While the color white has typically stood for women’s rights to vote, speak out, and be heard in the political process, Greta Gerwig’s summer smash movie, Barbie, colorized in its multiple hues of pink, makes one wonder if perhaps pink is perhaps the new white, or white’s newest sister. While I saw this movie with my two twenty something year old daughters in early August, I see as of now, (late October), that it’s still actively playing in many movie theaters. What was it that Gerwig so epically hit on? There was certainly nostalgia for middle-age women like myself, and for the younger generations, but there was something more, it was about the truth of what it’s still like to be a female in the 21st century.
While of course I knew Barbie was about Barbie, and let’s not forget Ken, I was pleasantly surprised at how Barbie grappled with real life feminist issues that we as a culture still regularly confront today, such as access to equal jobs, pay, and treatment as our male counterparts. Since Matel first released the Barbie doll on March 9, 1959, she has come a long way both in having more realistic body proportions and updated professional aspirations. Young girls can learn that they too can be anything from an astronaut to a vetenarian to the president of our nation. Over the years, more racially diverse Barbie dolls have become easily available, as have Barbie dolls with disabilities.
The problem, as Gerwig so poignantly highlights, is not so much an issue with Barbie, as it is with our larger culture that continues to regularly set up many obstacles for half the population—the female half. When Barbie becomes human in the movie, she quickly learns that she cannot run around in her cool, sexy magenta cowboy outfit with tons of dangling fringe in public without receiving unwanted and unnerving looks and cat calls from men. She also learns that women do not have the same access to all jobs as men, from the male sanitation workers who whistle at her to the men’s only club at Matel where we see solely men at the board meetings. We might also wonder what happens to all those women who go on to have babies and can’t afford dependable childcare, thus leaving them with fewer good financial options to say the least.
While girls can dream, many women must deal with some harsh realities of being adult females. Some may have better educational and employment options, but all face some form of inequality or even discrimination at some point in their lives, despite the many laws now on the books attempting to prevent just that.
Huge congratulations to Gerwig for getting out this pivotal message of outrage over real gender inequities through such a fun, campy movie.
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