Barbie, a feminist icon?

Barbie (2023) Director: Greta Gerwig

There is a difference between fiction and reality. Like that, there is a stark difference between biology and sociology, between what one wants and what one gets, between doing good and receiving good things and between male and female. What started a plaything is now an icon of feminity?

Life used to be simpler. Boys would play with soldiers and girls with dolls. Maybe it is a realisation movie. The feminists, after fighting all these years for equal rights, against what they perceived as male toxicity or patriarchal thumping, are now realising that they had pushed their agenda too far. The feminist fight has gone too long. Some quarters will swear they have achieved more than they bargained for. Others will assert that they had already been liberated in the 7th century with the introduction of the latest Abrahamic religion, and there is nothing else to fight for anymore. Is Barbie really a feminist icon? Or are they merely another device to exploit people's gullibility to add to the umpteen wants they think they cannot live without? Barbie is if people did not realise, just a figment of one's imagination. It morphed from the inspiration of an adult-themed tabloid, Bild, named Bild Lilli. Lilli had been described as a 'pornographic caricature of a gold-digging exhibitionist and a floozy. In 1964, Mattel bought the copyrights to Bild Lilli, and its manufacturing in Germany ceased. Over the years, instead of empowering young girls, I think it gave young girls body dysmorphia issues.

Of course, over the years, Mattel tried to make Barbie inclusive by creating her line of dolls with themes of the marginalised and the handicapped and in keeping with the times to be inclusive, gender identity-wise. Mattel was happy to include them as more varieties would mean more children harassing their parents for more Barbie dolls.

The film is definitely not children's fare. With such sexual innuendos in its dialogue, it is far from a preteen movie. With a PG-13 rating, the target audience cannot be children. It must be aimed at the 90s kids who grew up with Barbie to know how they had been hoodwinked with a dream of a feminist icon which went too far.

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