It’s a Barbie World: Diving into the Feminine Subconscious of the Barbie Movie
As I am sitting in a crowded, sold out theater late night on a Monday, I look around the room at girls and women of all ages accompanied by their respective ‘Kens’ and ‘Allans.’ Like me, many of us are wearing shades of pink as a tribute to everyone’s favorite or most hated childhood doll. The year is 2023, six years since Donald Trump was elected to office. The past years have been a political blur filled with what has felt like explosions of misogyny and nonstop events that threatened the feeling of safety and hope for many. Each wave of legislation, trials, elections, deaths, and pop culture scandals has been tinged with a knife’s edge of misogyny that has become so prevalent it is practically background noise.
To grow up in this world for so many young women like myself that were sold on feminist ideals is to realize how little anything has changed at all.
Like Barbie sitting at the bus stop, we look at the old women around us and begin to see their magical resilience and beauty. How could anyone possibly make it through this for so long? We wish they could tell us the secret. At a certain point the social structure we live in begins to feel inevitable, yet our lives carry on evolving as we have to overcome again and again.
For some of us the hope for anything else may have been crushed early in life. The incidence of childhood sexual abuse for girls is overwhelming (1 in 5 of us!) along with domestic violence in the home, harassment at school and in the workplace, sexual assault (with the highest incidence being for women under the age of 25), and of course the crushing final blow of entrenched and subtle gender dynamics that leave women stuck being the default caregivers, carriers of the mental load at home, household managers, devalued at work, and the ones left responsible for the emotional and literal caretaking of our society.
By the time a woman reaches 30 it is hard to cope with the emotional pile up of our own coming of age.
Somewhere along the way our dreams for Barbie’s future changed from candy-colored fantasy to sharpie’d out black eyes, jagged haircuts, and throwing Barbie on the roof. It’s all too easy to hate Barbie sometimes. The world is nothing like what we dreamed of and our place in it is a far cry from the center of a glittering disco party where we are just nailing the choreography in sparkly bell-bottoms. That was sadly not what was in store for most of us.
Whatever your relationship with Barbie, the Barbie movie suggests the powerful idea that Barbie is a symbol of what it meant to dream of being a woman when we were just children. As a therapist that works with both girls and women, I think the symbolism of Barbie is quite deep. All toys are symbols and a means of communication for children.
With Barbie it’s clear that somewhere along the way a doll that is intended to merely represent a woman becomes the very space in which we enact our complicated emotions around femininity as we grow into pre-adolescence and beyond.
For some of us now as adults we can’t let Barbie go, we keep a doll in our closet with perfect hair that was left perfectly brushed from our last visit. Perhaps we take her out every now and then and brush her hair again. She is a reminder of wonderful dreams and a lifelong friend. Perhaps we hope to share her with our children, especially imagining our daughters. Barbie is a space to learn how to braid hair, to dress up, to throw parties, have friends, and to dream big dreams.
For others, we may have given our Barbies away. The reality of adulthood hit too soon. We were not allowed to hold onto the fantasy at all. The dreams were quickly swept out of the house in a neat box and replaced with responsibilities. Our imagination was not something that was cultivated, but rather tolerated until it could be neatly put out and replaced with something more useful. Barbie is a fool and a frivolity only tolerated in the very young and if possible skipped altogether for the better of society.
For others yet, perhaps Barbie became a symbol of everything we could not be. Her perfect body is a cruel reminder of teasing at school, feelings of inferiority, a body that simply won’t conform to standards, hair that is not as “good.” Barbie might be evil and we wish to never see her again. She stirs up feelings of rage and disappointment. Barbie is an unmet expectation that we realized too soon was impossible. She is betrayal herself. She is the mean girl in the lunch room and the back-stabbing blonde senators voting against us. We hate her.
Perhaps Barbie is all of these things and that speaks to the complexity of being a woman.
It’s clear to notice that as a young girl, our relationship with Barbie exists purely in our imagination. What we make of her as we grow older speaks volumes as to what our own stories have been and how they change.
It was a powerful feeling to sit in a theater alongside so many people all there with their own memories of Barbie. This was a movie that dove into the subconscious world of latent dreams that women and girls have for the world. A world seen through the female gaze entirely and because of its childlike theme it was unencumbered by the pressure we have as women to “get it right” or do justice to complexity for fear of being seen as an emotional bimbo. Barbie is an emotional bimbo and she still has a powerful story to tell.
The Barbie movie did not need to explain the logic of Barbie, it was speaking in the language of play to an audience of those who had already been there and done that. It’s a visual expression of the unconscious desires from childhood that women have.
To remember that Barbieland existed and spend time with our inner child in the world where men were accessories, marriage was an act of theater, babies popped simply out of a plastic stomach, a career was a world of endless possibility, and a supportive community was abundant feels like a fresh summer breeze after so many years of the suffocating realities we face.
Of course the dreams of a little girl are self-absorbed and naive. Barbie is placed as a perfect main character in a story that is all about her and the things she cares about and we can empathize with her as she begins to grow up. The worries take hold, cellulite appears, and Ken is not that great after all.
To remember the idealism of young girlhood is healing in itself when you are forced to live in a world that constantly pushes you to the side and reminds you of your place as a second class member of society.
For women and girls that process begins so early that we can see the tortured relationship with femininity and womanhood emerging before we are even women at all. To be able to have a movie so aptly capture our mute inner child, perhaps our current inner adolescent that is actively grappling with what it even means to grow up was a healing experience for me and I imagine so many of the other women and girls emerging into and out of the theater in their pink outfits for the next sold out showing.
Society often dismisses pop culture phenomenons like the Barbie movie to merely marketing, escapism, and good timing. However, I think that doesn’t do it justice. There is something to be said for coming to terms with Barbie.
There is something behind the energizing hope of reclaiming our dreams, grieving our own disillusions, and giving ourselves the space to truly imagine a world that our own inner little girl would have been delighted to live in. I wonder what the world would look like if we could all remember what our Barbielands were like.
Perhaps we might realize we are worthy and deserving of our own dreams whether they come true or not. Perhaps it might be easier for us to look at one another and see the little girl inside. Perhaps we might find it easier to respect that for each of us those dreams really were different, but they were all Barbieland and that Barbieland is still a place worth fighting for.