Can someone please give Barbie a hamburger?

'Barbie' got us thinking about what it means to be human, but is this summer's blockbuster really all that feminist?

Hi, readers! Have you seen “Barbie” yet? If you haven’t (and don’t want any spoilers), you’ll want to hold onto this week’s newsletter until after you’ve seen it. 

But if you have seen “Barbie” — or are simply curious to read some thoughts on the biggest movie of the year — read on…

Before I launch into some observations and a few critiques about the film, I want to say that, overall, I did like the movie and am grateful that director Greta Gerwig convinced Mattel to make a movie that so directly, if flatly, addresses “the patriarchy” and even makes fun of the company that created the Barbie empire. 

So, I want to start with the Barbie world I grew up in.

As a cisgender white woman who grew up in America in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I was one of those tomboy girls who felt pressured to play with — and in many ways, be — this ultra-thin, straight-haired doll that I didn’t really identify with. I might have achieved things that Barbie told me I could achieve, but I felt terrible about my body (and hair) while doing it.

The movie helped me see just how ground-breaking Barbie was when it launched because it gave little girls something to play with other than a baby, and that certainly helped the feminist movement expand young women’s imaginations about what they could be. 

Of course, the physical ideal of how those young girls should be didn’t really shift much over the years, even as Barbie added physically diverse dolls and dolls who were not white. 

I was surprised that the movie addressed these tensions and anxieties, but it didn’t really do much to push us beyond naming them. 

The movie, unfortunately, took too many pages from the “girls rule, boys drool” playbook. Kens and Barbies were divided along a gender binary that feels frustrating to a woman who exists outside the strictly femme space. I wanted to see short-haired professional athlete Barbies who would never wear heels. I wanted to see Kens who paint their fingernails. I wanted to see one of the Kens become a Barbie or vice versa. 

But mainly, I wanted to see Barbie eat. 

Gerwig plays with the food element by showing Stereotypical Barbie “pouring” herself an imaginary glass of “milk,” which in a later scene is “spoiled.” When she enters the real world, she awkwardly drinks from a tea cup and spills it on herself because she’s never actually put liquid to her lips. 

When Barbie permanently left the doll realm to become a human, she displayed no physical hunger, no sexual lust, no professional ambition. 

Her time as a human was limited to the last few minutes of the movie, but there was a real opportunity for Gerwig to show that there’s more to being a woman than going to the gynecologist. 

Being human means having an appetite, for food, for sex, for meaningful work.

The only thing I saw Margot Robbie’s Barbie have an appetite for was being human, but we didn’t get to see her engaged in the activities that make us human besides going to the doctor’s office.

This seems like a small issue to nitpick about the film, but appetite — in all its forms — is something that most women I know have struggled with, and not in small ways: What does it mean to be hungry, to nourish yourself, to feel physically and emotionally satisfied? 

Even though women have suppressed their appetites, figuratively and literally, for longer than Barbie has been around, rates of anorexia and bulimia soared in the 20 years after Barbie debuted. (And plus-sized Barbies didn’t debut until 2016.)

So, after 64 years of empty glasses of milk and fake waffles and an unnatural thinness brought to you by eating absolutely nothing, I wish this Barbie would have headed to an In-N-Out Burger instead. 

We cannot overstate how much this one doll messed up how we perceive our actual human bodies, and this movie didn’t do as much as it could have to address this psychological harm, which will now affect a whole new generation of young woman.

A couple of other not-so-small thoughts: I did not love how men are represented in Gerwig’s Barbieland. My husband laughed and cried and loved nearly every minute of this movie — and my 16-year-old son saw it twice — but I can see why conservatives and even some feminists like me weren’t pleased with the way that the Kens were stereotyped in the same way that the Barbies were revolting against. 

A big part of my evolution as a feminist has been to become even more “pro-men.” To close the Supreme Court to them or to put them back in their second-class citizen boxes are the same tools used in the real world to disempower women. If we are seeking true equity, why would women want to use those same oppressive strategies against men? 

In this way, I can see how “Barbie” will fuel the gender wars rather than help bring them to an end, and this makes me sad. 

I get the satirical point that Gerwig was trying to make, but I’d love to see less Ken-bashing — and more examples of healthy masculinity and allyship — on display in the sequels. 

Another hard-to-dismiss problem with the movie was its colorblindness. The screenwriting displayed all the hallmarks of “white feminism,” which centers white women and enforces the harmful idea that what’s good for white women must be good for all women. 

President Barbie, portrayed by the excellent Issa Rae, was Black in skin only. The only Hispanic thing about America Ferrera’s character was her white husband learning Spanish. Her daughter’s mixed heritage wasn’t part of her character development; it was simply part of her casting description. The smallpox joke that Ferrera’s character was all the information I needed to know that there were no Indigenous writers on staff.

I hate to burst anyone’s bubbles here, but feminism without intersectionality is not feminism, so I would argue that “Barbie” isn’t really a feminist movie after all.

But before I write the movie off altogether, I want to try to put into words what I felt when Margot Robbie’s Barbie walks arm in arm with Ruth Handler, played by Rhea Perlman, into the ethereal transition room between Barbie world and the real world. 

As Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” plays in the background, the two women — one young and only a little less naive than she was just a few moments before, the other having seen more than the other could possibly comprehend — share one of the most touching moments I’ve seen on a movie screen. 

In these precious, devastating seconds, Barbie became human. (Even without the hamburger.) She left her old life and sacrificed the comforts of what she knew to walk toward a new, scary life that held the promise of unknowable pain, loss, love, beauty, and, yes, hunger and satisfaction. 

She stood at the arm of an elder — a chosen ancestor, I’ll point out — and met Death, who helped her make the leap into the Life that follows. 

I was overcome with emotion at this point in the theater, thinking of my own grandmother who crossed her own threshold six years ago next month. As her death grew closer, I watched her get both wiser and weaker. 

The more she knew, the less she needed to understand. 

You all know how much time I spend thinking about grief and ancestors and embracing the bittersweetness that comes with change, no matter the form. 

For all the film’s flaws, this last scene holds a special place in my heart, even more than the scene with America Ferrera’s epic rant about being a woman in America. 

When I first started The Feminist Kitchen in 2010, I was living in that rant, rallying against the constraints of the world and its insufferable contradictions and just how unfair it was to be a woman today. 

Now I spend my days with my well and chosen ancestors by my side, guiding me through the thresholds of life and offering comfort in a world where the only constant is change. 

Including my thoughts about feminism.

Having said all of this, I really do hope they make another “Barbie” movie so we can see Barbie expand and evolve beyond the 1.0 version we saw this summer and to see more Barbies (and Kens and Allans and Skippers) shed their old ideas to find new ones. 

Because if Barbie can embrace loss and change and maybe even a growing appetite for something more to life, then maybe movie-goers can, too.

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