I S S U E  10

Pink Cushions of Capitalism

Hatice Yıldız reviews Barbie

Barbie. Directed by Greta Gerwig. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2023

Various Cinemas

As of October 2023, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is set to be the highest ‌grossing worldwide movie of the year. Its commercial success largely rests on the writers’ ability to subvert expectations from a commercial propaganda movie and speak to purportedly feminist sensibilities. Dressed as a witty critique of patriarchy, Barbie caters to a sizeable market of sufficiently affluent Western women willing to pay for entertainment that celebrates them as political subjects. The putative feminism of Barbie, however, has an artificial sugary aftertaste. Just as cotton candy is bereft of true nourishing substance, Barbie’s airy feminism is devoid of disruptive potential. 

The screen plot: a blonde skinny female doll (Barbie) and her emasculated male partner (Ken) leave their seemingly perfect world after imperfect things begin to happen, e.g., thoughts of death occurring to Barbie. In the real world where they travel for answers, the pair ‘discovers’ a gender order where men subjugate women. This constitutes a stark contrast to their universe where Kens’ existence is defined by their usefulness to female dolls. The couple’s sobering encounter with patriarchy, described via a tasteless analogy to indigenous people’s contact with smallpox, transforms their personal and political trajectories. As he becomes aware of an alternate gender order where men pull the strings, Ken sets out to import it to Barbieland. He manages to temporarily seize the wealth enjoyed by Barbies but fails to institute systemic change via a constitutional reform. He settles instead for the freedom to develop an identity independent of his girlfriend. Meanwhile, Barbie meets her maker, Ruth Handler, and resolves to leave the fantasy universe to be a flawed but real woman. The story ends with Barbie visiting a gynaecologist’s office to presumably discuss her lack of genitalia, a non-issue in her former sterile existence.  

Immediately odd about the movie is that it portrays a world of extreme pink, glitter, and plastic perfection as a universe untouched by patriarchy. Barbieland presents itself as a non-misogynistic realm because its smiling, functional, well-dressed female dolls fulfil roles other than that of a housewife and mother. Highlighted in the opening scene is the notion that Barbie dolls allow girls to discard the caregiver role and imagine their futures as doctors, judges, and lawyers. Despite its seeming merits, Barbieland is not an egalitarian society. Among the wealth enjoyed by women are slave-like men who live to please them. Relationships of power and domination are wrapped in fancy clothes, pristine houses, and dance parties to which male dolls beg to be invited. In his attempt to reverse the gender order, Ken seizes Barbie’s house and reduces women to the role of submissive partner. He also introduces horse riding and beer drinking on a wide scale. Ultimately, patriarchy generates a less-than-fashionable world where child-like men impose their crude ways of entertainment on smart women.

The script speaks the language of (white) liberal feminism, dear to Hollywood. Rooted in classical liberalism, this branch of feminist thought holds that the conditions of women’s oppression are sustained by political and legal institutions that make up liberal democracies. Following from this diagnosis is the idea that male supremacy can be overcome by ensuring women’s equal representation in decision-making organs such as parliaments, trade associations, universities, courthouses, and executive boardrooms of corporations such as Mattel. Although it is commonplace to refer to liberal feminism as embodying the ‘first wave’ of women’s movement, implying that its perspective has been surpassed by forms of thought and activism that emerged later, the reality is more complex. As history does not run in a linear fashion, feminist perspectives of yesterday and today often interlock, especially as women’s civil rights re-enter the realm of public discussion. Barbie thus enthusiastically soaks up the feminist backlash to Trump era politics, in sometimes crude ways (e.g., Ken’s failed coup d’état targeting the Supreme Court). Even in parts of the world where ultra-conservative threats seem distant, the movie sings to a choir of urbanite, educated women fed up with glass ceilings, opportunity gaps, and politicians paying lip service to gender equality. 

The political climate described above obscures a problematic understanding implicit in white liberal feminism: that women as a coherent, harmonious group can consume or compete their way out of patriarchy. This notion is put to good use by Barbie’s writers as they form narrative devices—from Barbie swapping her high heels with Birkenstock slippers to her asking to speak with the ‘women in charge’ in Mattel’s headquarters. Contrary to Barbieland, neither women nor men in the real world constitute egalitarian political entities in which class and race do not matter. Barbie’s feminism conveniently flattens such hierarchies to portray gender politics as a chair game between the Blue and Pink Teams where the stakes are reduced to losing a privileged lifestyle. Either sex can win the game if they generate sufficient in-group motivation and new patterns of consumption. Breaking the shackles of patriarchy, represented by Barbie leaving her box, is possible via women voicing their frustrations and altering consumer preferences. ‘Let’s make an ordinary Barbie’, pleads the character Gloria towards the end of the movie, posing a market-friendly solution to contradictions inherent in Barbie’s seemingly flawless femininity. 

