The Economics of the Barbie Movie
She's everything. He's just Ken.
I saw the Barbie movie with my friends right after it come out, and then again last weekend with my mom. Barbie (2023) is a great movie: funny, sweet, heart-warming. I laughed, I cried, I yelled out IT’S THE GUY FROM FLEABAG (the bus rodent). But this isn’t a film studies blog, so: what does the movie say about economics that wasn’t included in last week’s post?
I also liked Oppenheimer and, spoiler alert, I’ll post something about it when I get around to it - I’ve been busy lately so I haven’t had much free time to write. It’s Barbenheimer time after all!
This post contains spoilers for the Barbie movie.
P(anic)-I(‘m Scared)-N(auseous)-K(Death)
Barbie changed everything. Then she changed it all again.(…) She has her own money, her own house, her own career
Narrator in The Barbie Movie
Basically, everything that men do in your world, women do in ours.
Barbie in The Barbie Movie
(Note: I do not condone Lizzo, I just chose the title before she was outed as a creep).
What is the Barbie movie about? Well, Barbie, duh. But here’s a brief summary.
Roughly speaking, the movie follows the titular blonde doll as she goes from living in Barbieland, a matriarchal utopia where the Barbies control all positions of power and influence (because this is a version of the Book of Genesis where God made Eve first), and the Kens merely exist as accesories. And there’s also Allan - he’s Ken’s buddy, and all of Ken’s clothes fit him. But Barbie starts having a crisis that is not-so-subtly a metaphor for puberty, which means she gets sad and physically imperfect, and then has to go to the real world to find whoever is playing with her doll version (that part is very confusing1) and figure out what to do.
Well, Ken (the main Barbie’s individual Ken) tags along, and the two of them enter the real world, where they find out that, unlike Barbieland, the Real World is run by men, and has some pretty nasty stuff going on towards women. Barbie does indeed find the person playing with her, and it’s a disenchanted middle aged man, while Ken gets into Andrew Tate and starts a misogynist version of the January 6th insurrection.
Now that there’s a patriarchy in Barbieland (now called the Kendom - fun fact: it’s called Kenmark in the Danish version), everyone is miserable: the Barbies go from scientists and government officials to feeding them beers and enduring their awful film and music takes, while the Kens are constantly paranoid about their relative status. Taking advantage of this, the Barbies take back Barbieland by empowering women and girls of all ages and sizes, and then Ken reveals that all he’s ever wanted is love from Barbie - but now he considers himself Kenough. Then Barbie becomes a real girl and goes to the gynecologist.
The movie is very very explicitly feminist - to quote one Benjamin Shapiro, “the word patriarchy is used no less than 10 times”. The movie’s plot is both about going from the mostly gender-equal world of childhood into the aggressively gendered world of adults, and about the impact that living in a fundamentally sexist world has on women’s self esteem and self image. Spoiler alert, it’s not great (Margot Robbie actually does not consider herself a good looking woman, for instance).
The actual feminist content of the movie has come under criticism for being “too feminism 101”, while others have complained it’s somehow anti-men to say that the patriarchy as a way of structuring society is bad, and there is also the complaint that the movie is providing cover for a rebrand of an extremely problematic product.
A few weeks ago, I talked briefly about the Disney Princess brand, which was a 2000s project by Disney to sell merchandise aimed at women by profiting off adult women’s childhood nostalgia for Cinderella and The Little Mermaid. But the brand itself came under criticism later for setting a bad example for women due to the shallow, and passive roles the dolls had, as well as the fact they were all fashion dolls conforming to eurocentric beauty standards. Later, Disney attempted to tune up the brand by introducing new, more active princesses (Brave, Frozen, Tangled) that poked fun at genre archetypes, and later, by adding superficial girlboss-y messages to live action movies that fell completely flat for a number of reasons.
Despite the Barbie movie doing a better job at the whole “let’s make a movie about the character that pokes fun at its well known sexist aspects but ultimately reaffirms its role as a positive force for girls and women”, mostly because they had an extremely talented filmmaker make it (Greta Gerwig), it’s also doing it. So Barbie is rebranding, because the controversy has hurt it: sales plummetted by a third between 2011 and 2015, as progressive younger mothers shunned the “bad example” and unrealistic physical goals the doll promoted. This was followed by more emphasis on the career-centric aspects of Barbie, as well as more body-positive dolls. The movie has been a huge hit, and rehabilitated the doll to some extent.
