Conservatives hate woke Barbie, but Greta Gerwig wishes them well
Barbie's success is like catnip to right-wing pundits pouncing on its anti-sexism message
Aux News Barbie
To the consternation of Whoopi Goldberg, conservatives hate Barbie. “It’s a doll movie, guys. I’m shocked that that’s what’s freaking you out these days,” Goldberg said on The View on Tuesday (via Variety). But is it really so shocking? Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is pro-feminism, and even the most basic, entry-level feminist ideas are antithetical to the right-wing outrage machine. Someone who makes a living from espousing conservative political ideology necessarily has to denounce any and all ideas to their left, even and perhaps especially if it comes up in frivolous kids’ media. It’s part of the business model.
Would we even know who Ben Shapiro was if he didn’t pull stunts like burning a bunch of Barbies in protest of the movie? Surely, The View would not bother with him if he wasn’t saying things like Barbie is “angry feminist claptrap that alienates men from women, undermines basic human values, and promotes falsehood all at the same time.” The outsize reaction to a film that offers a fairly surface-level critique of societal sexism is part of the grift. Right-wing pundit picks ridiculous target for his ire, left-leaning media gives him the attention he so craves, right-wing audience gains a martyr to protect and puts money in his pocket. Rinse, wash, repeat.
Unfortunately, ignoring the outrage machine has become nigh impossible, particularly when it comes to Barbie. It’s the biggest movie of the year, and the biggest opening for any female director ever. (Presumably to the chagrin of Ben Shaprio, who predicted that Barbie’s box office was “absolutely going to fall off a cliff.”) Women artists tend to be more scrutinized anyway, especially when their work has overt or even covert feminist themes. Barbie was an inevitable lightning rod for discourse, even without Ken’s (Ryan Gosling) exploration and ultimate rejection of “patriarchy.” Add in that buzzword, and it’s pure catnip for some of the most obnoxiously vocal online commenters out there. (“If you take a shot every time Barbie says the word ‘Patriarchy,’ you will pass out before the movie ends,” X-Chief Twit Elon Musk posted on whatever his platform is called these days.)
Hilariously, The View’s current resident conservative panelist Alyssa Farah Griffin—who formerly served in President Donald Trump’s White House—had the most cutting critique of the conservative Barbie backlash. Praising Gerwig as “brilliant,” Farah Griffin said on the show, “I’m so taken by some of these right-wing men who have all these thoughts on masculinity. Like, somehow, the Barbie movie is going to make them feel emasculated. No, caring so much about it is honestly the most emasculating thing I could think about it.”
Meanwhile, Gerwig herself seems touched that anyone cares. Speaking with the New York Times, she claimed she didn’t anticipate the “woke” criticism. “Certainly, there’s a lot of passion,” she said diplomatically. “My hope for the movie is that it’s an invitation for everybody to be part of the party and let go of the things that aren’t necessarily serving us as either women or men. I hope that in all of that passion, if they see it or engage with it, it can give them some of the relief that it gave other people.”
It sure gave them something—another platform to preach from, a Barbie to (literally!) burn at the stake—but relief doesn’t seem to be part of it. But more power to Gerwig, for trying to get through to the Ben Shapiros of the world.
67 Comments
Woof
frivolous kids’ mediaAnd here I thought Greta Gerwig was trying to make a film that could be enjoyed by adults and that had something substantive and thoughtful to say. But yeah, it’s PG-13 so it must be strictly for kiddies.Anyway, welcome to 21st century conservatism, where Barbie is more evil than slavery, apparently.
Seems an awfully convenient excuse against any criticisms… It is representative and satirically profound when it suits and dumb kiddie garbage and “why do you take it serious you dummy” whenever it doesn’t
Someone doesn’t know what satire is for.
Even if we take it solely as a satire challenging modern gender norms, it doesn’t exactly justify the conservative outrage or validate the nature of the criticism.
There can be perfectly valid reasons to be critical of the Barbie movie but the reactionary pearl-clutching over the focus of its satire is bad faith nonsense.
“…but the reactionary pearl-clutching over the focus of its satire is bad faith nonsense.”You mean like the left’s total nervous breakdown over Sound of Freedom, the most middle of the road thriller possible with zero Q shit in it that was largely trashed by people who didn’t see it? “Women artists tend to be more scrutinized anyway, especially when their work has overt or even covert feminist themes.”Citation needed. Women get 75% of fine arts master’s degrees and feminism has clobbered everything from Google to Hollywood.
