I'M TOO BUTCH FOR BARBIE (2023)

a informal rant/essay by danny

so the barbie movie came out this week. most of the people (those who i know and those who i don't) that i follow on twitter or instagram or tumblr went out opening weekend decked out in pastel pinks to embrace the promised-to-be-camp movie. and literally everyone i'd seen or spoken to who saw the movie in the first few days it was out had nothing but praises to heap upon it. i quite literally did not see a single bad thing said about the movie from the 10-15 people i know who actually watched it.

the issue with that is that i fucking hated it.

barbie (2023) is a movie about how ridiculous it is that society treats women like contradictory nightmare beasts inferior to the complete serene logic of men. it is a movie about how it's not just important for women to be told they can be anything, it's important that they see and believe it with their own eyes and hearts or they'll never be good enough (for the world or for themselves). it's a movie about how important it is to connect and embrace your fellow woman because we're all bonded by the eternal struggle of living in a man's world.

at least it's really trying to be about all of these things. but actually, barbie (2023) is about how important it is to buy little girls barbies so they know that women (which they will become one day) can be """anything"""! but—of course—there's only one way to be a woman.

when i was a little girl, my sisters and i played with barbies. we played with dolls and we played pretend house and we made fake towns populated by fake people with intricately fake (and sometimes strange and horrific) backstories. and i was always a grown woman named syd who's husband tragically died young in a horrible fire and i lived alone and i worked at the post office and no one ever called me mrs. anything.

it's no mystery that i'm a massive butch now. but for a long time, i wasn't. i was never a tomboy, never one to shy away from girlhood or even "womanhood" (whatever that means). from the moment it was acceptable, i wore makeup and a different dress everyday. i styled my hair and shaved my legs and waxed my eyebrows and did everything a pre-teen girl approaching and enduring puberty needed to do to be "properly" feminine.

even after i learned that it's kinda shitty that society expects women to be hairless and i stopped shaving/waxing and even after i cut my hair short and dyed it all different pastel colors, i didn't let go of the dresses or the delicate flats or the carefully-applied eyeliner until i finally let myself realize as a 17 year old that i've been fucking miserable the entire time.

and it wasn't until after i graduated high school and moved 4 hours away for college that i could actually do anything about it (due to my mom's strict enforcement of gender roles and refusal to let me leave the house wearing anything that wasn't "flattering", aka feminine and showed off my tits and hips).

my first few years at college were spent meticulously building a wardrobe that didn't make me cry in front of bathroom mirrors or scratch incessantly at my skin. and the thing is i still bought clothes that i knew i would never be comfortable in because a part of me thought maybe one day i'll actually feel how i'm supposed to about being a woman (whatever the fuck that is).

and all of that long sad story ends in the happiest i've ever been and closet full of grandpa-ass button ups but more importantly, it made watching the barbie movie a nightmarish experience.

every moment that greta gerwig and noah baumbach and the corporation of mattel tried to tell me how powerful women (who bought mattel products) were, i couldn't help but think about how i could never be included in their definition of "woman". i'm not a sexual object to men, i'm an object of disgust. i'm not ignored or talked over, i'm spat on and thrown away. none of the barbies wore fucking pants!!!!!!!!!!!!! (before you message me, yes this is hyperbole to emphasize how all of the barbies were feminine and pressed and perfect even when they were wearing pantsuits).

barbie (2023) said women are inherently feminine. isn't that great? isn't being feminine fantastic? don't we want all the little girls to know that they're going to grow up into confident and powerful and FEMININE women (who support mattel). don't we want all the teenage girls who are moody and uncertain and lashing out to finally embrace their feminine beauty and only then will they open up and become honest, kind, joyful WOMEN!

as my similarly-presenting partner pointed out, barbieland was supposed to represent everything a woman could be. they showed a fat barbie, they showed a barbie (with no speaking lines) in a wheelchair, there was even a trans woman barbie so you know they're inclusive!

except there wasn't a barbie that looked like me. and no one in the movie ever thought to question why there wasn't.

the butchest thing anyone in this movie wears is the godawful product-placement designer birkenstocks. and those pan up to a perfectly shaved leg (as all barbies have) on a perfectly shaped body (as all barbies and america ferrera have). barbie wears a full face of makeup, a "femininely" shaped blazer, and a pencil skirt to the goddamn gyencologist! and this was AFTER she figured out that she didn't want to be barbie, that she just wanted to be human.

i'm not saying the movie should've ended with barbie in dirt-stained baggy jeans and a carabiner full of keys clipped to her leather belt but if it had, i probably would've liked it a little more.

barbie (2023) might mean so much to some 15 year old teenage girl whose teachers/parents/coaches/adults won't take her seriously—who will feel connected to the "universal" struggle of womanhood in a male-dominated world in a way she's never seen on screen.

but if i saw barbie (2023) as a 15 year old girl, i would be the biggest closet case known to man. i'd probably be married to some white guy named brian who proposed to me right out of college. we'd have a tiny apartment right outside of the southern-USA city my parents' live in and we'd be talking about having kids together one day that we'd name after our respective grandparents.

so thank god all it made me feel as a 24 year old was rage. next time a movie centers "female empowerment" on buying products in the color pink, warn your local butch before they see it.