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

• Legend in the making: Marta. Rapinoe. Hegerberg. Hamm. Chastain—just a small handful of the names that come to mind when you think of iconic World Cup appearances. Now there’s a new name to add to that list: Caicedo.

  You might have first noticed Linda Caicedo on Sunday, when she scored a beautiful goal for Colombia in its group-stage match against South Korea. It was an exclamation point on Caicedo’s World Cup official debut. But what makes her first cap so special is that she’s now the first player in history to score in THREE World Cups the same year.

  How is that possible? Well, in case you’re not breathing cut grass and soccer ball leather 24/7, you’re definitely not aware of the Under-20 and Under-17 World Cup games that took place earlier this year. Caicedo, who is now 18, competed in both and performed so impressively, she was brought onto Las Cafeteras’ main roster for the Women’s World Cup.

  But her story is deeper than soccer. Born in Valle del Cauca, Columbia, Caicedo started her professional soccer career at just 14 with America de Cali Femenino. But just one year later, Caicedo was diagnosed with ovarian cancer; she didn’t know if she would play again. After surgery and treatment she went into remission and went on to be the top-ranked player in Copa America 2022 and helped Colombia qualify for the 2023 World Cup—something the team hadn’t done since 2015.

  And it’s not just Colombian fans who see her potential. The second she turned 18, Caicedo was scooped up by global powerhouse Real Madrid, a team that closed out its previous season as number two in its league. (Caicedo had also been courted by Barcelona, the number one team in the league.) As a sports director at a Colombian radio station told the AP, Caicedo “is everybody’s hope. Linda is Colombia’s promise.”

THE INTENSITY! THE DRIVE! THE FUTURE! (IMAGE BY PATRICIA PEREZ FERRARO VIA GETTY IMAGES)

AND:

• Thirteen schools in the East Ramapo School District in New York—home to over 9,000 mainly Black and Latine students—have been cited for having unsafe drinking water. In a letter to Governor Hochul, the New York Civil Liberties Union likened the water situation in East Ramapo to that of Flint, Michigan, mentioning that “lead in the water at East Ramapo public schools was discovered seven years ago, yet it remains unaddressed.”

• Republicans in the Ohio legislature tried to sneak through a new measure to prevent voters from changing the state’s abortion policy. But Ohioans aren’t having it.

• Swimmer Katie Ledecky is making history! Her gold medal in the women’s 1500 meter at the World Aquatics Championships this morning means she is now tied with Michael Phelps for most individual world golds. One more and she will surpass the water GOAT.

• Just when you think it’s not possible, Texas governor Greg Abbott descends into a layer of hell so deep even Dante Alighieri is asking, “Where are we?”

THINK PINK

This Barbie Is a Community Organizer

Consciousness-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.

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.

• South Korea’s Casey Phair (who trains in New Jersey, woo!) is the youngest person ever to compete in a Women’s World Cup at only 16 years old.

• In another heartwarming record breaker, the Philippines won its first-ever World Cup match against co-host nation New Zealand.

• Not interested in what’s happening on the pitch? Fear not: Writer Lindsay Gibbs reported on all of the good, bad, and sexist behind-the-scenes machinations leading up to this year’s Cup. And most importantly, she breaks down the math on all that prize money.

You can tune into Fox Sports and FS1, or stream games on YouTube TV. Here’s the match lineup for this week!

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