Barbie’s commercial success is a testimony to how widely appealing the message of liberal feminism can be, especially when sponsored by giant corporations. Equally important is the huge cashflow that the movie helped generate in adjacent sectors, including fashion, beauty, toys, furniture, and even the medical sector. According to reports, some plastic surgeons have endorsed the name Barbie to describe an extreme variety of labiaplasty. The irony here is sharp but not wholly shocking: that the doll in the movie visits her gynaecologist to get a vagina so that she can be like ‘real’ women, meanwhile actual women go under an extreme medical procedure to visually erase theirs so that they can look like Barbie. The product works exactly as Mattel intended: it urges women to consume in greater amounts to feel ‘empowered’, while sustaining the profitability of global capitalism. It is, ultimately, a comfortable pink cushion for market actors to lean against, as they disarm and turn to their advantage potentially system-threatening cultural tendencies.

It may be delusive to expect any disruptive intervention from a Hollywood movie formulated to entertain. Some hold that Barbie has captured its audience to talk about patriarchy, even if it meant that corporations got richer. This stance is specious. First, cultural resonations of liberal feminism have historically shown a limited potential to generate lasting change in favour of the oppressed sex. Ironically, the discourse has proven useful to patriarchal regimes invested in the project of expanding their market relations. Take the United Arab Emirates, where a marketing campaign involved a giant 3D model of Barbie standing near Burj Khalifa. Despite protests from within, the regime ultimately saw no issue in approving the movie’s release, which generated an estimated revenue of $1.9 million in its first weekend. Such apparent flexibility from an openly misogynistic polity is likely not ‘a glitch in the system’ or sign of improvement in gender relations. It means that the ruling elite see a consumer-friendly feminist sentiment as posing no tangible political threat to their privilege. They absorb it, use it, and at times turn it against women (on a Turkish radio channel now is one of the country’s popular religious fundamentalists, bragging about how women in his family are free to assume certain public roles).

Second, women have been talking about patriarchy for centuries and we have gained material insights that may displease Mattel: patriarchy is not simply a synonym for gendered double-standards causing cognitive dissonance in middle-class women, though it produces them. It is an ideology sustained by, and which sustains, racial and class inequalities. Women, especially those in privileged positions, have been complicit in its reproduction. They have done so through promoting or defending racial and sexist structures, denying agency to the less privileged, and subverting potentially disruptive feminist movements and discourses. Barbie can hardly do any of those things. At the same time, it provides an example of how a privileged female experience can ‘lay claim to no less than the universe of women’. Take the supposed ‘feminist peak’ of the movie, where the character Gloria highlights the contradictions of performing femininity in modern society. Not long after she begins the monologue, the audience is confronted with the reality of a woman who suffers from having to have money without asking for it (‘because that is crass’). She must lead without dominating, and be a boss without being ‘mean’. No doubt challenging, dilemmas of the above sort speak to experiences of a minority. Yet they are the bread and butter of Barbie’s hollow feminism. 

Aware of the issues involved in being a global market player, Mattel makes sure it has dolls that are not blonde, thin, and/or white. Operating in formerly colonised markets, ‘equal representation’ and ‘diversity’ are big deals for the company. The doll collection involves 35 skin tones, 97 hairstyles, nine body types, ‘and counting . . . ’, states its website. Women and young girls employed in Asian plants that churn out Barbies, however, are hardly suited to Mattel’s consumer profile. No matter their skin colour or body shape, female sweatshop workers with exploitative wages endure a ‘lifestyle’ that would be hard to celebrate by even the most ‘inclusive’ of companies (can there be a ‘sweatshop worker Barbie’?). Often ignored by the liberal feminist discourse, most lower-class women in the wider world bear the brunt of a patriarchy that is hard to compete or consume away. In stark contrast to their pliant portrayal in the movie, the heads of Mattel reportedly refuse to take responsibility to prevent violations of women’s rights in Barbie factories. According to a recent investigation, these include unsustainable workloads and gender-based violence particularly targeting young women. 

Patriarchy is a resilient construct. The stakes of feminist struggles involve putting an end to chronic poverty, hunger, illiteracy, disease, trauma, abuse, and death. Barbie’s motto ‘you can be anything’ does not apply to millions whose path to realising their aspirations has been blocked by market forces. At the same time, patriarchy is an extremely flexible ideology capable of adapting to a wealth of political and economic systems. It has been in perfect harmony with liberal democracies in the West, as it has been with autocratic regimes elsewhere. It hides behind cultural trends and discourses that mock us while pretending to liberate us. Together, patriarchy and capitalism absorb our aspirations for emancipation, and we find ourselves being ‘sold’ Barbie politics. 

Ultimately, replacing the Blue with Pink Team achieves nothing, unless one fundamentally alters the game of global capitalism itself. 

Hatice Yıldız is a Lecturer in Modern Gender History at the University of Edinburgh. Her research is on female labour in nineteenth-century South Asia and the Middle East.