There can be perfectly valid reasons to be critical of the Barbie movie but the reactionary pearl-clutching over the focus of its satire is bad faith nonsense.Really, that’s what they want. We’re in this weird position where we are tricked into defending a corporate property that hasn’t always had the best record on women’s issues as if it is actually the vanguard of modern feminism. They could not give a shit; they are just performatively feigning an outrage to amp up their audience and distract from any real issues actually worth discussing.
I’m a little unsure if you’re saying Mattel and Warner Bros. are manufacturing outrage about the movie. As to how genuine conservative critics are being, I think it’s varying mixtures of look-at-me shit-stirring and genuine ideological outrage.
There are a number of factors here that I don’t feel are clear either/or situations.
There’s no question in my mind that for Mattel this movie is all about building their brand and moving product. That said, it sounds like Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach were given freedom to actually tell a story that’s actually about something they believe in and tries to find some real meaning in the consumerism.
It can be more than one thing. Like virtually everything else in modern life, it’s a shapeshifting mass of stuff that changes according to your perspective.
I don’t necessarily buy that we can’t call bullshit on conservative outrage over ideas that frankly shouldn’t be controversial without turning into corporate shills. Are there more important issues? Of course. I don’t know how much this whole situation is about calculated distraction–on either side–though.
Or perhaps this type of cultural criticism isn’t any good in any way and goes back to looking for satanist messages recorded backwards or any other kind of belief that showing a behavior or idea is an automatic promotion of that behavior and any viewer will end up adopting said behavior, as if we are all children. Recent Atlantic piece goes into this (paywall and it was my last freebie, but can share the link, it’s great reading and important and true), here’s the end of it that I copied for a different post on the same topic.
“Just as the reduction of art to political propaganda leads to bad art, the aestheticization of politics leads to bad, irresponsible politics. That’s because aesthetics and politics are not the same thing. They are not totally unrelated, obviously, but they are also and even primarily different. A political message can be part of an aesthetic effect, just as a political movement can benefit from an aesthetic appeal. But we get nowhere if we confuse or collapse these categories.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/oppenheimer-movie-moralizing-reviews-social-media/674823/
“dumb kiddie garbage”You’re surprised that a movie based off of a kid’s toy is “kiddie?”And what does any of this have to do with the OP’s point that conservatives are auto dismissing this as “woke” like they do of literally anything and everything they don’t like and disagree with?Gonna have to try a little harder than that buddy.
That’s because slaves (at least those that survived it) learned valuable skills that could be applied for their personal benefit, just like the Holocaust was all about demonstrating how you had useful skills if you wanted to survive it. Utility! Utility kept you alive!Darkest timeline for the win.
Well yeah Barbie is a white woman, she’s definitely more important than black people./s just in case
If there’s one big critique of Barbie it’s that it frequently tries to have things both ways, but that’s probably goes with the territory when you’re trying to make a movie for a broad audience.
Why are the Kens still 2nd class citizens at the end? Is the satire offering a solution or simply reflecting the current state of affairs, but gender flipped?
Why are women still second class citizen in nearly every country on the planet? They gave the Kens a seat at the Supreme Court. What more would they want? Full equality? Sorry, that doesn’t exist. I don’t expect the film to fix society. It’s pretty clear Gerwig’s trying to raise consciousness to the problem and gives Ken the opportunity to figure out who he is.
thanks for your input.
I think they didn’t give a Ken a seat on the Supreme Court, but a lower-level circuit court or something like that.
And the narrator had the remark of “eventually Kens will have the same status women have today.”
I LOVE how intentional the phrasing in the movie was in all of the baggage the remark has with it. It can be read several different ways and that’s clearly the intent.
Thank you, I was going off memory. I forgot about the circuit court joke.
Please leave that fucker in the grays where they belong.
I don’t think it matters. Why is it when they go to the “real world,” the general public behave like the real general public, but the “real” Mattel Executives behave like the population in Barbieland? I don’t think it matters.
I mean, the satire was essentially that Ken’s get what women have in the real world – access to more of the jobs Barbies have, but for lower pay. I’m pretty sure that Issa Rae’s character even stated that.As someone else pointed out, the narrator also said something to the effect of “One day the Ken’s will have the same status women in the real world have today.”
