“Take my hands, close your eyes, and feel.”
These simple words haven’t ceased circling my brain over the past few months. When I first heard these words, they felt like a sigh of relief. Tears started falling from my eyes and I felt everything. I felt sadness, joy, anger, happiness, pride, love, sisterhood. It took me a while to understand why that sentence was so impactful. I don’t think I have ever been allowed to just feel. Emotions for women are always too much and not at the right time. All of the emotions I felt in that moment are all of the emotions I have about being a woman. I feel sadness and anger for the suffering that myself and other women have faced. I felt joy and happiness for all of the beautiful parts of being a woman. Most of all, I cried tears of pride.
I cannot recall ever being as excited about a movie as I was to see Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” this past summer. Every girl on TikTok decided that they were going to dress up to see the movie in true Barbie fashion, all pink. I wanted to do the same, so that morning I walked over to my closet ready to channel my inner Barbie only to open the doors and realize, I don’t own any pink. But I love pink! I looked down at my hands in confusion because my nails were painted bright bubblegum pink. I looked from my nails to my closet over and over again until I realized, I had only just allowed myself to start liking pink again.
When I was a little girl, I loved pink. Everything was pink. My clothes, my shoes, my Barbies. But one day, some of the girls around me stopped liking pink. All of a sudden girlhood was something to be ridiculed. Boys rule and girls drool. The girls who liked pink started to be teased for being too “girly.” The boys teased us, and the pink-hating girls did, too. The girls who held strong in their love of pink were “annoying” and “stuck-up.” So I changed my favorite color from pink to teal. It seemed less girly. If anyone dared call me a “girly girl,” I would riot. But I was the girliest girl possible. This was one of my first experiences of womanhood: I gave something that I loved up to better fit who others thought I should be.
As silly as much of the movie is, “Barbie” is an incredibly accurate description of the female experience. The first thing Barbie experiences in the real world is self-consciousness. She experiences sexual harassment within minutes and explains feeling an “undertone of violence,” while Ken has never felt freer. Believe me when I say that walking around as a woman in society very much has an undertone of violence. Barbie’s first experiences in the world remind me of being a little girl, and then one day waking up and feeling self-conscious of my appearance and receiving unwanted attention.
In Barbieland, the Barbies have never apologized for their femininity. In her defense, Lawyer Barbie states that her emotions are not a burden and instead enhance her arguments. In the real world, women are told to suppress their emotions because they are “distracting.” Writer Barbie beams while receiving an award and proudly states that she deserves it. Every time I have watched a woman receive an award or even a compliment, she immediately counters with an explanation of how she doesn’t really deserve it. In my own life, I make a conscious effort to be able to take a compliment without immediately discounting it. Barbie looks at an old woman and tells her how beautiful she is because she has never been taught that age is something for women to fear. Yes, “Barbie” is silly and colorful and at some moments completely ridiculous, but something being satirical does not discount its truth.
The satire continues in the representation of Ken, as well. Ken is representative of the sweet little boys that girls grew up with who turned into misogynistic and objectifying teenagers seemingly overnight, leaving their female friends behind. Ken is the “nice guy” before the girl rejects him. Ken never truly loves Barbie; he only thinks that loving Barbie is how he should behave. Ken is both the victim and the villain, which is representative of how men exist in the real world patriarchy. Men are negatively impacted by the patriarchy, but this doesn’t discount the fact that they not only created it but continue to benefit from it. Ken is stuck in a trap of his own making.
Unsurprisingly, “Barbie” has received quite the backlash from people who clearly misunderstood the movie. Many conservatives called the movie “leftist brainwashing” or “feminist propaganda.” Funnily enough, most of the backlash surrounds the treatment of the Ken’s by the Barbie’s. For people who do not know how to read between the lines: Barbie is not arguing for a female-dominated society where men exist only to serve women, but rather seeks to acknowledge the female experience within the patriarchy. It is interesting that when male characters face a sliver of what women have been subjected to for centuries, men riot. I would argue that the people who didn’t like Barbie were the ones who needed to see it the most. Another reaction from some men was that they didn’t understand the movie. To that I say, maybe you should think about why you didn’t understand it. Of course you could not relate to Barbie–you weren’t supposed to. The majority of men have never been catcalled, have never been objectified and have never been told to sacrifice their gender expression to “fit” better.
The “girly girl” in me that I had tried my best to repress never went away. I just denied her. Growing up, I loved pink, makeup, dresses, cheesy romance novels, sparkles and literally anything you would associate with a stereotypical girl. I thought that in order to be taken seriously I would have to sacrifice the feminine aspects of myself. In a way, I was right. Even though “Legally Blonde” came out years ago, if a woman wearing pink waltzed into your lecture hall I doubt you would take her as seriously as you would if she was wearing brown. There have been far too many times in my life that I have heard a man say to a woman, “You’re not like other girls,” as if that is even remotely the compliment they intend it to be. What this phrase really means is, “You’re not like those silly, stupid girls, who care about how they look, and catch feelings and cry and hold me accountable for my actions.”
No, I am exactly like other girls.
My generation of women is genuinely stepping into our power in femininity. Finally, we have unapologetically learned to love being women, no matter how it looks to each of us. At the movie, I watched women sit together in the theater with their friends, dressed in all pink, giggling and unapologetically being women. The summer of 2023 was truly a summer full of girlhood. My friends and I could not stop watching the new season of “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” a show about a 17-year-old girl and her childhood crush. I shouldn’t be able to relate to it, being older than all of the characters, but I couldn’t help but cry as I watched the adaptation of a book that tween me held so dearly. Taylor Swift re-recorded her 2010 album, “Speak Now,” reminding many people of how much they have changed in the last 13 years. “Speak Now” was my Christmas gift when I was 8-years-old and listening to a new version of it years later when I actually understood the songs broke my heart in the best possible way. There’s something beautifully devastating about listening to “Never Grow Up” knowing that you actually have.
I recently found a video of my younger self opening my first Barbie doll. Three years ago, that video would have made me angry. How dare you hand a young girl a doll representing everything that society tells her she should be? Older now, I look at that video and warmth fills my heart. The way I look at Barbie, the way my little hands start to fix her hair, the look of admiration on such a tiny face. I had to ask myself, was the so-called damage done by Barbie or by the ones holding her? Barbie never told me that I was supposed to look like her–society told me that I should want to look like Barbie. Barbie taught me that I could be whatever I want, in whatever way I want. So now after 21 years, I can finally say, thank you Barbie for everything.
This article is dedicated to every woman who has had a man badly play guitar at them and had to pretend that it was good.