Barbie’s feminism 101 is no ordinary feat

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Did your audience applaud after THE speech? Mid-movie, spontaneously? Mine sure did.

If you’ve seen Barbie, or pretty much any social media since the film came out July 21 to thunderous, record-breaking, continuing box office and critical success, you know the monologue I’m talking about: the one that impassioned mom/Mattel employee Gloria (America Ferrera) delivers as a kick in the hotpants to Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie), who’s upset by sexism. The speech that’s flooding social media, that influencers are posting on their vision boards. The one that, according to the film’s writer/director, Greta Gerwig, made even the men on set cry.

It is an excellent speech. I won’t print the whole thing, but here’s the gist: “It’s literally impossible to be a woman … We have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.” You have to be thin but not too thin, have money but not ask for it, lead without squashing others’ ideas. You have to answer for men’s bad behaviour, but if you point that out you’re accused of complaining. You have to stay pretty but not so pretty that you tempt men or threaten women, never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, fail, show fear or get out of line.

And not only are you doing everything wrong, Gloria concludes, “but also everything is your fault. I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us.”

Now, some pundits have dismissed the speech as Feminism 101, but isn’t that precisely what newly self-actualized Barbies need? More importantly, isn’t it still true?

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Gloria’s do-this-but-also-do-the-opposite observations exactly mirror the complex Tao of Barbie that Gerwig walks (on tiptoe) throughout the film. She ribs the all-male Mattel execs, but reassures them that self-aware dolls can still make them money. She advocates for mothers having passions outside their parenthood, but also declares, “We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back to see how far they’ve come.”

She’s said in numerous interviews that the moment she cares about most is the one where Barbie sees her first older woman, played by the lauded costumer Ann Roth, who is 91 and wears her wrinkles like a map of her life etched into her face. Barbie, fascinated, says, “You’re beautiful.” Roth replies, “I know it.”

It is a lovely moment. But this past weekend I was in a swimming pool with five women friends in the 55+ demographic – I alone got my hair wet, by the way; the rest were bobbing near the shallow end in their hats and sunglasses and earrings like a limited edition of Sun-Averse Barbies – and we couldn’t help but notice that Roth is shrouded neck to toe in fabulous textiles, and Gerwig does not pan down to a sagging arm or swollen ankle.

We chortled for quite a while over our pitch for Aging Barbie. She could be the inverse of Growing Up Skipper: Instead of spinning Skipper’s arm to make her chest pop out, you’d raise Aging Barbie’s arm – halfway only, because she probably has frozen shoulder – and watch her magnificent bosom drop gently to her thickening waist. Sometimes her hair turns grey, sometimes it just falls out, and you don’t know which yours will be. Also, you have to sign a waiver that she could melt at any time from hot flashes, from 10 years before Barbiepause to 20 years after.

That night, one of the women e-mailed to say she’d actually found two aging Barbies: a one-off modelled after Iris Apfel, the 101-year-old fashion icon for older women; and an homage to Queen Elizabeth. Our minds boggled: Would Queen Barbie ever let go of her handbag? Would one be able to undress her – surely not! We noted that neither doll has a single wrinkle.

For me, the most have-your-cupcake-and-everyone-eats-it-too thing about Barbie is that it conforms to everything we already know about films made by women directors: They hire more women than male directors, but at least half their hires are still men. Study after study proves it – from the likes of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University (SDSU).

In the top-grossing 250 U.S. films of 2022, for example, on films with at least one woman director, SDSU found that women comprised 53 per cent of writers, but only 39 per cent of editors, 19 per cent of cinematographers and 19 per cent of composers. According to the credits listed on IMDB, Barbie fits those stats. Gerwig wrote it with a male co-writer, Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story). Her editor, cinematographer, composers and art director are men. On screen, among her top 77 actors, there are 17 women in Barbie Land and 11 men, but there are 25 men in the real world and 24 women.

The plot itself is also a balancing act. Yes, Barbie takes a heroine’s journey to independence. But she also cedes a ton of screen time to the Kens (led by Ryan Gosling), and she helps them find a better, fairer life outside her slender shadow.

Near the end of the film, Gerwig (via Gloria) advocates for a new addition to the Mattel lineup, Ordinary Barbie – a kind of Barbie Neutrality, as opposed to relentless Barbie Positivity – and wants us to nod along. This confounded me at first. Isn’t the aspirational nature of Barbie the reason she’s so appealing? You don’t play down to a Barbie, as you do to baby dolls; you play up, imagining teenagerhood, university, careers. What fun is it to imagine yourself as ordinary?

But then I realized, Gerwig has satisfied an extraordinary number of interests in Barbie, and delivered the best opening weekend in history for a film directed by a woman. She is Exception Barbie. She, better than anyone, knows how far we have to go before success like hers will be Ordinary.

She hints to as much in her choice for Barbie’s road trip song, a durable feminist anthem by the Indigo Girls, which we hear many times during the film. It’s not “Closer to Fabulous.” Not yet, not by a long shot. As Gloria’s speech laments, we’re still shooting for “Closer to Fine.”

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