*CW: violence, rape, murder, genocide, slavery
I wasn’t going to go see Barbie. My body shame resurfaced earlier this summer, so I couldn’t bear to subject myself to the “never enough” messages from my youth while viewing Margot Robbie’s impossible perfection—perfection according to white, patriarchal, ableist, cisheteronormative beauty standards, that is.
Plus, relentless shame comes with being socialized to complete deference: “his will over yours,” “your body doesn’t belong to you,” “self-love is selfishness,” “your flesh is sin,” “you can’t trust yourself,” “surrender fully to him,” “put others before yourself,” “it’s not about you,” “your suffering is for his glory,” and “avoid punishment by doing what he wants.” Barbie lived too close to this old, deep, embodied shame of erased agency, and I just couldn’t face her.
And then I heard that conservative men were big mad about the film.
And then I heard that incels were calling Margot Robbie “mid.”
And THEN I heard my boys ask me to take them to see Barbie as they played the Barbie Girl remake with Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice.
“Let’s do it.”
We found our seats and watched as people joined our anticipation. I wore my pink flower top with puff sleeves, and James lamented that he didn’t have a pink button-up shirt like the teenage boys walking by.
I don’t have much to add to the discourse praising the film for its rich satire, its epistemology of relatedness, its Jungian framework of integrated realms, its validation of the ordinary human existence, its dig at capitalist achievement, its liberation lesson of living as one’s true, agentic self while fighting social structures that keep us from doing so, and its pragmatic conclusion of anti-oppression work, namely that we “have to start somewhere.”
But like, sure, it’s easy to try and be okay with your ordinary cellulite life when you’re not trying to survive. Patriarchy’s realities are about people’s very survival because in essence patriarchy is about power over bodies. We’re not just talking about, “You aren’t pretty enough.” We’re talking about force and manipulation. We’re talking about exploitative labor. Human property. Sexual coercion. Rape. Forced reproduction. Murder. We’re talking about collusion with white supremacy, colonization, genocide, chattel slavery, capitalism, and imperialism.
Of course Gloria was depressed.
Before I go there, I’ll start somewhere beautiful.
Flesh of my Flesh
I’ll start with my boys, the flesh-and-bones bodies of me. That I saw Barbie with my two sons at their request bears meaning I can’t yet comprehend. It’s like their souls somehow wanted their mother to keep healing.
My favorite parts during the film were when each of them whispered to me. As Ken began to discover just how good he has it in the real world - and how bad Barbie has it - James leaned over to say,
“Mom, Ken likes it here.”
“Yes, James. Yes he does.”
While grown conservative men and their women choose to miss the glaring point of the film, James understood. The real world is a place where Barbie is ogled and Ken is admired, where Barbie is punished for doing something about a man’s assault on her, where men make decisions for women, and where the gods are male. This is 101 stuff. Kids get it. Adults don’t want to get it because then they’d have to see themselves differently. Truthfully.
Later in Barblieland, John wanted to comfort me. When Gloria says, “By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance of living under patriarchy, you robbed it of its power,” I became entirely overwhelmed. Again. This was my lesson. When you integrate the contradicting truths of you, whether experiences, beliefs, needs, thoughts, or emotions, you reduce their control over you - and others’ control over you, too. You learn to see yourself differently. Truthfully.
“Mom, you don’t have to cry. It’s just a movie.”
“Thank you, John.” And it’s just my life, I muttered to myself.
James reflected the real world back to me. John reflected the fantasy world back to me. It’s just a movie, but it’s also just real life. It’s toys and models, but it’s also my story. It’s a reflective world, but it’s also an envisaged one. The power of play, the power of toys, the power of film, the power of stories. The power of bodies.
The stories in my body say that the film’s real world was a walk in the park compared to real life patriarchy.
Real Life Patriarchy is Vile
Barbie didn’t begin to show the horrors of patriarchy. Of course, if it had, the film would not be appropriate for wide audiences. So I’ll name it here:
Real life patriarchy erases human subjectivity to impose power over bodies, which is much viler than Barbie could ever show.
In Understanding Patriarchy, bell hooks says:
"Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence."
It’s not only that men are pervasively “in charge” in this world, a place that Ken certainly likes. It’s also that their structures of “in-charge-ness” have resulted in systematized impositions over bodies, minds, spirits, wills, and lands for millennia.
