I know a lot of impressive women married to men. Maybe the men are impressive too. I don’t give them much thought, to be honest. By the time I catch up with these women on all they are doing, and commiserate on the state of the world, we rarely have time to talk about their husbands. Sometimes, to be polite, I ask, but they normally don’t come up unless some conflict is brewing. This doesn’t mean that my friends don’t love their partners—just that, when given room to talk about their lives, that’s what they want to talk about: their lives.
Watching Barbie, I remembered how infrequently Ken factored into my narratives when I played with Barbie as a girl. Barbie got dressed up to go to work and out with her friends; Ken just appeared if and when I needed a dramatic storyline. A wedding! A passionate fight! A cheating spouse! (What can I say? I was raised on Dallas and telenovelas.)
This attitude was typical of the girls I played with. Typical, too, was how much that changed when we hit our teens and 20s. With the dolls discarded, and play redefined as clubbing and barhopping and checking off each thing on our overachieving-woman bingo card (culminating with, you guessed it, marriage), the Kens were guest stars no longer. The story—the very fate of my life—revolved around men and their actions. What were they doing? What were they thinking? What were they thinking about me? About us? About our future?! Together?!!
But as I’ve aged, my attitude has shifted yet again. It’s not that I don’t love men or enjoy their thoughts and company. I date them. I value them as friends and colleagues. But coupling with one is hardly the central preoccupation of my days. And, if I’m being honest, with a few exceptions, I just don’t find them nearly as interesting as I do the women I know. And I don’t think I’m alone in that.
This is the secret that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie has exposed.
When it comes to our closest friendships, many women I know are already living in a Barbie world. It’s the women who astound us, amaze us, and amuse us, who get things done and make households run. The way we perceive it, their partners and husbands are the “and Kens”—supporting players in ourmy friends’ busy lives navigating professional advancements, cross-country moves, and home renovations while caring for aging parents and mothering children in a collapsing world.
Although most women I know flocked to see Barbie with their girlfriends, a few of my fabulous friends went with their husbands. Everyone reported enjoying the film, but more than one mentioned that in the hours and days afterward, said husbands were suffering from some serious sulky Kenergy. They scratched their heads and worried: Were they the “and Kens” of their own homes, riding in the back of a pink tandem bicycle that Barbie steers?
Barbie is not a perfect or intersectional film. It presents a narrow, mostly white vision of the complexities of womanhood. But what it does reveal—with great humor and moments of pure heartbreak—is the way many women see and experience the world. The movie is stylized and satirized, but there are a lot of truths under all that Pepto Bismol pink. And truths, especially those of women, can be uncomfortable.
In the confines of female friendships, Barbie is everything. But outside that space, women are often treated like we are nothing. Certainly Gerwig knows that. As America Ferrera’s Gloria states in her impassioned monologue, it is impossible to be a woman out in the real world. That world was made by and for men, who don’t have to think about how much Barbie labor it takes to keep a Dream House running.
This is a familiar theme in many women’s group chats and shared Instagram memes, but I’m not sure it’s ever gotten the big-budget pop-culture-saturation treatment that Hollywood usually reserves for films about superheroes or guns or men blowing things up.
Perhaps no truth is more uncomfortable than the fact that men might not always be the center of women’s thoughts and worlds.
This may explain why so much of the discourse and press about the film—fully and completely about women, made by a woman—has shifted to center itself on men. Specifically, Ken. We’ve now read articles about Ryan Gosling’s (wonderful) performance, what Ken means for masculinity, how to get Ken’s abs, how to do Ken’s dance, how Ken “stole the show,” what actors would love to be considered for Ken in a sequel.
Sure, these are fun takes about a fun movie. But the sheer number of them made me wonder: Are we so uncomfortable with lingering over a woman’s narrative that we—even the women among us—have to rush to talk about men instead? Are we so afraid of hurting men’s feelings?
I laughed a lot during Barbie, but I cried a lot too—at how hard it is to be a girl, how hard it is to be a woman, how long it might be until the world makes another mega-budget movie about our lives and thoughts. I even got a little misty thinking about how confusing and challenging it must be to be a man right now.
But if there is a sequel, please—don’t make it about Ken.