It's really not about you, Ken
Barbie, sex, gender and reality
“What is the patriarchy? Even I don’t really understand it…” Piers Morgan
Psychic man spreaders have not enjoyed Barbie the movie. In a long piece for the New York Post last week the tabloid editor turned TV presenter Piers Morgan gave Greta Gerwig’s film both rhetorical barrels. Like Elon Musk (X-ing on X) Morgan took issue with the word “patriarchy” being used by the characters. Once upon a time, he told his readers, it had been used strictly to mean “the time that men were the titular heads of most families and organizations”**, then along came the women:
But in recent times, the concept of “the patriarchy” has been hijacked and corrupted by feminazis to suggest that every aspect of life and society is dominated by powerful, privileged males over subjugated, underprivileged females.
Morgan’s assault on “radical feminists” was based, he claimed, on their distortion of how society works because:
The real world I occupy is chock-full of confident, high-achieving women who would laugh at such a derisory mischaracterization of their status in life.
According to Morgan this feminazi misrepresentation of how the real world actually operates leads to the film-makers effectively propagandising for the establishment of a matriarchy every bit as dreadful as the imagined (but non existent) patriarchy:
The movie’s clear message is that the only solution to this dreadful patriarchal state of affairs is for women to rule the world, and preferably to do so on their own without horrible men to ruin both the planet and them.
Not only is the film urging a deeply undesirable social outcome but, almost as bad, its very existence just shows how plain unfair feminazis and the critical classes are being to chap like him:
The bottom line is this: If I made a movie mocking women as useless dunderheads, constantly attacking “the matriarchy,” and depicting all things feminist as toxic bulls–t, I wouldn’t just be canceled, I’d be executed.
However he ends with a ho-ho…
But the good news is that if the trans lobby has lost their way, women will still be dominated by biological men going forward — they’ll just be identifying as women!
(**Wikipedia’s definition - as does just about everyone else’s - differs from Morgan’s: ‘Patriarchy is a social system in which positions of dominance and privilege are primarily held by men. It is used, both as a technical anthropological term’.)
Yeah right. but what is Barbie REALLY about?
Piers Morgan is a man who could read War and Peace and swear it was a book about whales. So as those who have seen it will know, Barbie simply is NOT a film about men. There may somewhere be a movie like the one he thinks he saw (perhaps the late Valerie Solanas obliged), but Barbie isn’t it. It isn’t about establishing a matriarchy and depriving sac-holders like Morgan of his yabbing rights. It isn’t about hating men.
If men such as Morgan and Ben Shapiro, the influential American conservative commentator he quotes approvingly (and who set fire to Barbies in his office as a YouTube stunt to protest against the film), believe Barbie’s premise is - in Shapiro’s words - “ literally, the only way you can have a happy world is if the women ignore the men and the men ignore the women,” it’s their anxious narcissism that drives their thinking. These are old whines in new bottles.
Other more trendy woke-battling right-wing male writers have been keen to discover a significant 2023 culture wars element in the film by attributing a trans activist motivation to it - not least because there’s a single transgender actor in it. The Trumpist broadcaster Charlie Kirk discerned “trans propaganda in this hyper-feminine, ultra-pink propaganda thing [that has] really been taken over by the trans mafia.” Meanwhile Matt Walsh, who made the supposedly gender critical movie What Is a Woman?, managed to see in Barbie “the most aggressively anti-man, feminist propaganda fest ever put to film.” A reminder (should one have been needed in the wake of the revoking of Roe v Wade), that the conservative right is no friend of feminism.
No, Barbie is a clever, funny film about women, sex, gender, fantasy and reality. It is almost entirely concerned with womens’ and girls’ relationship to themselves, albeit in a society that is residually patriarchal (and do I really have to run the stats again to prove this?) A film about contradictions, Barbie is not a kids’ film, nor is it even a kids’ film for adults. It’s an adult’s film for adults.
As I write this I see Boris Johnson has been to see Barbie, has thought about it for a few seconds and worked up his column for the Mail. We older men clearly have a lot invested in this discussion. So let’s discuss.