Barbie: Nothing to Feel Good About
“Authenticity has never been Barbie’s strong suit.”
–Mona Eltahawy
This post contains incidents of the sexual abuse of a minor. Viewer discretion is advised.
I left the Barbie movie feeling slightly ill. Even though there were amusing moments, overall, it felt like an insult to women who have experienced sexual and physical violence at the hands of men. Just like The Help and The Secret Life of Bees made racism seem survivable, Barbie presented men’s insecurities and anger in a way that undercut the truth. Uncle Tom’s Children by Richard Wright taught me about lynching, and my experiences of rape and physical abuse have made it impossible for me to view men’s fear and hatred of women as benign.
Ken's anger towards Barbie's independence is presented as something comic, but this trope can morph into a rage that results in physical violence. My experience of being held down and told that you are being raped because you are smart and beautiful by someone much stronger, someone who is angry because you flirted with another man, someone who calls you terrible names and makes your first time the stuff of nightmares and shame makes the conflict between Barbie and Ken hard to enjoy. Yes, these are dolls, but the movie is being lauded as a breakthrough for feminism.
photo by Monica Melton
Having witnessed and been traumatized by the fights between my parents, fights that took place after too much alcohol, and fights that resulted in injuries to my mother, I hoped to enter the world of adult relationships peacefully, longing to experience romance and gentle affection.
This was not to be. My first crush was on an adult male, I was fifteen, he was charged with leading a group of teenagers on a bike trip through New England. I thought I loved him; he treated me like an equal and a girlfriend, and when we were to consummate our relationship, he called me “jailbait” and pushed me out of his tent. I was jailbait, and he, at least, had the grace to reject me. But that rejection resulted in my dating a boy who beat me up on our first date and raped me. I kept that a secret until my freshman year in college when I explained to my boyfriend that it didn’t matter whether I had orgasms as I was frigid because of what happened to me. I said it was my fault, I was a cock tease, and that person misread the signals. Luckily, this college boyfriend helped me heal. I wasn’t frigid. Still, the reality of male rage directed towards women, especially women like me who refused to keep quiet and agree, was clear.
Fast forward to my first real job working in a non-traditional job made possible because of a lawsuit. I was the only woman in a position with authority over ten men who were, on average, 10 to 15 years older than me. I was 22. This was a situation where I needed to be very careful. I was very careful. I wore super conservative, masculine clothes, steel toe boots, minimal makeup, and my hair was always up. But I was 22, and it was hard to disguise my femininity to the degree that I was neutralized.
It was a co-worker, not someone who worked for me, who raped me. He had helped me out of several job situations with new installers who were being trained by someone, me, with no actual experience, just pole climbing school and a series of classes on management that filled ten binders and another series of classes explaining what made the phones ring. In other words, the mostly blind leading the completely blind. Stuck on a cut up telephone pole in late November, no one answered the phone back in the garage except him. He came to the job, walked my employee through the steps to finish, and casually asked me personal questions about my interests outside of work. I told him I was studying acting, lived alone in Hoboken, and that was about it.
Several days later, he suggested I meet him and the other managers at a bar that happened to be on my way home. This was the first time anyone had made me feel included, so I readily accepted. When I arrived, I saw him sitting alone at a table. Immediately, I knew something was wrong, but it never occurred to me how wrong. When I sat down and asked where everyone else was, he told me no one else was coming. He intended to come back to my house, where we would fuck.
“I’ve waited a long time for this,” he said.
“I thought we were friends,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I don’t make friends with women,” he said.
I stood and started walking towards the door, he followed. Outside, I turned and told him to leave me alone.
“Listen,” he said. I’lll tell everyone you fucked me anyway with details, so make it easy on yourself.”
I was driving an old Fiat, which my father had given me, that could barely make the speed limit. His car hugged my bumper back to Hoboken. We stood on the street outside of my apartment.
“Don’t do this,” I said. I looked around for someone to ask for help. The street was empty.
“C’mon,” he said. “It will be fun, and I won’t tell anyone.”
I tried to close the door behind me, but he pushed it open. A voice in my head said, “It’s not that big a deal. You’ve slept with people you haven’t loved before.” But this was different “I thought we were friends,” I said again, starting to cry.
“No,” he said.
“l feel like a whore.”
“Whatever works.”
The next afternoon at lunchtime, he opened my office door. “Let’s get lunch,” he said.
I stood behind my desk, knees trembling. ”I’ll tell your wife,” I said. “I’ll report you to the police. That was rape.”
He shrugged and went away.
Somehow I still blamed myself. I was too independent, too opinionated, too provocative. It took sobriety, motherhood, and a whole lot of therapy for me to accept and love who I am.
I am now the mother of a man and understand how men have been conditioned not to show weakness, to keep secrets, and not to trust easily. I tried in my mothering to make sure my son understood those things were good ways to process emotion and to see women as equals and friends. What I despised in the Barbie movie was its complacency; it’s ignoring the recent Supreme Court decision that criminalizes abortion. For four years, we had a president who openly espoused misogyny and described sexual violence against women as being something he supported, but Barbie was now wearing Birkenstocks instead of stilettos. Birkenstocks are a good visual for comfortable footwear, but they do not erase the sad truth that women are still struggling to achieve equality. and basic human rights.
“As the former executive director of the World Food Program, I was often humbled by women in conflict or crisis situations who, when asked about their needs, wanted nothing for themselves but asked that we educate their daughters. Education, these mothers believed, would provide their daughters with opportunities they, because of their gender, were denied. Unfortunately, even with adequate education, women here in the United States as well as women across much of the world still lack equal access to opportunity.
Despite decades of notable progress at home and abroad, a reality in which opportunities are not defined by gender has yet to be universally achieved. Even more disconcerting, in too many places around the globe, women exercising or even seeking their basic rights is interpreted as a direct and destabilizing challenge to existing power structures. Some regimes are now trying to roll back the hard-won rights of women and girls.”
–Ertharin Cousin, a distinguished fellow of the Global Food and Agriculture at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the former executive director of the United Nations World Food Program.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach