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Barbie and the stain of masculinity
Jul. 28th, 2023 07:09 pmCONTAINS BARBIE SPOILERS.
The year is 20FarTooRecentForComfort, and I am wearing sharp shirts and chinos. My hair is short, with an undercut. I walk with a swagger. My voice is loud by accident, and as deep as I can make it on purpose.
I am working in an office. The office is full of women. Some of them are traditionally feminine. Some of them are goth feminine. Some of them are feminine in the way that wears heavy walking boots to the office. Some of them are fat, or women of colour, or older. They all smile widely and greet each other enthusiastically. The few men in the office play by their rules.
And they are vicious.
-
Look, I didn’t go into Barbie expecting my butch little heart to come out fulfilled. I started out thinking I might dress up to go see it in the dress I’ve been making, which has a galaxy print corded bodice and a long gored skirt. Then that started to feel uncomfortable and I thought about soft pastel masc, with my trans flag coloured short-sleeve button-down and light blue shorts.
Then I realised that I was gonna need armour. The sharp shirts I wore in 20FTRFC don’t fit anymore, but I’m more comfortable in a more grungy butch mode anyway. So a flannel shirt and ripped denim it was. And god, I’m glad.
-
Is Barbie worth watching? I mean, it’s great for what it is, which is a toy advert doing entry-level feminism. There are these occasional flashes of satirical brilliance, and for the first half of the film I genuinely thought it was going to do something groundbreaking. Then it settled for chanting ‘EVERY WOMAN IS BEAUTIFUL BUT BEING A WOMAN IS HARD’ over the sounds of the more interesting film it could have been being manhandled back into its box. Which was somewhat disappointing.
What I did like, and was genuinely impressed by, was the fact that Barbie is trans (she was, after all, ADAC – assigned doll at creation!), and that plotline feels very real and true. Like that’s how it works! Everything is grand1 and then you start having weird thoughts and then your body changes in weird ways and nothing WORKS like it did and everyone around you is disgusted and you try really hard to go back to how it was but you CAN’TYOUCANTYOUCANT. And people want you to just be normal but you CAN’T.
And then you accept it and go get the appropriate healthcare and it feels great.
Like, that’s a trans narrative! That can’t not be a trans narrative! Fuck yeah!!
And yet it manages to be a trans narrative without carrying any stain of masculinity. Barbie is stereotypical Barbie, feminine and pretty, and then she transitions to a human woman who is also feminine and pretty in a very slightly different way.
1 Everything is not necessarily grand, because little kids can smell weird on you before you can
-
The trans community periodically breaks out into vicious intracommunity wars about who is more oppressed: trans femmes or trans mascs. We bandy about statistics about murder and rape, we tell childhood anecdotes about bullying and microaggressions, we tell each other to stay in our lane and not talk over each other.
For the record, this is stupid battle of the sexes nonsense from a cisnormative world that we don’t need to be buying into.
Gender stains. Every trans person knows this. Trying to present as your true gender while your body won’t be like you need it to be feels like walking around with a big stain on your shirt. Trying to hide your true gender feels like walking around trying to cover up a big stain on your back.
And to the transphobe cult, we’re all dirty. The different sects phrase it in different ways, but that’s what it comes down to: we disgust them. All of us. We have too many of the wrong kinds of gendered behaviours and characteristics. We blur boundaries they’ve often cut themselves down to live within. We are, indelibly, stained by both the genders we chose and the genders we didn’t.
Let’s illustrate this with an example. The TERF sect of the transphobe cult likes to pretend that it wants to rescue those poor lost little girls duped into being trans. But what happens if someone comes to them and says this is them, they took hormones or had surgery and they were wrong, they need rescuing? Does the TERF sect welcome them with open arms?
Nah, don’t be stupid. Even if such people are useful to make a rhetorical point or to use as a legal bludgeon, they will always be freaks to the believers. They are indelibly stained by the masculinity they took on, ruined women, fallen women. And the TERFs are also very happy to join with other sects who don’t want women stained by masculinity, such as conservative Christians who want their perfect subservient wives.
Another example. It’s low hanging fruit, but it’s an obvious example. The number one thing that transphobes of all sects say to trans women to try and hurt them is, ‘you’ll always be a man, you’ll never be a woman.’ Stained by manhood again, even though this time it was involuntary. But what was it like when these women were still trying to pass as men? Well, back then, they were being punished for being too girly, for being ‘failed men.’