But Barbie has long been at the center of controversy: from the “weight loss advice” doll that promoted not eating, to the Barbie that said math was too hard, to dolls cancelled by weirdo conservative freaks like the pregnant Barbie, the Barbie whose boobs grow, and Feather Earring Ken. But it wouldn’t be very fair to reduce Barbie as just a patriarchal product: Barbie has, one must emphasize, never been married or had children, has always had her own house and her own job (a rarity back in the 50s and 60s), and was one of the first dolls to actually depict adult women and not just babies for little girls to perform motherhood with.
The actual origins of Barbie, allegedly, are that creator Ruth Handler (played by Rhea Perlman of Matilda’s mom fame in the film) noticed her daughter playing with paper dolls that resembled adult women, and decided to produce the doll when she and her husband Elliot (the “EL” in Mattel comes from Elliot Handler) noticed a German doll called Bild Lilli while visiting Germany. Well, Lilli herself had a strange story: she was based on naughty German comics about a prostitute’s exploits, and was initially meant as a toy for adult men, kind of like those Hawaiian dancers on trucks. It was later adopted by women and girls, who wanted to play with an adult woman and not babies (no jokes allowed). And dollhouses, long a Barbie staple, were for the longest time meant to display wealth and not for girls to play with.
Barbie’s feminist bonafides are complicated - but, to quote the movie “she doesn’t control the railways, or the flow of commerce”. Men do.
A Barbie Girl in a Ken’s World
Everything exists to expand and elevate the presence of men, and horses.
Ken in The Barbie Movie.
I’ve written about the gender economics of Barbie before (and about the topic writ large a lot - it dominates my top 10 most covered topics), but I haven’t actually dealt with the concept of “the patriarchy” before directly.
Coming from the Greek word meaning “rule of the father”, and it’s broadly used by feminists to refer to the political, social, and economic systems that put men, overwhelmingly, in positions of power, influence, and status, and create a culture and beliefs that justify it. Ken’s definition would be spot on: everything exists to elevate the status of men and horses, which are merely men extenders.
Barbieworld is originally a strict matriarchy, where women hold all positions of power and authority, control all economic levers, and have center place in culture, status, and prestige - which is broadly very in line with the few observed matriarchies in the world, particularly the Gulf of Guinea:
The female solidarity portrayed in Barbieland is reminiscent of the Gulf of Guinea in earlier centuries. Igbo and Bakweri women harassed men for mistreating their wives, violating market rules or harming their crops. In 19th century Congo-Brazaville, a husband would not take even ‘an egg from her chicken coop’ without permission from his wife. Asante, Igbo and Yoruba women had independent networks. They controlled the markets, set the rules and punished wrongdoers. Banding together, women reprimanded abusive men and traversed great distances as traders. Independently wealthy women marshalled their networks, commercial acumen and linguistic skills to thrive in coastal exports.
The patriarchy has political, economic, and cultural aspects. Politically, very obviously, men hold most positions of influence; economically, well, read my newsletter lol; culturally, that’s interesting. Piers Morgan, a man of unclear profession to me, has said that “If I made a movie that treated women the way Barbie treats men, feminists would want me executed” - well, that’s just every movie ever (except those by Jane Campion).
Culture tends to normalize patriarchal norms in a variety of manners: from parenting, to how respect is distributed, how social approval is granted, how social spaces are designed, etc. Parenting is one item apart because of how disruptive it is on women’s economic lives, but the rest are somewhat simple.
The way public spaces are built and designed mostly corresponds to how men utilize them, both because basically all urban planners were men for most of history but also because of the norm-enforcing aspect of them, which results in a built environment that is inconvenient and often unsafe.
Policing of gender norms has large effects on society: tighter patriarchal environments have lower rates of innovation - “looser cultures”, where norms are more likely to be challenged, also have higher rates of innovation. Obviously this applies to gender norms, and their impact is still felt even in relatively modern societies: inventions and discoveries by women are less likely to be monetized.
Women are perceived as less competent than men, doubly so for women with children, despite being at least or sometimes even more competent. In letters of recommendation for academic economists, men are praised for their talent, and women for their dedication.
