The above is a drawing I did a few years ago. I’m struggling with the Barbie Movie. I have not seen it yet. I will see it. As an observer of the culture and as a feminist, I need to see how the Oscar winning director Great Gerwig approached this. My distaste for the doll goes back to my childhood—I refused to have any dolls, let alone a Barbie, and had a bear house, playing with small bears. I don’t have a problem with dolls, just one that has historically made little girls feel insecure and unhappy with their bodies. One that historically prescribed women to the home. I know there are career Barbies now, and that’s progress, as is the fact there is diversity in the dolls produced. But what about the body shape? I read Gerwig sought to make a feminist film, and Mattel, who produced it, pushed back on some of her ideas. Here is an
Time to expand even more, I think. I'll be seeing the movie soon, taking a 10-year-old lad for whom I bought a Barbie doll house a year or two ago, because he was dying to have it.
The man reading the newspaper while the mother makes the meal is distressingly like my 1950s childhood. For the shopping, we'd pile into the (seatbeltless) car and drive to the market, where mom snd the kids shopped while he sat in the car and listened to the radio.
Both our adult children participated in Barbenheimer this weekend and had a blast. I'm looking forward to seeing both movies, just separately. I never really loved Barbie but didn't really hate her eithe. I love Greta Gerwig and trust her story telling style. I hear the Barbie film is uplifting and positive. We can't get enough of uplifting and positive these days, eh? I say keep and open mind and go see the film....and what about Gretchen Whitmer. Great read: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/style/gretchen-whitmer-barbie.html
Barbie is not something I struggle with anymore. I am enjoying people my age reliving their childhood through this movie. If it smacks one thing or another, my hope is people don’t politicize it. For goodness sakes, it is just a movie.
Greta Gerwig shared all of your concerns about Barbie, Liza, and gave voice to every last one of them in the film. I saw it in a theatre filled with pink-clad women of all ages, and they roared approval and laughter. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the strong sisterhood of Barbies the film presents, and the riotous good time they have triumphing over Kendom. And now on to Oppenheimer. Boom!
I have always been appalled by Barbie and didn’t allow my children ( now 48,45,42 and 35) to have one. I saw Barbie as promoting racism, sexism and body hatred for girls. I saw Disney this way too! ( sheesh am I really an American?...I struggle with that) However I do plan to see the movie because it looks like fun and who cares I’m blond)I also plan to see Oppenheimer!! Love the cartoons and look forward to your take in the movie !! You inspire me!!
I love the cartoons, Liza. I had a Barbie. I agree that her body presented an impossible model of what girls were supposed to live up to. And for that reason, and the abundance of pink, I’m not planning to see the movie. Am waiting for Oppenheimer to reach our local theater! 🍿
I had no interest in seeing the Barbie movie until I heard some conservatives calling it woke. This intrigued me as I love to be woken up from our brainwashed culture. I was caught off guard and found my self in tears over America Ferrera’s monologue as
“Gloria — centered on all the traps that accompany womanhood, weighed down by impossible societal expectations” ~ew.com. It’s a lot to take in and a lot to unpack. There were a couple of spots that seemed to go too far into villainizing men, but they seemed to get it all balanced in the end. I’d have to see again to really analyze it. All in all I think it’s worth seeing and likely not what you’d expect from Mattel.
Thanks for your thoughts, some I agree with. I guess it's better than what we might have expected from Matell, true! Greta pushed back on many things, apparently.
Liza, thank you for this very important conversation. The willingness of so many women to embrace the icons of acceptable womanhood, so aptly reflected in your drawings and accompanying captions, is indeed disturbing. In my novel (currently serializing on Substack) my protagonist is recruited for a Barbie advertisement. The scene is narrated from the POV of an eight year old girl who is innately resistant to the dominant narrative. As you know, comedy and tragedy are closely linked and, in this scene, I have deployed both in an effort to illustrate the disturbing role women play in upholding the patriarchy. If you're interested, it's the last scene in chapter 4, and you can read it here for free: https://dlleeauthor.substack.com/p/sisterly-love-chapter-4
Thank you! I didn't know you were serializing your novel, how interesting. I will def read what you share here, thank you! And it sounds like we agree on a lot.
Perhaps we make too much of toys. Kids tend to go their own way, regardless of what they play with early in life. When she was little, my daughter Alec played with Barbie. But when she graduated from high school in 2008, she asked me if I'd go with her to talk to an Army recruiter. A few weeks later, she enlisted and went on to serve as an MP for five years, including tours in South Korea and Afghanistan.
Regarding J. Robert Oppenheimer, it would be a mistake to tag him as a ban-the bomber. Not only did he play a key role in the development of the atomic bomb, but he supported the development of tactical nuclear weapons in the late Forties. Oppenheimer did balk at the hydrogen bomb, opposing its development even though the USSR was known to be working on it. He also promoted a scheme to turn over control of all things nuclear to some international body, which goes to show that high intelligence does not necessarily imply wisdom.
As it happens, the Bomb played a role in my own family history. Shortly after VE Day, my father, then serving in the US Coast Guard, was transferred from New York to San Diego, where hundreds of coastguardsmen were being trained to crew landing craft for Operation Downfall, the projected invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. Fortunately for him and millions of other Americans in uniform, the work of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues made that operation unnecessary.
I am glad to know your father was not deployed to invade Japan. My uncle served in the army and was kill in Germany right after the end of the war. He was 19. He did not benefit from Oppenheimer's work, sadly.