Patriarchy keeps men in power with shifting versions of masculinity that degrade every hint of whatever people think is “feminine” at the time, even though gendered characteristics are entirely made up. Did you know pink was once a so-called boy’s color? And how are people going to say that men are the stronger sex when women regularly push 8 pounds of flesh out their narrow gate in a grueling and gruesome fashion? Who is more protective and providing than a mother? And what’s more made up than men’s suppression of their own tears?
Hardly a role reversal, when the Barbies were in charge of Barbieland, the Kens were just “there,” politely ignored, unnecessary to the storyline, mere accessories, sort of how I played with Barbies. Ken *maybe* came out of the toy box every third time. Wait, did I even have a Ken?
Imagine if simply being left alone to do as you please was women’s and LGBTQ+ people’s experience under the patriarchy. A Black gay man was just stabbed to death in NYC for voguing.
This discrepancy between real and imagined life became somewhat evident when the storyline contrasted the so-called matriarchy of Barbieland with the watered-down patriarchy of Kendom. The patriarchal Kens in Kendom brainwashed Barbies out of their social positions and into sexualized, objectified servitude, a slightly more accurate portrayal of subjugation.
Throughout the film, we watch Ken desperately seeking out Barbie for his sense of worth to the extent that he becomes cruel. And he’s seeking not just Barbie’s friendship, but her affection, romance, and sex. It’s as if Kens think they are entitled to that. As if they use us to feel good. It’s as if they feel like our worth diminishes as soon as they achieve us. And as if they feel like they have no worth if we refuse them.
In Kendom everyone seeks out the Kens’ approval. The Kens need other Kens’ acceptance to maintain their sense of status and power but also to avoid violence.
Just days ago I witnessed a gaggle of real life men on social media telling a woman that they shouldn’t have to intervene when other men are sexually harassing women in public because then they’d risk a violent confrontation with the men. The sheer number of men who said to women, “It’s on you” tells you everything you need to know about patriarchy. People believe men’s violence is women’s responsibility. Women were chiming in with patriarchal nonsense, as they sometimes do, saying, “Those guys were just trying to start a conversation” and “Can’t you take a compliment?” These statements are manipulative because they twist the meaning and function of the interaction to preserve the illusion of men’s innocence.
Sexual harassment is an act of dominance. In catcalling and making comments about women’s bodies, men are enacting power over women’s bodies: they incite fear in our bodies, as if watching us squirm is the turn-on; they put themselves in positions to judge our bodies; and they impose public attention to our bodies without our consent. All of it is power. To boot, the subsequent victim blaming, accountability dodging, and gaslighting (“You’re overreacting,” “Just don’t let it get to you”) further maintains men’s power.
In a patriarchy women coddle men’s violence, blame themselves and other women, and keep their heads in the sand. It’s easier to deny the truth than to face it. Coming to terms with patriarchal violence means we have to face just how close and vulnerable to violence we are. It’s terrifying.
Any imposition of will, coercively and forcibly so, is distinct to patriarchy, even if a woman is doing it. Because men have long held social positions of power over others, at least dating back to the onset of agrarian life, masculine models of action and penetration have shaped social paradigms of hierarchy and control. The planet is on fire because of our imposition onto bodies of land, air, and water and because of our social models of power-over instead of models of reciprocity, connectivity, and community.
A Black Barbie president sort of symbolized the fact that Black feminists have - and should - lead the way toward upending patriarchal structures with their models of egalitarian community. They argue for an intersectional approach to understanding how all oppression is related. Intersectionality examines the ways that various systems, like education, economics, legal systems, politics, immigration policies, and so forth compound to affect various groups of people in different ways. The developers of this theory in the 1960s and 1970s, like the Combahee River Collective, wanted to make it clear that oppression looks differently for Black men than it does for Black women, and even more complex for Black LGBTQ+ women, immigrants, and so on because white supremacy intersects with the patriarchy, capitalism, colonization, and imperialism.
Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a legal scholar, and Dr. Patricia Hill Collins, a sociologist, were some of the first Black feminists to bring the idea of intersectionality to the academy. The topic of their early papers? Violence and domination. Collins writes about the matrix of domination along interlocking lines of race, gender, and class at individual and systems levels. Crenshaw writes about the sheer difficulty to escape domestic violence when multiple systems converge to oppress women of color. In a more recent interview with a news outlet about school discipline, Kimberlé Crenshaw stated, “Black girls are punished, many times violently so, for questioning and challenging authority, which is something that is often celebrated and encouraged as a sign of intelligence and critical thinking in white boys.” Power over bodies.
