Barbie is stunning in stilettos but could she ever be a mother?

Kimberly Ells

July 26, 2023 7 Reactions

The rest of the movie unfolds like this: Barbie lives blissfully in Barbieland where Barbies run everything, but because of a rift in the cosmos Barbie ends up in the real world where everything is run by men. She’s horrified, but Ken (who was a purposeless accessory in Barbieland) loves this new world and embraces “the patriarchy” with a vengeance. The juxtaposition of the woman-run world and the man-run world is supposed to fill us with indignation about the state of women in the world today.

But here’s the thing. If babies have been struck from the script of humanity—as was deftly done in the skull-crushing prologue—it doesn’t really matter who runs anything. If Barbies lack genitals (as they do in Barbieland) and there are no babies on the way, life loses massive meaning. Mothering disappears, fathering disappears, and the need for cooperative roles focused on the well-being of children disappears. In that case, yes, patriarchy-hating Barbie has a great point and Barbies might as well take over the world in an avalanche of pink.

But see, that’s not how the world really is. The movie tried yet again to do what radical feminism has tried to do for the past 70 years -- sidestep the fact that babies exist, that babies come from mothers, and that the kind of mothering a child receives largely determines the child’s success in every measurable way for the rest of her life.

What rarely seems to occur to women who make these kinds of movies is that “the patriarchy” may exist for the purpose of serving, helping, and supporting women and the children they bear.

The movie attempts to show that women in the real world are purposeless accessories if they’re not sitting in a boardroom. But they’re not. When a woman has a baby, and most women do, she is needed as the mother of that child. In fact, you might say that she is essential. Of course, she is highly capable of contributing and having purpose in other ways including the business sector or any other sector, but her child might need her more than Goldman Sachs needs her for part of her life. If a woman is not sitting in a boardroom, it doesn’t mean she’s sitting around in a purposeless, powerless stupor crimping her hair or shopping for stilettos. The fact is, she has supreme purpose and matchless power.

If it truly didn’t matter who cared for a child, we could just ship children off to boot camps (or bash their heads in), Barbie could dominate the boardroom, and the Kens of the world could endlessly play the guitar and ride horses, as they do in the movie. But because the cooperative anatomy of men and women in the real world creates babies, babies must be dealt with.

And being able to deal with them well is what makes a person a grown up.

At the end of the movie, Barbie gets a vagina. My guess is that when she figures out what it’s for and a baby comes out of it, she’ll really be wishing Ken was around. But Barbie and Ken spend much of the movie fighting over which one of them gets to live in the dreamhouse. It’s Ken who finally says, “I always thought this would be our house.”

But that isn’t the answer for modern Barbie. There can’t be cooperation and complementarity and equal partnership worked out in a house together. No, there must be endless competing for the throne.

Barbie and Ken need to figure out that the throne is a loveseat, and there’s room for two.

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Kimberly Ells is the author of The Invincible Family. Follow her at Invincible Family Substack.