And another! Have you ever noticed something about all the #Representation the trans community has been getting over the last few years? The women are very feminine, the men very masculine. Occasionally someone is pre-transition. And the non-binary people are skinny, flat-chested, short-haired, with high voices and clear skin. Nobody is stained.
-
In Barbieland, all the Barbies are pretty and feminine and all the Kens are masculine in a soft, unthreatening way. They wear pink and pastels, they are ripped but not rugged. Their hair is short. None of the Barbies have visible muscles; all of the Kens do. It is a perfect paradise of gender dimorphism.
In Barbieland, there is a script and everyone follows it, and as long as you do, everything is wonderful. You smile widely, you wear a pretty outfit, you have your perfect breakfast, and you can just float down off the roof. You dance the night away and then start again, until someone says the Wrong thing. Has doubts. Is uncomfortable. And has the nerve to say so.
Then the music stops and everyone is staring until they find a shitty excuse to cover it up, and then everything goes on like before, but everything has changed. And when they try to talk about it, people react with horror. And the only person who might be able to understand is a freak.
This is excellent, biting satire. This rings true with my experience as a brainweird trans queer.
There is the kernel of a truly excellent film within Barbie. Sometime around the halfway point, the film starts to manhandle its better self into a box and bury it deep beneath sparkly pink grave dirt. And by the end, it has completely copped out of its cooler, more radical ideas, and simply caves to a simplistic battle of the sexes model and a return to the status quo.
The moment Barbie lost me was when Barbie, in the midst of her existential crisis, sobs that she’s ugly. The voiceover has a clever little quip about Margot Robbie being the wrong person to cast for this point, and the human woman comforting her has this realisation of oh god, if even a doll feels like this… and she snaps and starts telling the truth about all the cognitive dissonance of being a woman.
I’m not going to argue with that rant, because it’s true. But what if, instead of that little quip, before that rant, the sentiment had instead been, ‘Oh, if even a doll, made to be the perfect woman, can feel this way, maybe it’s not worth it. What if the answer is, sure, maybe you’re ugly. So what?’? What if we went from there?
-
Ugly wasn’t the word people called me as a child. They usually went for disgusting. Disgusting because of my hairy legs, my unplucked eyebrows, the completely benign skin issue on my hands. Suspect, because of my boyish clothes and inability to respond correctly to questions about boys or clothes or makeup or pop songs, and just, always, not one of us. Fat, sometimes, or in danger of becoming fat.
Ugly was always there, though, under the surface. People calling me homophobic slurs did so because I was too butch. Stained by masculinity. Feminists are all ugly lesbians, no offence, my sociology teacher said, staring directly at me, the only person willing to admit to being a feminist in A-level sociology. (I’m bored, I said. No offence.)
Feeling like you look good is hard, in the barb(i)ed wire border zones of gender. We’ve got this sort of sliding scale of formality, whereby at the lower rungs you can get away with blurring the boundaries, but the more formal you get, the more gendered the clothes are, and the harder it is to find things that fit both your body and your soul.
The only way out is to look past what you were taught about what’s ugly. And it’s something that you learn in community, in defiance. Queers have been doing this work for years. So have disabled people, people of colour, fat people. It was in the school of defiance that I learned how to wear masculinity with a swagger, with pride, with love and joy.
-
Barbie has fat Barbie, disabled Barbie, black Barbie, trans Barbie. It even has queer Barbie insomuch as our lead Barbie reads very queer, whether gay or asexual. It does not have ugly Barbie. Even weird Barbie2 is made-up in pink and skirts, and she gets more put-together as the film goes on.
We at least get a pre-teen girl in jeans and a black, shapeless hoody. Well, until she gets to Barbieland, whereupon she appears progressively more femme. More pretty. I remember people trying to make me dress like that.
What if, instead of saying, ‘of course you’re beautiful,’ the film had said, ‘fuck it, let’s be ugly’? And the Barbies – and their human friends – chose whether they wanted to stay made-up and pretty, or branch out into other aesthetics. Goth. Grunge. Queer. Butch. Masc.
Oh wait.
Masculinity is a stain, isn’t it? And we can’t have girls getting dirty like the boys.
