Does Barbie Have Flaws?

2024 EVVY Nominee for Outstanding Opinion Article

Art by Olivia Flanz

Growing up, I always brought my DVD copies of Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper, Barbie: Fairytopia, and Barbie of Swan Lake to sleepovers (so 2000s, I know). What I loved about these movies was how magical they seemed. I was able to escape into the life of a fairy, or a princess, or a mermaid; all things that my inner child desired to be. At the age of 21 I still held a special place for Barbie in my heart. For months, I couldn’t wait for July 21: the release date of the Barbie movie! I couldn’t wait to sit in the movie theater alongside many other former Barbie lovers and revel in the nostalgia of being young girls again. Although many viewers shared a similar excitement for the Barbie movie, there were other viewers who were exempt from this.

Greta Gerwig has been praised for directing movies such as Barbie, Little Women, and Lady Bird, all of which are said to capture the “female experience” or the experience of “girlhood.” While I agree that these films accurately portray aspects of the female experience and girlhood, it is important to note that my perception of these portrayals is based on my experience as a white, cisgender female. It is impossible to create a film, or any work of art, that resonates with or encompasses the experience of every woman, so we must recognize that movies aimed at capturing the female experience, such as Barbie, can create dangerous “single stories” of womanhood.Single stories are overly simplistic and generalized perceptions of people, places, and experiences. Attempting to capture an entire experience can be dangerous because it can erase the complexities and differences of each individual’s experience.

Although I and many other woman-identifying people could relate to scenes in Barbie that resonated with our childhood memories of the doll, not every woman person can. The Barbie doll itself has been a controversial figure for decades. Originally created in 1959, Barbie debuted as a white, blond woman with long, thin legs, and a flat stomach. The doll encapsulated 1950s Western beauty standards; beauty standards that are toxic and unrealistic, and have plagued generations of women. However in 1980, Barbie’s manufacturer Mattel began producing more diverse dolls (including dolls with various features common to different ethnicities and dolls with disabilities). In 2016, Mattel introduced Barbies with different body types such as petite, tall, and curvy. But the “original” Barbie with its unrealistic features still impacts young girls to this day.

It is interesting that a movie based on a childhood toy that has caused so many body image related issues is being labeled as the “ultimate feminist movie.” In her NPR article titled “Is Barbie a feminist icon? It’s complicated,” Rachel Treisman asks, “Has a doll long criticized for perpetuating outdated gender norms and unrealistic body image become a feminist icon? Has she always been one?”

Treisman notes that the Barbie franchise has long perpetuated outdated gender norms, forcing us to ask the question: Is the Barbie movie, a so-called feminist movie, perpetuating these same norms? The Barbie movie may have been exclusionary towards trans people and nonbinary people. Much like the heteronormativity of the toys themselves, the film produces a binary in which there are Barbies and there are Kens, insinuating that for every Barbie, there is a Ken. This binary showcases female characters and male characters, leaving out identities which do not conform to these binaries. However, there have been arguments that the character “Alan” is representative of those who identify outside of the binaries because he is not a Ken or a Barbie. Even so, this character is on the outskirts of the Barbie world, is portrayed as awkward, and is based on a discontinued toy.

In her New York Times article titled “Barbie and Ken and Nothing in Between,” Emily St. James, who identifies as a trans woman, writes, “Yes, the film does well by trans people in some regards, especially by casting the trans performer Hari Nef as Doctor Barbie and giving her plenty to do. She isn’t just on hand to score ‘we love trans people!’ points. Yet the film’s story line and its politics set up a kind of pure distillation of womanhood that seems specifically rooted in the cisgender experience and affords little room for anything outside a rigid understanding of gender.”

Much like Gerwig’s other films, Barbie is a female-forward and empowering movie—but it is not representative of all women people. As I previously mentioned, my experience, the cisgender female experience, was represented;. But womanhood and girlhood are experienced in vastly different, and individual ways and cannot be reduced to a single story. The Barbie movie ends with the idea that Barbie is every woman and every woman is Barbie—but the idea that every woman is the same creates a single story of what it means to be a woman and experience life as a woman.

With that being said, it is important to distinguish between a “feminist film” and a film that includes feminist politics. Barbie was widely considered to be empowering to many women. Many female viewers resonated with the constrictions of the patriarchy and with the character Gloria's moving monologue about the endless contradictions that women face. The Barbie movie did an excellent job at incorporating feminist politics, but I am hesitant to label a movie that is exclusionary of trans and nonbinary identities, centers around a figure that has for so long perpetuated toxic beauty standards for young girls, and creates a single story of womanhood/girlhood, as a “feminist movie.” 

As much as I enjoyed being transported into the sparkly, pink Barbie world for an hour and 54 minutes with an absolute banger of a soundtrack, I think we as consumers must be considerate and careful of what we label a “feminist” work of art. Before we label any work as inherently feminist, we must evaluate if it is intersectional and inclusive of all identities.