I feel like I should be taking more advantage of right wingers’ outrage. I could make such easy money designing a simple “Let’s Go Brandon” shirt or something.
How about ‘Ken wasn’t wrong!’
Apparently you can make $80K a day by hawking cheap made-in-China hats that read “Make America Great Again” just by having a sentient enema wear one over his comb-over in between tee times, sexual assaults, and racist rants.
Let’s go Dark Brandon! Convict 45 now! 👍
There was a teen girl who made up a story about how her parents were godless leftists who were going to kick her out of the house for being a Christian “Blacks for Trump” supporter, started a GoFundMe, and raised $100,000s from the dumb hicks in an afternoon. THEN, in a coup de grace, she gave it all back and basically said she didn’t need their money, just wanted them to remember that they are racist dumbasses and she is a “finesse queen”
Extremely funny but would’ve been even better if she gave it to an abortion fund or something.
that teen girl has wicked cajones! Goon on her…
Did I ever tell you about my Stride Mother? $10o00k McLaren, baby.
Woke is a meaningless word. It means whatever the speaker wants it to mean, whether it’s sensible or not.
The film has an ‘A’ Cinemascore, which at least on one level is an indicator that people are walking away from this movie having enjoyed it, and not being completely turned off by its themes and message… Mother! this movie is not.The whole point of the ‘woke culture wars’ is for right-wing politicians to force their presence into every aspect of people’s life, even if they have nothing relevant to say (and let’s be honest, some of this “outrage” is really stretching it). Ron Desantis is juggling about 50 different culture wars right now because he wants to get his name out there for his ever-failing presidential push. My thought with this shit is to do the least amount of engaging necessary, and don’t get caught up in any of it.
They can’t lose. If the target concedes to them, they get a win, and if they don’t concede, they get to add it to their pile of evidence for their victimhood.
And he’s going broke doing that.
“The film has an ‘A’ Cinemascore, which at least on one level is an indicator that people are walking away from this movie having enjoyed it”Well, yeah. None of the righties whining about it have actually seen it.
The left accusing the right of waging culture wars is like Hitler telling Goebbels to take it down a notch. I mean, here we are talking about the rightwing backlash toward Barbie, when the left had an absolute meltdown about Sound of Freedom.The left has captured practically every institution, from academia to Hollywood to tech to fucking knitting circles (google social justice knitting circles). Now we have massive DEI initiatives in everything from corporations to med school (did you know you must write a DEI statement to apply to med schools now? You have to explain how your practice of medicine will further DEI, and they have altered the Hippocratic Oath in at least one institution to include DEI pledges).The right definitely wages their side, but they’re about 10 years behind and largely losing it, except in Florida and Bud Light. I mean, what institutions has the right won with this shit?Let the hate flow.
Conservatives LOVE Ken
ignoring the outrage machine has become nigh impossibleI’d be doing fine at that if you didn’t keep writing articles about it. 🤷♂️
“As a dominant alpha male, my masculinity is threatened by this entertainment based on a toy made for little girls”
A movie that reinforces their favorite talking point that Barbies are made for girls. You’d think they’d be excited about that!
I love how conservatives get all worked up over a fictional film. What nonsense! 👍
It’s a lot like how “fake News” meant what it says, before conservatives co-opted it to “real News that I don’t like”.
I still find it super cute that conservatives have recontextualized “woke” into a negative thing while not realizing it means “awoken to social issues”. It’s just so cute how dumb they are sometimes.
I shall go to my grave firm in the belief that “woke” won out as the new “political correctness gone mad” because it’s from black twitter and sounds just grammatically threatening enough to certain ears.In other words, even their chosen insults have racist undertones.
Reframing innocuous words into terms designed to scare elderly FOX News viewers into donating money and voting against their own interests is literally their entire brand.
A reminder that Ben Shapiro is a failed screenwriter, and only turned into a right wing culture warrior after he was viciously rejected by Hollywood.
Behind like 90% of these right-wing whine-mongers, there’s a failed screenwriting/child acting/stand-up comedy/etc/etc career. Seriously, it’s like the free space on their bingo. Just transparent sour grapes psychology.
It’s the Skinner meme in real life.
“Hmm, am I just downright terrible at this?”
“No, it is the Leftist Jewish Hollywood elite that doesn’t understand my genius.”