2 Played, for the record, by a vocal transphobe.
-
Here I need to talk about Ken. I’ve seen people saying that men need to go see Barbie, because they will learn an important lesson about toxic masculinity. I’ve also seen men upset because they don’t like its portrayal of men. And sure, some of those men are the worst kinds. But I am, in general, more in the latter camp.
Sure, ‘Ken gets radicalised’ is a funny plot, and one that makes a degree of sense in the world as set up. He’s deeply naïve and feels disrespected. Okay, I guess. I’ve also seen someone say that it’s actually a critique of the types of feminism that hold that women can do no wrong and an inverted patriarchy is desirable, in that he displays what happens when someone gets to act on that urge. (I don’t think that message lands at all.)
But you know what I was thinking, right up to the point where he was like, ‘ah yes, I love patriarchy’? I was looking at this man who’s only ever been a pretty plastic trophy get a glimpse of a different kind of masculinity and feel like he was coming home. You know how I said Barbie is trans (doll to female)? I thought Ken would get to do the same (doll to male).
But of course, he didn’t. Because masculinity, this film says, is a stain. Being rugged, being butch, having a swagger and an edge to your masculinity – that means you’re a threat. And of course, you will treat every woman around you poorly, throw mockable tantrums (you still don’t get to have real emotions), and try to enact political violence on the world around you.
And the only solution is femininity, because feminine women know best.
-
Let’s go back to that pit of vipers disguised as an office. For months they gaslit me about being too loud, too careless, bad at my job. I got smaller. Quieter. Sadder. Meeker. Lesser. Then my manager let it slip – I was aggressive, she said, when I expressed the mildest little bit of confusion. She was afraid of me.
And that’s when I realised that I’d done nothing wrong. I’d simply had the temerity to be masculine, to be rugged, to have a bit of swagger and pride in myself, on terms that were my own and not those of the feminine women who set the tone for the office.
There is absolutely a toxic femininity. The society we live in allows women power and viciousness if they use it in a sufficiently feminine way, and many women jump at the chance. They berate their husbands and sons for not being manly enough. They bully women who don’t live up to their standards. They viciously turn on people who won’t fit into the gendered hierarchy that they benefit from.
Sometimes they decide to be inclusive, and they extend their feminism to include Women And Femmes. Or AFABs. And every ugly queer looks at that and goes, not for me then. Because they are only interested in people who aren’t stained.
-
That’s who Barbie seems to consciously set its Barbies up to be, when they react with horror and disgust to our lead Barbie’s malfunction. And yet, in the end, we return almost entirely to the status quo – just with a couple of weak little apologies, one to weird Barbie and one to Ken, to try and patch up the original problem.
And it doesn’t. Because Ken has a comedy breakdown, has to cast off his rugged masculinity and his swagger (both of which were purely comedic in the first place), and he has to believe that he is someone without them. He returns clean of any stain, in a pink sweater proclaiming him to be Kenough. His masculinity is, once more, on the terms of feminine women.
Johannes T. Evans, a writer of fantasy, erotica, and non-fiction, writes more eloquently than I can about masculinities that aren’t for or about women, and the violence that happens when women try to force it. The film sets this up as the right thing to do by portraying Ken as dominator and romantic aggressor. It’s not.
Meanwhile, the man in a suit who pulls the strings is more or less forgotten. That is a pretty on-the-nose metaphor, but not one I think was intended. Women of a certain femininity, a certain race, a certain class – the kind of women who are all on board with toxic femininity – will happily overlook the sins of men of a similar class who do gender correctly. In the same breath, they’ll come down hard on Black masculinities and other masculinities of colour, trans masculinities, queer and disabled and fat and ugly masculinities, and call them creepy, aggressive, pathetic.
Do Ken’s feelings matter? This film doesn’t seem to think they do. They’re a potential threat, or they’re comedic, or they’re an obstacle to be overcome. Which is, coincidentally, exactly how the patriarchy treats men’s feelings. Toxic masculinity says boys don’t cry. Toxic masculinity says caring too much is silly, or girly, or funny. Toxic masculinity says that anger is the only acceptable emotion, but only if it’s domineering in a socially-sanctioned manner, coming from a man with power already.
Toxic femininity agrees, with an additional nasty overtone of mocking men for not having it figured out the way they think women do.
