Robin Harris

Here are some of the ideas I saw Gerwig playing with in the Barbie movie:
Modernity is really weird and asks us to be men and women in a vacuum, without reference to any reality that could ground or orient us. It reminded me of @zugzwanged’s idea of gender in zero gravity.

Ok I have so many thoughts, I’m not sure I can collect them yet. I’m going to be chewing on this for a while, but anyone who thinks this movie is woke propaganda is just not paying attention.

Societies that become zero-sum games between the sexes end up being a lose-lose for everyone, whether it’s patriarchy or matriarchy (you have to read a little between the lines to see the latter in this movie). Modern culture requires women to be an impossible combination of things: powerful but also unintimidating, sexy but also serious, intelligent but not critical, a nurturing mother but also a powerful career-woman. It then punishes them for not living up to the standard. Feminism (maybe specifically 3rd wave) didn’t succeed in empowering women at all; it just gave women more ways to fail, more ways to be commoditized. It failed precisely because it did not give women anything real to ground to, or orient their womanhood to. The way out of this mess is NOT—and this is where you have to give Gerwig a ton of credit—to “make your own meaning.” It is to pay attention to the givenness of your design and submit yourself to who you were created to be. Gerwig is still working within a modern feminist framework, so there is still a sense in which “becoming a maker instead of an object” is a choice, maybe not quite a calling. But Gerwig is seeing a lot of things clearly, including, especially, the whiff of natural law at the end. Gerwig is meeting women where they are: exhausted with impossible standards, ashamed at never measuring up, and totally disoriented from reality. Within that framework she is saying something really refreshing, something essentially conservative: the path to reorientation is your design, and design is given, not self-made.