It's Barbie, and It's Ken

The Barbie movie is all about differentiation

Men and women are in the process of renegotiating their common life together. Much of this renegotiation is antagonistic, and deeply unhealthy. Many prominent voices in society demonize all healthy expressions of masculinity as toxic, dangerous, or even outright evil. In response to this and other concerning societal trends, a growing group of right-wing men (and some women) increasingly blame women for all of society’s woes. There is a sense among them that our culture was better off when the public square was dominated by men, and women stayed in their own domestic lane. 

Enter the Barbie movie, which dropped one year ago today. While on a popular level, the Barbie movie was largely seen as an imaginative triumph for feminists, many on the Left criticized Greta Gerwig for reinforcing what they see as retrogressive conceptions of femininity, such as the link between biology and female identity. On the other hand, many conservatives interpreted the Barbie movie as yet another story where men are blamed for women’s problems and where women can only live safely and freely when men are divested of power.

I think such both simplistic reads of the Barbie movie are far off target. Both miss what I believe are important contributions to the conversation about this renegotiation of the sexes.  As I set out in my review for Theopolis, Gerwig believes that embracing the givenness of our gendered humanity is the first step toward recovering sanity. But there is another aspect to healing the rift between the sexes that Gerwig offers us in this movie, one that could easily be mistaken for something like “expressive individualism”—differentiation. 

Differentiation is the process of discerning and drawing lines around yourself, to distinguish yourself from others. A person’s differentiation begins as a baby when we discover that we are not part of our mother, but are in fact a separate person. The reason a toddler’s favorite word is no is not necessarily because of a rebellious spirit, but because no represents the most fundamental boundary between you and me. Later, an even sharper break in identity must take place between the teenager and parent. Those who fail to differentiate sufficiently from their parents go on to have enmeshed relationships, struggle to set boundaries, and have many other problems in life related to having a weak sense of self. Differentiation is extremely important, and it must happen before two people form a romantic attachment, or problems will abound. 

Many conservatives criticized Gerwig for her decision to have Barbie and Ken go their separate ways at the end of the film. But Gerwig’s message would have fallen flat if she had allowed her two main characters, both deeply disoriented from reality, to enter too quickly into a relationship. Gerwig criticizes the wrong version of the idea that men and women are in some way made for each other. Instead of simply affirming the positive version, she deconstructs the toxic version. 

Gerwig does this by poking fun at the ways both men and women can see the other gender as primarily existing to fulfill their own needs and desires. At the beginning of the movie, every night is girls’ night, and the Kens exist only as living accessories to the Barbies, without any purpose or meaningful identity of their own. After the Kens take over Barbieland, the roles are reversed. The Barbies now exist only to bring the Kens beer, give them foot-rubs, and cheer them on from the sidelines. Gerwig is clear that both of these “models” for society are a dead-end. This way of being “for” the other is deeply unhealthy, and it represents a sort of self-commoditization.

At the end of the movie, Barbieland has been saved, and the Barbie houses have been reclaimed from the interloping Kens. Barbie apologizes to Ken for pushing him to the sidelines, but that doesn’t mean she wants to get together with him. She suggests that it’s time for Ken to find out who he is, apart from Barbie, as she does the same. Ken responds that he doesn’t know who he is apart from Barbie. “. . . It’s Barbie and Ken. There is no just Ken. That’s why I was created. I only exist within the warmth of your gaze.” Barbie suggests, “Maybe it’s time for Ken to discover who Ken is. . . maybe it’s Barbie, and it’s Ken.” Ken looks up with a new light in his eyes and says, “Ken is. . . me.” For the first time, he sees himself as a being in his own right, rather than a sort of appendage to Barbie. It would be a mistake to see this as division and alienation; this is–or could be–the beginning of a healthy process of differentiation. 

A fair critique of the Barbie movie is that it does not show us what it looks like when men and women live and work together the way they ought. While Gerwig rightly diagnoses toxic  over-dependence, she doesn’t seem to have a vision for healthy interdependence. But Gerwig is making art, not sermonizing (although America Ferrera’s extended “it’s impossible to be a woman” monologue might suggest otherwise). It’s not her intent to tie up all the loose ends for us. She points to a cluster of problems and gestures at some initial remedies. And one of those remedies is that men and women must understand who they are apart from one another if they have any hope of living together healthily. 

Men and women were made to stand and work side by side, and cannot build anything without rapport and solidarity with one another. But in order to do that, men and women must have a sense of who they are apart from the other. Gerwig understood that women cannot discover who they are under the male gaze, any more than men can discover who they are under the female gaze. In order to be useful to each other, we must first be who we are, and refuse to be the fantasy version of ourselves that the other can often demand. No one was designed to be an accessory.

It’s notable that Barbie’s vision of being human has nothing to do with the male experience. But neither does it have anything to do with liberal feminist stereotypes of womanhood: girl-bossing, achieving, striving, or breaking the glass ceiling (a fact that invited wrath from many left-wing feminists). Rather, Barbie’s vision of womanhood is a vision of rich, intimate, same-sex friendships and family bonds. This is not to say that Gerwig thinks womanhood is circumscribed by relationality. But certainly, she sees relationality as an essential foundation of femininity. A woman’s foundation as a woman is the unconditional love and acceptance women receive in our woman-to-woman friendships and family ties. This is, obviously, not at all how manhood is forged, which is why men need to learn to be men and women need to learn to be women apart from one another. 

We can’t pause society or have men and women retreat from each other until we can get this all sorted out. But men and women should stop looking toward each other to find legitimization for their manhood or womanhood. A man is not a man when a woman says he is, and a woman is not a woman when a man says she is. Maybe we need to take a cue from Barbie. Before it can be “men and women,” maybe it needs to be “it’s men, and it’s women.”