hard-won. But is she really the hero we need right now? The original Barbie fantasy involved no Malibu mansions or impossibly arched feet or any of the famous doll\u2019s more recent multi-hyphenate ambitions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14721"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14721"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14744,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14721\/revisions\/14744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Margot](\"https:\/\/media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com\/image\/upload\/t_focal-760x428,f_auto,q_auto:best\/mpx\/2704722219\/2023_07\/tdy_barbie_230710-mdl1x6.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"Ryan](\"https:\/\/media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com\/image\/upload\/t_focal-760x428,f_auto,q_auto:best\/mpx\/2704722219\/2023_07\/1689683724249_tdy_pop_8a_ryan_gosling_230718_1920x1080-f4l5ex.jpg\")
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