Look, women can have power over men in the real world, not just in Barbieland. None of that diminishes the very real grip of patriarchy, the very real experience of misogyny. But you cannot solve toxic masculinity with sufficient application of toxic femininity.
-
And now I come, via a circuitous route, to Allan. Because he is very, very clearly meant to be there for the queers of this world. Even if I hadn’t seen an interview talking about it, I would’ve known from the first glimpse of his funky print short-sleeve button-down, the ubiquitous uniform of the unthreateningly dapper soft butch.3 And then they gave him a bow tie for the dance, and, well, I’ve been on the internet in the last fifteen years. And then he begged to get out of Kendom.
And he was just There except when he needed to solve a problem or be kind of a joke. It’s like they went, oh yeah! Queer people exist, too! (See those two obviously gay Kens in the outcast house). They’re here! #Representation!
#Representation isn’t enough. And, of course, then Allan disappears into the all-encompassing pink jumpsuit of the girly SWAT team. Women and femmes. What does Allan want? Who is he? Would he like to exist on his own terms, rather than on the sufferance of his more powerful feminine or masculine neighbours? Can he vote?
3 This is not to denigrate people who like them! But we are talking about media here. #Representation. And this look is used to signal masculinity in a way that doesn’t stain. It’s not an accident that Ken is also wearing a short-sleeved button down at the beginning.
-
Here in the real world, though, I don’t need him. I exist on my own terms, swagger and all. I get to have complicated feelings about power and gender and the relationality of the two. I get to be ugly. I get to avoid those feminine things that feel like shackles. I get to be butch. Even when I’m feminine, I’m feminine in a butch way. My masculinity is a threat, in a way, to those who would wrong me and my fellow freaks; but it’s also warm, welcoming, compassionate, gentle. Masculinity has just as much room for all of those things as femininity.
Do I think Barbie is a bad film? No. It’s a fun toy advert disguised as entry-level feminism. It was never going to satisfy me, a person who has been forced as a condition of survival to level up my gender and feminist theory far, far beyond it. It had flashes of brilliance. The first half of it set up a truly amazing film. But I came out of it with my butch little heart aching, and I know the only response to that.
It’s defiance.
I’m stained by gender, and that’s okay. After all, what is a dye? It’s a stain that’s on purpose.
The year is 20FarTooRecentForComfort, and I am wearing sharp shirts and chinos. My hair is short, with an undercut. I walk with a swagger. My voice is loud by accident, and as deep as I can make it on purpose.
I am working in an office. The office is full of women. Some of them are traditionally feminine. Some of them are goth feminine. Some of them are feminine in the way that wears heavy walking boots to the office. Some of them are fat, or women of colour, or older. They all smile widely and greet each other enthusiastically. The few men in the office play by their rules.
And they are vicious.
-
Look, I didn’t go into Barbie expecting my butch little heart to come out fulfilled. I started out thinking I might dress up to go see it in the dress I’ve been making, which has a galaxy print corded bodice and a long gored skirt. Then that started to feel uncomfortable and I thought about soft pastel masc, with my trans flag coloured short-sleeve button-down and light blue shorts.
Then I realised that I was gonna need armour. The sharp shirts I wore in 20FTRFC don’t fit anymore, but I’m more comfortable in a more grungy butch mode anyway. So a flannel shirt and ripped denim it was. And god, I’m glad.
-
Is Barbie worth watching? I mean, it’s great for what it is, which is a toy advert doing entry-level feminism. There are these occasional flashes of satirical brilliance, and for the first half of the film I genuinely thought it was going to do something groundbreaking. Then it settled for chanting ‘EVERY WOMAN IS BEAUTIFUL BUT BEING A WOMAN IS HARD’ over the sounds of the more interesting film it could have been being manhandled back into its box. Which was somewhat disappointing.
What I did like, and was genuinely impressed by, was the fact that Barbie is trans (she was, after all, ADAC – assigned doll at creation!), and that plotline feels very real and true. Like that’s how it works! Everything is grand1 and then you start having weird thoughts and then your body changes in weird ways and nothing WORKS like it did and everyone around you is disgusted and you try really hard to go back to how it was but you CAN’TYOUCANTYOUCANT. And people want you to just be normal but you CAN’T.
And then you accept it and go get the appropriate healthcare and it feels great.
Like, that’s a trans narrative! That can’t not be a trans narrative! Fuck yeah!!