Well, neither did the tens of thousands of Japanese who were killed in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They died so that my father and tens of thousands of other Americans might live. War is horribly unfair. It picks out the valiant, the innocent, and the unlucky, and kills them off. I wore the uniform for 28 years, and I’ve yet to come to terms with that. I don’t mean that I regret my service: It was, barring marriage and fatherhood, the biggest thing I’ve done in my life. Why that is I think is explained in a short story I wrote a few years ago and recently shared here on Substack:
Time to expand even more, I think. I'll be seeing the movie soon, taking a 10-year-old lad for whom I bought a Barbie doll house a year or two ago, because he was dying to have it.
Lisa, did you see the imax version?
no! I would like to, however.
The man reading the newspaper while the mother makes the meal is distressingly like my 1950s childhood. For the shopping, we'd pile into the (seatbeltless) car and drive to the market, where mom snd the kids shopped while he sat in the car and listened to the radio.
Both our adult children participated in Barbenheimer this weekend and had a blast. I'm looking forward to seeing both movies, just separately. I never really loved Barbie but didn't really hate her eithe. I love Greta Gerwig and trust her story telling style. I hear the Barbie film is uplifting and positive. We can't get enough of uplifting and positive these days, eh? I say keep and open mind and go see the film....and what about Gretchen Whitmer. Great read: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/style/gretchen-whitmer-barbie.html
Thank you! I hope you had a good weekend watching movies. I love that we as a country are going to the theater again!
Barbie is not something I struggle with anymore. I am enjoying people my age reliving their childhood through this movie. If it smacks one thing or another, my hope is people don’t politicize it. For goodness sakes, it is just a movie.
Greta Gerwig shared all of your concerns about Barbie, Liza, and gave voice to every last one of them in the film. I saw it in a theatre filled with pink-clad women of all ages, and they roared approval and laughter. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the strong sisterhood of Barbies the film presents, and the riotous good time they have triumphing over Kendom. And now on to Oppenheimer. Boom!
Well, laughter is good, and I had some laughs!
I have always been appalled by Barbie and didn’t allow my children ( now 48,45,42 and 35) to have one. I saw Barbie as promoting racism, sexism and body hatred for girls. I saw Disney this way too! ( sheesh am I really an American?...I struggle with that) However I do plan to see the movie because it looks like fun and who cares I’m blond)I also plan to see Oppenheimer!! Love the cartoons and look forward to your take in the movie !! You inspire me!!
Thanks! Enjoy!
I love the cartoons, Liza. I had a Barbie. I agree that her body presented an impossible model of what girls were supposed to live up to. And for that reason, and the abundance of pink, I’m not planning to see the movie. Am waiting for Oppenheimer to reach our local theater! 🍿
I had no interest in seeing the Barbie movie until I heard some conservatives calling it woke. This intrigued me as I love to be woken up from our brainwashed culture. I was caught off guard and found my self in tears over America Ferrera’s monologue as
“Gloria — centered on all the traps that accompany womanhood, weighed down by impossible societal expectations” ~ew.com. It’s a lot to take in and a lot to unpack. There were a couple of spots that seemed to go too far into villainizing men, but they seemed to get it all balanced in the end. I’d have to see again to really analyze it. All in all I think it’s worth seeing and likely not what you’d expect from Mattel.
Thanks for your thoughts, some I agree with. I guess it's better than what we might have expected from Matell, true! Greta pushed back on many things, apparently.
Liza, thank you for this very important conversation. The willingness of so many women to embrace the icons of acceptable womanhood, so aptly reflected in your drawings and accompanying captions, is indeed disturbing. In my novel (currently serializing on Substack) my protagonist is recruited for a Barbie advertisement. The scene is narrated from the POV of an eight year old girl who is innately resistant to the dominant narrative. As you know, comedy and tragedy are closely linked and, in this scene, I have deployed both in an effort to illustrate the disturbing role women play in upholding the patriarchy. If you're interested, it's the last scene in chapter 4, and you can read it here for free: https://dlleeauthor.substack.com/p/sisterly-love-chapter-4
Thank you! I didn't know you were serializing your novel, how interesting. I will def read what you share here, thank you! And it sounds like we agree on a lot.
Perhaps we make too much of toys. Kids tend to go their own way, regardless of what they play with early in life. When she was little, my daughter Alec played with Barbie. But when she graduated from high school in 2008, she asked me if I'd go with her to talk to an Army recruiter. A few weeks later, she enlisted and went on to serve as an MP for five years, including tours in South Korea and Afghanistan.
Regarding J. Robert Oppenheimer, it would be a mistake to tag him as a ban-the bomber. Not only did he play a key role in the development of the atomic bomb, but he supported the development of tactical nuclear weapons in the late Forties. Oppenheimer did balk at the hydrogen bomb, opposing its development even though the USSR was known to be working on it. He also promoted a scheme to turn over control of all things nuclear to some international body, which goes to show that high intelligence does not necessarily imply wisdom.
As it happens, the Bomb played a role in my own family history. Shortly after VE Day, my father, then serving in the US Coast Guard, was transferred from New York to San Diego, where hundreds of coastguardsmen were being trained to crew landing craft for Operation Downfall, the projected invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. Fortunately for him and millions of other Americans in uniform, the work of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues made that operation unnecessary.
I am glad to know your father was not deployed to invade Japan. My uncle served in the army and was kill in Germany right after the end of the war. He was 19. He did not benefit from Oppenheimer's work, sadly.
Well, neither did the tens of thousands of Japanese who were killed in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They died so that my father and tens of thousands of other Americans might live. War is horribly unfair. It picks out the valiant, the innocent, and the unlucky, and kills them off. I wore the uniform for 28 years, and I’ve yet to come to terms with that. I don’t mean that I regret my service: It was, barring marriage and fatherhood, the biggest thing I’ve done in my life. Why that is I think is explained in a short story I wrote a few years ago and recently shared here on Substack:
https://unwokeindianaag.substack.com/p/survivor