1) People are mocking conservatives for getting outraged by saying ‘it’s just a kids’ film.’ But that’s literally the point. They’re outraged because they see it as both a symbol and amplifier of a worldview that they hate, and one that is (arguably) directed towards impressionable children. It’s weird that people don’t get this; especially a couple of articles over we’ve got people on this website complaining about Try it in a Small Town and a bunch of articles about The Sound of Freedom. If you believe ideological expression in media matters, then you shouldn’t really be (acting) surprised by this.2) That said, once again conservatives are made to look stupid by their own lack of media literacy. The Kens are obviously meant to be stand-ins for women; with the whole movie being a gender-flipped patriarchy. Through that lens, the Ken uprising could even be seen as a criticism of certain strains of feminism (although in that sense it’s not really reflected by reality). But conservatives don’t get this so they’re treating the ending as: ‘They’re saying that oppressing men is good!’ And obviously Kens are men so any mistreatment of them = misandry. 3) Also, conservatives’ lack of media literacy is absolutely their fault. As much as I hate how confidently wrong certain progressives have gotten on their side of the culture wars, progressive dominance in media can be at least partially attributed to the fact that conservatives have spent decades devaluing the arts and humanities, and have been crying wolf about the media’s liberal bias for so long that it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Odd that a movie about kids dolls is rated PG-13.
To point #2 on your list – It’s also notable that this is pretty much the text, not the subtext, of the movie. It’s stated pretty overtly more than once including when Barbie tells Ken “you’re more than your girlfriend.” This helps to highlight the fact that the right-wing commentators on this issue have largely not seen the movie or are not interested in actually dissecting it. Some of them may have personal media literacy, but if they dare to show that in public, they know they won’t get the clicks, views and ratings they need from an audience that lacks media literacy.
Sorry for the reply. Yeah, that’s absolutely true. Gerwig’s hardly being subtle about the ‘Kens = women’ analogy, but typical chuds too busy foaming at the mouth to see the obvious.
“Through that lens, the Ken uprising could even be seen as a criticism of certain strains of feminism.” Absolutely, and it’s not the only time when women come in for criticism. How about how the matriarchical Barbie society we see at the beginning has “solved the problem of equal rights” but the Kens don’t matter and are in fact homeless–Gerwig’s showing that abuse of power isn’t a gendered issue, it’s a people issue. Then there’s the plan to distract the Kens, using the kinds of tactics women use in head games with men.
Someone online pointed out that Ben Shapiro has now uploaded more minutes of ranting about Barbie movie than the entire runtime of the Barbie movie.
left-leaning media gives him the attention he so cravesMaybe don’t give it to him?
I’ll admit, I initially had little interest in Barbie (mostly from not being in the target demographic), but knowing that it makes people like Ben Shapiro mad makes me want to see it, now.
Re: that Elon tweet—does Margot Robbie Barbie even say “patriarchy” in the film? I recall Ryan Gosling Ken (and maybe some of the other Kens) saying it a bunch but not so much Barbie herself.
Is this backlash worse than the left’s absolute meltdown over Sound of Freedom, which is at best a milquetoast thriller with zero conspiracy shit in it?
Yes. Good talk.
Great argument. Much thinking.I watched a panel on MSNBC about how half the country apparently believes in a baby-blood drinking cult and perhaps need to be monitored, while Ben Shapiro bitches for 45 minutes about Barbie. Perfectly comparable reactions to these films.Have you seen both? I have.
Man. I need to see this movie!
It’s just a “doll movie”, eh?
I mean, I think Alyssa Farah Griffin is proof a stopped clock is right twice a day.I loved the movie, but it also isn’t saying anything shocking about Barbie, about women, about the world. It was great how it was all put together and I enjoyed it thoroughly, but you’d think no one ever dared to say being a woman is hard before with how some people are falling all over themselves.As many others have pointed out, Ken dolls only exist to be accessories for Barbie so you could do weddings and dating scenarios. They certainly don’t exist for boys because we know how conservatives feel about dolls being given to boys.
As long as you call boy’s dolls ‘action figures’ they have zero problem with it.
Conservatives only approve of giving dolls to boys if they can be called “action figures” and come with at least two guns apiece.
Rinse, wash, repeat.That’s “lather, rinse, repeat”. Obviously you don’t rinse before you wash, dumbass.