And yet it manages to be a trans narrative without carrying any stain of masculinity. Barbie is stereotypical Barbie, feminine and pretty, and then she transitions to a human woman who is also feminine and pretty in a very slightly different way.
1 Everything is not necessarily grand, because little kids can smell weird on you before you can
-
The trans community periodically breaks out into vicious intracommunity wars about who is more oppressed: trans femmes or trans mascs. We bandy about statistics about murder and rape, we tell childhood anecdotes about bullying and microaggressions, we tell each other to stay in our lane and not talk over each other.
For the record, this is stupid battle of the sexes nonsense from a cisnormative world that we don’t need to be buying into.
Gender stains. Every trans person knows this. Trying to present as your true gender while your body won’t be like you need it to be feels like walking around with a big stain on your shirt. Trying to hide your true gender feels like walking around trying to cover up a big stain on your back.
And to the transphobe cult, we’re all dirty. The different sects phrase it in different ways, but that’s what it comes down to: we disgust them. All of us. We have too many of the wrong kinds of gendered behaviours and characteristics. We blur boundaries they’ve often cut themselves down to live within. We are, indelibly, stained by both the genders we chose and the genders we didn’t.
Let’s illustrate this with an example. The TERF sect of the transphobe cult likes to pretend that it wants to rescue those poor lost little girls duped into being trans. But what happens if someone comes to them and says this is them, they took hormones or had surgery and they were wrong, they need rescuing? Does the TERF sect welcome them with open arms?
Nah, don’t be stupid. Even if such people are useful to make a rhetorical point or to use as a legal bludgeon, they will always be freaks to the believers. They are indelibly stained by the masculinity they took on, ruined women, fallen women. And the TERFs are also very happy to join with other sects who don’t want women stained by masculinity, such as conservative Christians who want their perfect subservient wives.
Another example. It’s low hanging fruit, but it’s an obvious example. The number one thing that transphobes of all sects say to trans women to try and hurt them is, ‘you’ll always be a man, you’ll never be a woman.’ Stained by manhood again, even though this time it was involuntary. But what was it like when these women were still trying to pass as men? Well, back then, they were being punished for being too girly, for being ‘failed men.’
And another! Have you ever noticed something about all the #Representation the trans community has been getting over the last few years? The women are very feminine, the men very masculine. Occasionally someone is pre-transition. And the non-binary people are skinny, flat-chested, short-haired, with high voices and clear skin. Nobody is stained.
-
In Barbieland, all the Barbies are pretty and feminine and all the Kens are masculine in a soft, unthreatening way. They wear pink and pastels, they are ripped but not rugged. Their hair is short. None of the Barbies have visible muscles; all of the Kens do. It is a perfect paradise of gender dimorphism.
In Barbieland, there is a script and everyone follows it, and as long as you do, everything is wonderful. You smile widely, you wear a pretty outfit, you have your perfect breakfast, and you can just float down off the roof. You dance the night away and then start again, until someone says the Wrong thing. Has doubts. Is uncomfortable. And has the nerve to say so.
Then the music stops and everyone is staring until they find a shitty excuse to cover it up, and then everything goes on like before, but everything has changed. And when they try to talk about it, people react with horror. And the only person who might be able to understand is a freak.
This is excellent, biting satire. This rings true with my experience as a brainweird trans queer.
There is the kernel of a truly excellent film within Barbie. Sometime around the halfway point, the film starts to manhandle its better self into a box and bury it deep beneath sparkly pink grave dirt. And by the end, it has completely copped out of its cooler, more radical ideas, and simply caves to a simplistic battle of the sexes model and a return to the status quo.
The moment Barbie lost me was when Barbie, in the midst of her existential crisis, sobs that she’s ugly. The voiceover has a clever little quip about Margot Robbie being the wrong person to cast for this point, and the human woman comforting her has this realisation of oh god, if even a doll feels like this… and she snaps and starts telling the truth about all the cognitive dissonance of being a woman.
I’m not going to argue with that rant, because it’s true. But what if, instead of that little quip, before that rant, the sentiment had instead been, ‘Oh, if even a doll, made to be the perfect woman, can feel this way, maybe it’s not worth it. What if the answer is, sure, maybe you’re ugly. So what?’? What if we went from there?