Lastly, parenting - I’ve touched upon it on my last post on Barbie (she’s never had children!), and in the past, but it’s worth pointing out how economically important it is: there is a lifelong earnings penalty for women after they have children, there is basically no wage gap between women with no children and men, with or without children, this happens because of both fewer hours worked and not working at all. When women become unexpectedly pregnant, their careers suffer over the long term, much moreso than for planned pregnancies. When a grandmother, who is traditionally a source of childcare, passes away unexpectedly, women’s labor market outcomes worsen significantly, except when there is an available alternative. 2
The issue is that the Barbie movie’s recipe to fight the patriarchy is not accurate: mostly, it comes down to telling women about how bad it is, and then they rise up and overthrhow it. This is known as “gender sensitisation” and, spoiler alert, it doesn’t really work: men don’t like being told that women can do anything they can, and women don’t believe it. Unless society is actually changing, then it’s not really plausible to DEI-train your way to the matriarchy. Of course the Barbies use this as a tool to build a political movevement that enacts actual changes in governance, which is good and smart.
He’s just Ken - and he’s not Kenough
Ken just isn’t something we’re worried about…ever.
CEO of Mattel in The Barbie Movie
For equally self evident and telling reasons, the main locus of discussion of the Barbie movie has been Ken, played (brilliantly) by Ryan Gosling. He has his memes, his Mojo Dojo Casa House, his song - and his issues.
What are men’s issues? There’s plenty, such as literally losing their grip strenght advantage on women, but they mainly relate to education: men are doing consistently worse at school than women, resulting in lifelong penalties to earnings and employment. Men do worse than women at all levels of education, particularly in college: men enroll and graduate higher education at much lower rates. Men also have higher suicide rates, despite women having much worse indicators in terms of mental health - the difference seems to be mostly about mental healthcare, health insurance, and perhaps choice of method. These issues are especially bad for men from the poorest families, even if men still dominate the top spots of society. Overall, this responds to fields where men drew large advantages over women becoming less prominent in the economy. Some of these issues, for instance involving welfare, are due to weird statistical issues, but men are usually behind women in some aspects.
Even if men do hold a disproportionate share of power, wealth, and status in society, there seems to be a large number of men who are falling very much behind. Ignoring these issues isn’t a good idea, and some have blamed them for the radicalization of men into far right, misogynistic belief systems. I don’t think that “men are becoming far right nutjobs because feminists aren’t nice enough” is a correct take - men want their "rightful" place on a social sphere that they were socialized to believe would have them at the top, and instead just spat them out and chewed them out.
Weirdly, the Barbie movie has this as a major plot line: after experiencing the benefits of the patriarchy in the real world, Ken falls into a far-right patriarchal rabbit hole, becomes a Ken’s rights activist and a virulent misogynist, and later takes it to its logical conclusion by attempting a takeover of the government. This tracks the radicalization of actual men online, as well as evidence from men who were exposed to Middle Eastern gender norms (famously not great) bringing them back home. Men who felt “left behind” by the system (i.e. did not get the social status they felt they deserved) were also staunch Trump supporters. Kenuary 6th was an accurate representation of the events!
Conclusion
While Barbie (2023) was not a perfect movie, or a movie that perfeclty encapsulates the realities of feminism (there was no gendered violence, a major concern in the real world), it was pretty good. It took the core concept and integrated it to the premise rather well - although it was obviously not a perfect movie, firstly because it’s a toy commercial and the Kens all turning into domestic abusers wouldn’t have been fun, but also because having Barbieland also grapple with racism or homophobia or class disparities or whatever would have been biting off more than any movie can chew.
And don’t forget to like, share, subscribe, comment, and read previous posts on the economics of Barbie (the doll), the gender pay gap, the two income trap, gender and race disparities, or culture in economics.
It makes perfect sense if you interpret the movie as a Gnostic myth, where Barbie is Jesus, Ruth Handler is the Monad, the other Barbies are the Aeons, Mattel is the Demiurge, and Barbie’s different careers are all aspects of the plenoma. There’s also a real world and a fake world, a connection between genitals and mortality, and an undefined essence for women as vectors of chaos and disruption.
"women as vectors of chaos and disruption"--the Goddess Chaos.