Intersectionality means understanding how colonization and patriarchy work together. Some scholars note that colonizers use the same strategies to colonize nations as men use to dominate women, like othering, dehumanization, exploitation, hyper-sexualization and exoticizing, presuming entitlement to bodies, and the maintenance of superiority status. I don’t know what Greta Gerwig was thinking with Gloria’s line about smallpox and Indigenous genocide, but it was a horrific misstep because it glossed over white feminists’ tendency to evade our complicity with colonial white supremacy. I mean, the suffrage movement was explicitly for white women at the expense of Black, Brown, and Indigenous women because we wanted access to the white man’s version of power.
Though I’m not sure of the particular chain of events over the past 10,000 years that led to globally-imperialized domination models over communal, relational, adaptive models of human existence, I do know that religion played a key role. Barbie didn’t exactly go there. What an oversight.
Controlling Bodies with Divine Communication
I look to womanist scholars, mujerista scholars, feminist theologians, and feminist church historians for the corpus of work that explores the relationship with patriarchy and religion. My copy of Jesus and John Wayne: How white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation just arrived in the mail, and from what I can gather, Kristen Kobes Du Mez explores the more recent ways evangelicals’ commitment to patriarchy upholds Christian Nationalism. I can’t yet speak to that.
But I can speak to my experiences with divine communication as an instrument of patriarchal coercion. It’s the “I get to tell you what to do because I know what God wants” approach.
The notion that God speaks to one individual, historically a man, and that individual disseminates “God’s message” to the masses facilitated a top-down model for power and control. The ancient idea that only the important man could enter the sacred part of the temple to meet God didn’t end; it evolved.
People love to tell others what to do, and it’s especially effective when God is supposedly on their side.
Across my lifetime, I’ve had people of all identities and spiritual or faith traditions tell me what God or some sort of spiritual something is saying. Sometimes the messages are solicited, but most of the time they are not. Strangers have told me what my angels are trying to communicate. Friends have told me what “spirit” says, what is “real,” or what God is like. Loved ones have told me what God wants for me. Of course, religious leaders have told me what God does, requires, says, and wants me to do.
And more recently, intuitive women have given me messages from Christina. Like, they feel her and see her precise qualities, without ever having felt or seen her in her lifetime.
I don't balk at divine communication. I balk at any degree of “I’m right” and “You have to” coming from the messenger.
I get it, I’ve reveled in the awe-inspiring mystery of intuitively, psychically, divinely knowing something. It’s astounding when it happens. You feel special. You feel powerful. With this kind of intuitive knowing, you begin to revel in a sense of authority. You imagine how people might begin to defer to you. To listen to you. To need you.
I’ve also been a part of an ideological community that insisted that our system of beliefs about God were the right beliefs. We were going to heaven and others weren’t. You feel special. You feel powerful. With this kind of institutionalized righteousness, you begin revel in a sense of authority. You imagine how people might begin to defer to you. To listen to you. To need you.
I balk at divine messages that are tainted by someone else’s unquestioned interpretation of them. We’re always interpreting. Always. Sometimes it turns out that the messages are simply a matter of a translation misunderstanding. Other times they are a way to have power over me. I once heard a rabbi say that there is evidence that even Moses changed God’s message when coming down from Mt. Sinai. Apparently God told him that the divine communication in the Torah was for everyone, but Moses decided it was just for the men. Even Moses had his interpretations.
Recently, I’ve been listening to a podcast called Data Over Dogma, in which a Biblical scholar, Dan McClellan, interrogates contemporary misinterpretations and mistranslations of the Bible from their original form and context. For example, the sin of Sodom was not homosexuality, but rather men’s gang rape of two male visitors, quite the ultimate display of inhospitality referenced in Ezekiel. Dr. McClellan reinforces a conceptual framework that I use in my own scholarship, that texts’ meanings are negotiated and contestable. He emphasizes that Biblical texts tell us about each author’s meanings, purposes, and experiences, and that a univocal, consistent meaning throughout the Bible simply doesn’t exist. Authors have subjectivity, and readers do, too.