-
Ugly wasn’t the word people called me as a child. They usually went for disgusting. Disgusting because of my hairy legs, my unplucked eyebrows, the completely benign skin issue on my hands. Suspect, because of my boyish clothes and inability to respond correctly to questions about boys or clothes or makeup or pop songs, and just, always, not one of us. Fat, sometimes, or in danger of becoming fat.
Ugly was always there, though, under the surface. People calling me homophobic slurs did so because I was too butch. Stained by masculinity. Feminists are all ugly lesbians, no offence, my sociology teacher said, staring directly at me, the only person willing to admit to being a feminist in A-level sociology. (I’m bored, I said. No offence.)
Feeling like you look good is hard, in the barb(i)ed wire border zones of gender. We’ve got this sort of sliding scale of formality, whereby at the lower rungs you can get away with blurring the boundaries, but the more formal you get, the more gendered the clothes are, and the harder it is to find things that fit both your body and your soul.
The only way out is to look past what you were taught about what’s ugly. And it’s something that you learn in community, in defiance. Queers have been doing this work for years. So have disabled people, people of colour, fat people. It was in the school of defiance that I learned how to wear masculinity with a swagger, with pride, with love and joy.
-
Barbie has fat Barbie, disabled Barbie, black Barbie, trans Barbie. It even has queer Barbie insomuch as our lead Barbie reads very queer, whether gay or asexual. It does not have ugly Barbie. Even weird Barbie2 is made-up in pink and skirts, and she gets more put-together as the film goes on.
We at least get a pre-teen girl in jeans and a black, shapeless hoody. Well, until she gets to Barbieland, whereupon she appears progressively more femme. More pretty. I remember people trying to make me dress like that.
What if, instead of saying, ‘of course you’re beautiful,’ the film had said, ‘fuck it, let’s be ugly’? And the Barbies – and their human friends – chose whether they wanted to stay made-up and pretty, or branch out into other aesthetics. Goth. Grunge. Queer. Butch. Masc.
Oh wait.
Masculinity is a stain, isn’t it? And we can’t have girls getting dirty like the boys.
2 Played, for the record, by a vocal transphobe.
-
Here I need to talk about Ken. I’ve seen people saying that men need to go see Barbie, because they will learn an important lesson about toxic masculinity. I’ve also seen men upset because they don’t like its portrayal of men. And sure, some of those men are the worst kinds. But I am, in general, more in the latter camp.
Sure, ‘Ken gets radicalised’ is a funny plot, and one that makes a degree of sense in the world as set up. He’s deeply naïve and feels disrespected. Okay, I guess. I’ve also seen someone say that it’s actually a critique of the types of feminism that hold that women can do no wrong and an inverted patriarchy is desirable, in that he displays what happens when someone gets to act on that urge. (I don’t think that message lands at all.)
But you know what I was thinking, right up to the point where he was like, ‘ah yes, I love patriarchy’? I was looking at this man who’s only ever been a pretty plastic trophy get a glimpse of a different kind of masculinity and feel like he was coming home. You know how I said Barbie is trans (doll to female)? I thought Ken would get to do the same (doll to male).
But of course, he didn’t. Because masculinity, this film says, is a stain. Being rugged, being butch, having a swagger and an edge to your masculinity – that means you’re a threat. And of course, you will treat every woman around you poorly, throw mockable tantrums (you still don’t get to have real emotions), and try to enact political violence on the world around you.
And the only solution is femininity, because feminine women know best.
-
Let’s go back to that pit of vipers disguised as an office. For months they gaslit me about being too loud, too careless, bad at my job. I got smaller. Quieter. Sadder. Meeker. Lesser. Then my manager let it slip – I was aggressive, she said, when I expressed the mildest little bit of confusion. She was afraid of me.
And that’s when I realised that I’d done nothing wrong. I’d simply had the temerity to be masculine, to be rugged, to have a bit of swagger and pride in myself, on terms that were my own and not those of the feminine women who set the tone for the office.
There is absolutely a toxic femininity. The society we live in allows women power and viciousness if they use it in a sufficiently feminine way, and many women jump at the chance. They berate their husbands and sons for not being manly enough. They bully women who don’t live up to their standards. They viciously turn on people who won’t fit into the gendered hierarchy that they benefit from.
