Barbie is a community organizer
Hey Meteor readers, I hope you all enjoyed Barbenheimer weekend. I’m sure Greta Gerwig did, as she watched her film become the biggest box office opening for a female director ever. And I personally am just glad the world is finally getting on board with liking Barbie, an agenda I have been pushing since 1997. In today’s newsletter, we are spotlighting the World Cup, shaking our heads at Greg Abbott again, and discussing the power of community organizing in Barbieland. You didn’t think you’d only get one Barbie newsletter, did you? Cleaning my Misty Copeland Barbie, Shannon Melero WHAT’S GOING ON
THE INTENSITY! THE DRIVE! THE FUTURE! (IMAGE BY PATRICIA PEREZ FERRARO VIA GETTY IMAGES) AND:
THINK PINKThis Barbie Is a Community OrganizerConsciousness-raising was effective in Barbieland. I bet it would be here, too.BY SAMHITA MUKHOPADHYAY (IMAGE BY THE CHOSUNILBO VIA GETTY IMAGES) SPOILERS AHEAD There has been no shortage of ink spilled about the cultural, political, social, and feminist meaning of the new Barbie movie directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie. The fantastical pink plastic joyride is many things: a box office record breaker; an exploration of Barbie’s legacy; a meditation on gender and masculinity; a rigorous look at the impossible standards we hold women to; and a referendum on easy narratives about girl power. This was all a surprise to me—I had walked into Barbie with a good bit of skepticism. Barbie, the doll, was never a feminist mascot to me, even if she had certain qualities that were radical, especially for her time. At the end of the day, she represented the exact untenable beauty standards that grated at me as a young woman. My protests started young: I shaved all my Barbie’s heads, something that still horrifies my mother. (To be fair, I later shaved my own head as well—it was the ’90s!) But Barbie tackles my ’90s feminist judgments head-on—implying that simply hating Barbie was also limited in its scope. The movie ultimately sends the message that the problem isn’t other women—it’s the system. Midway through, America Ferrera’s character Gloria gives a powerful speech about the competing pressures of being a woman that serves as a turning point in the film, a profoundly earnest scene in what is up to that moment airy, humorous fare. She tells a despondent Robbie, “It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.” Barbie has an awakening at this moment, what feminists including my friend Courtney Martin have called the “click moment”: the moment you realize you have been living a limited version of yourself thanks to the patriarchy™ and that feminism is a real and tangible thing that can make your life better. So the Barbies hatch a plot to convince other Barbies who have been brainwashed that they need to think for themselves, not in the service of their beer-drinking, Godfather-watching counterparts. They quickly come to their senses and band together to overthrow the Kens and, literally, rewrite the Constitution. And that’s the truly radical thing about Barbie. Like the feminists of the 1970s, who used consciousness-raising circles to let women air their grievances and figure out what to do next, the film uses coming together as Step One. Step Two is overthrowing the patriarchy. Before the film came out, the right was stressed about the movie being anti-man or too “woke.” They were right to be worried about this doll movie—but less for those reasons than for the road map it makes. As we navigate the aggressive assault on women’s rights, Barbie perhaps gives us a path forward: When we share our stories and come together—we can make anything happen. That is a lesson in community organizing and the power of democratic majorities we’d do well to consider. PHOTO BY HEATHER HAZZAN Samhita Mukhopadhyay is a writer, editor, and speaker. She is the former Executive Editor of Teen Vogue and is the co-editor of Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance and Revolution in Trump’s America and the author of Outdated: Why Dating is Ruining Your Love Life, and the forthcoming book, The Myth of Making It. AROUND THE WORLD CUP ⚽️If you’ve been waking up at all hours of the night to catch live matches, I salute you. If not, here’s a quick rundown of what the world’s best soccer players are getting into.
You can tune into Fox Sports and FS1, or stream games on YouTube TV. Here’s the match lineup for this week! FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? Sign up for your own copy, sent Tuesdays and Thursdays.
|