When a person in a position of power fails to acknowledge authors’ subjectivity (i.e., their perspectives, purposes, context, experiences, culture, etc.) or readers’ subjectivity in the interpretation of the texts, he creates a context in which he can more easily coerce people into adhering to his meaning to serve his purposes. He can have power over bodies. Quite frankly, it tastes like fascist authoritarianism. Looking at you, Christian Nationalism.
Kenough
I’m not sure I can adequately describe the terror that takes up residence inside your body when someone imposes their will onto it, whether by force or coercion.
Nor can I describe the pain when realizing all the ways you’ve been told that this is how it should be. Invalidating someone’s subjectivity feels particularly sinister when applied to God: “his will over yours,” “your body doesn’t belong to you,” “self-love is selfishness,” “your flesh is sin,” “you can’t trust yourself,” “surrender fully to him,” “put others before yourself,” “it’s not about you,” “your suffering is for his glory,” and “avoid punishment by doing what he wants.”
Erased subjectivity only leads to power over bodies.
This version of God creates dysfunction. Telling people they can only trust God and not themselves keeps people in a kind of delusion because it keeps people from their truth. They don’t see red flags in authority figures because they learned to suppress their body’s warning signals. They suffer for the Lord to gain a jewel in their crown, but instead of rubies and emeralds, they got anxiety and PTSD. They become shiny, happy people enduring abuse behind closed doors. They twist reality and fantasy. They presume they need permission from their creator to be themselves, as Barbie did.
When you learn that it’s not about you, you begin to treat others the same way, as though it’s not about them. You tell them, “God has a plan” because your version of empathy, salvation, is saving from not delivery through. You place responsibility for your views, emotions, experiences, needs, and agency outside of yourself. You lose your sense of worth. You become simultaneously fragile and aggrandized, like Ken did. Like Trump is. Like many people’s version of God is.
People’s presumed relationship to God affects their relationships with other people. As a Stanford study showed, when people think God is a (white) male who expects deference to his will, they think (white) men should expect deference to their wills, too.
Patriarchal violence thrives on invalidated subjectivities and erased agency. It thrives on submission to the other. It thrives on deference to and approval from men. It thrives on imposed wills and deflected responsibility. It thrives on twisted realities.
Kenough already.
When I play with fantasy and real life, I tell stories of validated subjectivities, of actual empathy and consent. I dream of a world where we learn to integrate what is, confronting every system and structure that keeps us from our and others’ truths. We see our bodies as fundamentally connected to each other and to The Everything.
Instead of divine communication being an instrument that helps us control people, I like to imagine that it helps us experience the realities of this life existence. It helps us know who we are. It helps us navigate our decisions because we can consult the divinity within us. Sometimes we can’t interpret the divine communication right away. We have to wait for life to unfold, for future messages to help us understand. We have to check in with our souls.
In my envisaged world, I imagine notions of gender as truth exposed and truth hidden with no value connected to either, just outer and inner realities that all humans have. There’s no binary of gender attached to human bodies, just a relationship between kinds of truth that interact, move, and transform within each of us.
The masculine part of us is the truth that is exposed, revealed, or birthed into the light. Sometimes the exposed truth of us is nasty, so please don’t assume I’m equating light with good.
The feminine part of us is the truth that is generating, within, not yet revealed, still in the dark. Sometimes the inner truth of us is beautiful, so please don’t assume I’m equating darkness with evil.
When working in relationship, in union, in marriage, all truths of each of us comprise our wholeness - our health. I interpret the gendered meaning of Jesus as the whole, integrated truth borne into the light, the masculine revelation borne from the feminine generativity. The state executed Jesus because truth poses the biggest threat to the Empire’s existence (just look at what’s happening to Florida’s education standards). But truth resurrects, as I’ve written about previously. We can integrate, birth, and resurrect our whole truths, too.
Yes, Ken likes it here. But as Barbie argues, Ken would also like it in a world where he can be all of himself, where he doesn't have to conform to principalities that deceive him into thinking has to be strong, unemotional, secure, objective, aggressive, and in control of others. He would like it in a world where he learns to validate his own subjectivity when he’s not those things. Maybe then will he be able to validate the subjectivity of others and see himself in them. To extend empathy. Maybe then he will see the masculine image of God, the expressions of truth, in others because he was able to see the feminine Imago Dei in himself first.
Maybe then Ken won’t go looking for power over others because he will learn to find the power in himself, the power in his whole truth. Thankfully, Barbie is starting to find hers.