How predictable was it that the new Barbie film would be a vehicle for the worst anti-man prejudices of the modern era, with every male character either an idiot, bigot or loser? Sarah Vine gives her verdict in the Mail, saying that she feels sorry “for those who subscribe to this nonsense — and for the young men growing up in a world that tells them they’re worthless”. Here’s an excerpt.
Every one of the screens in the place had been commandeered by Barbie. I took my daughter Bea, 20, with me — partly because she’d nagged me half to death about coming, partly as an unsullied Gen Z counterpoint to my grumpy mummy stance on Barbie.
Despite the tagline — “If you hate Barbie, this is the film for you” — I didn’t really think I was likely to be the target audience. And so it transpired. She loved every second; me, not so much.
My main criticism, actually, has nothing to do with the subject matter. Barbie or no Barbie, it’s not intrinsically that good a film. It’s uneven, disjointed, the plot makes no real sense — and the dead hand of corporate America weighs heavily upon it.
For sure, Mattel is superficially mocked in the shape of a bumbling CEO and his be-suited sidekicks. But the opening scene, in which a group of little girls smash their boring ‘old‑fashioned’ dolls’ heads in, with alarming violence, at the appearance of their Barbie messiah, is actually quite sinister. As is the appearance of the ‘ghost’ of Ruth Handler, Barbie’s inventor, as some sort of God-like figure.
But my main objection is that Barbie is not really a film about Barbie at all. It’s one hour and 54 minutes of extended misandry, dressed up with a few fun dance routines and one or two (granted fairly decent) jokes.
It’s a deeply anti-man movie, an extension of all that TikTok feminism that paints any form of masculinity — other than the most anodyne — as toxic and predatory, and frames women’s liberation not as a movement based on achieving equality between the sexes but as a cultural revenge vehicle designed to write men out of the story altogether.
Every male character is either an idiot, a bigot or a sad, rather pathetic loser. If the roles were reversed, and a male director made a film about how all women were hysterical, neurotic, gold-digging witches, it would be denounced — quite rightly — as deeply offensive and sexist.
In a nutshell, Barbie and Ken set off on an adventure to the real world to discover the source of Barbie’s sudden and uncharacteristic anxiety. Barbie gets a nasty shock — she’s not as universally popular as she imagined. Ken, on the other hand, has a tremendous time, plugging into the macho culture of LA and discovering that there is such a thing called the ‘patriarchy’.
He then turns into a ‘real man’ (again, sketched in the most one‑dimensional of clichés), goes back to Barbie Land, organises the equivalent of an incel uprising (quite literally, given Ken’s lack of tackle) — and brainwashes all the Barbies into becoming his willing slaves. Strong Andrew Tate vibes, put it that way.
Queen Barbie, a.k.a. Margot Robbie, must then mobilise a counter-revolution, which she does with the help of her human friends — mother and daughter duo Gloria and Sasha. Using their Barbie wiles, they put the Kens back in their boxes. The film ends with her checking into a gynaecology clinic, presumably so she can become a ‘real’ woman.
It only goes to further confirm the infamous double standards of woke culture, where despite the railing against ‘oppressive’ stereotypes, all the worst stereotypes are levelled at any demographic group (men, white people, older people etc.) seen as falling into the facile ‘privileged’ class.
Read More: Barbie is a “Deeply Anti-Man Movie
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