Barbiecalism: A Critical Response to the ^Barbie Movie

Words by Zoe Hollier (she/her)

Allow me to take you back a month—an entire century in media-cycle time—to that pinkified period of Barbiecalism. As momentous as the moon landing and glittering as the Bronze Age, Barbie, a reformed cultural icon, tiptoed her perfectly arched foot into the capitol of our minds and has thus far refused to leave. Her so-called ‘radical wokeism’ (in the words of personally afflicted conservative commentators) instigated an international conversation about womanhood that is infiltrating humanity’s digitised psyches across the globe.

We all relished our participation in this cultural moment, decked out in our finest pink garb to venerate director Greta Gerwig’s feminist manifesto; pleading with our boyfriends and besties to tag along; posting our pinky pics to our stories; consciously and subconsciously urging ^everybody to participate in the cultural phenomenon of ^Barbie.

But we’ve got to ask ourselves: what is it we’re actually participating in and promoting? What are we all influencing each other to take part in? What might be hiding beneath the surface of Barbie’s blinding, glittering pinkness? 

I didn’t like Barbie. I know, I know, hold the tomatoes. I think I must have watched a different movie to everyone else, because what I felt as the credits rolled was not emphatic femininity, but rather concern as to the deeper impacts this film will have on culture, discourse, and feminism as a whole.

You see, the film is outdated. It’s a repackaging of old feminist ideas shoved to the forefront of mainstream discourse, restating and reprioritising second-wave feminism against a modern backdrop. Yes, Barbie was an emblem of feminism—50-odd years ago. Her whole deal is that “women can be anything” (a sentiment the film carries at its heart), which was a radical idea in the 1960s, but does not hold relevance to 21st century feminism.

There has been a cinematic trend of outdated feminism that I’ve noticed these past few years, and my concern only grows as Barbie’s influence continues to grow. 

Remember last year’s craze over Don’t Worry Darling? The shitshow, white woman’s Get Out? Marketed as a modern feminist film, director Olivia Wilde noted the inspiration of Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique—the book that sparked second-wave feminism—and the 1970 film The Stepford Wives; two pieces of media from over 50 years ago. Radical for their time, they assert that women can be more than their prescribed role as the traditional housewife. Is that really a modern conversation? A film released in 2022, headlining issues 50 years its senior—is this really what modern-day feminism is? 

Barbie does the same thing, parroting beginner feminism painted as ‘radical’ and resurrecting old fights to the forefront of media discourse. How many podcasts, opinion pieces (yes, I see the irony), and TikToks have you seen about this film? Feminists are having to reassert old conclusions to those outraged male conservatives just to get any hold of the immense influence this film is having on our mediated world (thanks Ben Shapiro). 

What particularly got to me was America Ferrera’s monologue and the Barbies’ plan to ‘fix patriarchy’. While everyone else in the theatre cried, I was dumbfounded at the simplicity of the film’s culmination: if women only knew the reality of patriarchy, they could solve it and trick men into giving up their ruling dominance because girl power. Seriously? Is that the message of a film released in 2023? I thought we knew this shit already, and at a more complex level than that! 

We must be critical of the media that influences us so we don’t continue to get caught in outdated conversation. Yes, feminism is an ongoing, cumulative process, but there are bigger, more pressing issues to be making headlines, beyond cis and heteronormative idealisations of pinkified, simplified, ‘feminist’ commodity. 

Maybe I’m a bit upset that this is the standard of worldwide-blockbuster-feminist-filmmaking. I thought we were past this sympathetic, antiquated feminism where women spoonfeed men Feminism101 at snail’s pace, praying we may one day get to actually radical and modern fourth-wave feminist conversation. 

But, alas, here we are again.