Sometimes they decide to be inclusive, and they extend their feminism to include Women And Femmes. Or AFABs. And every ugly queer looks at that and goes, not for me then. Because they are only interested in people who aren’t stained.
-
That’s who Barbie seems to consciously set its Barbies up to be, when they react with horror and disgust to our lead Barbie’s malfunction. And yet, in the end, we return almost entirely to the status quo – just with a couple of weak little apologies, one to weird Barbie and one to Ken, to try and patch up the original problem.
And it doesn’t. Because Ken has a comedy breakdown, has to cast off his rugged masculinity and his swagger (both of which were purely comedic in the first place), and he has to believe that he is someone without them. He returns clean of any stain, in a pink sweater proclaiming him to be Kenough. His masculinity is, once more, on the terms of feminine women.
Johannes T. Evans, a writer of fantasy, erotica, and non-fiction, writes more eloquently than I can about masculinities that aren’t for or about women, and the violence that happens when women try to force it. The film sets this up as the right thing to do by portraying Ken as dominator and romantic aggressor. It’s not.
Meanwhile, the man in a suit who pulls the strings is more or less forgotten. That is a pretty on-the-nose metaphor, but not one I think was intended. Women of a certain femininity, a certain race, a certain class – the kind of women who are all on board with toxic femininity – will happily overlook the sins of men of a similar class who do gender correctly. In the same breath, they’ll come down hard on Black masculinities and other masculinities of colour, trans masculinities, queer and disabled and fat and ugly masculinities, and call them creepy, aggressive, pathetic.
Do Ken’s feelings matter? This film doesn’t seem to think they do. They’re a potential threat, or they’re comedic, or they’re an obstacle to be overcome. Which is, coincidentally, exactly how the patriarchy treats men’s feelings. Toxic masculinity says boys don’t cry. Toxic masculinity says caring too much is silly, or girly, or funny. Toxic masculinity says that anger is the only acceptable emotion, but only if it’s domineering in a socially-sanctioned manner, coming from a man with power already.
Toxic femininity agrees, with an additional nasty overtone of mocking men for not having it figured out the way they think women do.
Look, women can have power over men in the real world, not just in Barbieland. None of that diminishes the very real grip of patriarchy, the very real experience of misogyny. But you cannot solve toxic masculinity with sufficient application of toxic femininity.
-
And now I come, via a circuitous route, to Allan. Because he is very, very clearly meant to be there for the queers of this world. Even if I hadn’t seen an interview talking about it, I would’ve known from the first glimpse of his funky print short-sleeve button-down, the ubiquitous uniform of the unthreateningly dapper soft butch.3 And then they gave him a bow tie for the dance, and, well, I’ve been on the internet in the last fifteen years. And then he begged to get out of Kendom.
And he was just There except when he needed to solve a problem or be kind of a joke. It’s like they went, oh yeah! Queer people exist, too! (See those two obviously gay Kens in the outcast house). They’re here! #Representation!
#Representation isn’t enough. And, of course, then Allan disappears into the all-encompassing pink jumpsuit of the girly SWAT team. Women and femmes. What does Allan want? Who is he? Would he like to exist on his own terms, rather than on the sufferance of his more powerful feminine or masculine neighbours? Can he vote?
3 This is not to denigrate people who like them! But we are talking about media here. #Representation. And this look is used to signal masculinity in a way that doesn’t stain. It’s not an accident that Ken is also wearing a short-sleeved button down at the beginning.
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Here in the real world, though, I don’t need him. I exist on my own terms, swagger and all. I get to have complicated feelings about power and gender and the relationality of the two. I get to be ugly. I get to avoid those feminine things that feel like shackles. I get to be butch. Even when I’m feminine, I’m feminine in a butch way. My masculinity is a threat, in a way, to those who would wrong me and my fellow freaks; but it’s also warm, welcoming, compassionate, gentle. Masculinity has just as much room for all of those things as femininity.
Do I think Barbie is a bad film? No. It’s a fun toy advert disguised as entry-level feminism. It was never going to satisfy me, a person who has been forced as a condition of survival to level up my gender and feminist theory far, far beyond it. It had flashes of brilliance. The first half of it set up a truly amazing film. But I came out of it with my butch little heart aching, and I know the only response to that.
It’s defiance.
I’m stained by gender, and that’s okay. After all, what is a dye? It’s a stain that’s on purpose.
