Barbie's Missed Opportunity
A 'feminist' movie--about a girls' toy--that ignores what's going on with girls today
It took me a long time to getting around to watching ‘Barbie’ because I wasn’t about to pay money to see it. I had read various articles about the film before its release, and they only verified that I was not going to like it. So, once it was released on DVD I got on the library waiting list, and was finally able to (hate)watch it recently. So, this ‘review’ may not be timely, but it is Women’s History Month and the DEI Awards Oscars are coming up, so what the heck.
I’ve never been a Barbie fan. I didn’t play with Barbies as a boy—unless my girl friends forced me to. I always found the taking-off and putting-on of the clothes aggravating. (They are ill-fitting and really not made well!) I did buy the Earring Magic Ken doll when it came out (I was 22 at the time) because I thought it was HILARIOUS.
[Incidentally, Earring Magic Ken was terribly miscast in the film. Was Trevor Donovan not available?!]
So it was more as a collector of pop culture artifacts and toy historian that I had a general curiosity about the Barbie movie. I had read about Barbie creator Ruth Handler many years ago and found her life story fascinating, so I was intrigued when I learned that she was going to be featured in the plot. Portrayed by Rhea Perlman, she gets an ample amount of screen time—but the movie only scratches the surface of her story. Rhea-as-‘Ruth’ briefly mentions that she had a double mastectomy, but this fact calls for much more than a passing line.
The history: Ruth Handler dreamed up the idea for an adult woman doll as an alternative to the baby dolls that little girls were offered. At the 1959 Toy Fair where Barbie was introduced, prospective buyers didn’t understand the concept.
"Ruth, little girls want baby dolls," one buyer explained. "They want to pretend to be mommies."
"No, they don't," Ruth answered. "They want to pretend to be bigger girls."1
Mattel executives had initially balked at Barbie, too—a doll with breasts was unseemly! But how else could a girl envision her future self unless she saw an example of a woman, breasts and all?
A girl could daydream about the woman she would become, what job she would work or what clothes she would wear. A baby doll suggested one future; a Barbie doll suggested all of them.
“The whole idea was that a little girl could dream dreams of growing up, and every grown-up that she saw had breasts,” said Handler.2
We know where the story goes next: Barbie became a big-selling hit. And yes, Ruth Handler was diagnosed with breast cancer in the 1970’s, which led to her getting a mastectomy.
But the story doesn’t end there.
Ruth Handler went back to the proverbial drawing board. Unhappy with the quality of the breast prostheses available at that time, she decided to make her own:
Handler had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 1970 and struggled to find a prosthetic breast after treatment. “I had been fighting to be a respected female executive all my life, and when I lost my breast it was as if I had lost my femininity.” For her, it was all connected.
To get her femininity back, she founded Nearly Me, one of the first prosthetic companies not to treat the left and right breasts as simply interchangeable. Handler was suddenly in sales again. She toured America talking about the importance of early detection, long before annual clinical breast exams were the standard. She went on The Merv Griffin Show and insisted the famous talk show host feel the Nearly Me she was wearing. Betty Ford wore a Nearly Me. If a mastectomy suggested the end of femininity, Nearly Me proposed a way to get it back. It was Handler’s second million-dollar business.3
As she explained to a reporter in the early 1980s, “When I conceived Barbie, I believed it was important to a little girl’s self-esteem to play with a doll that has breasts. Now I find it even more important to return that self-esteem to women who have lost theirs.”4
Fast forward to today, when we are seeing an epidemic of young, healthy girls electing to get ‘top surgery’ in their desire to opt out of being female.
(Here’s the data for the chart above.)
TikTok videos are celebrating and promoting these 'gender affirming care' surgeries. And Teen Vogue is glorifying it and glamorizing it, via articles like this fawning profile of Hollywood actress Liv Hewson:
And, just to be clear, unlike Ellen ‘Elliot’ Page, Liv Hewson did not have her breasts removed because she believes she is a man. No, she did it because she is ‘non-binary’.5
“You’ve been making women feel bad about themselves since you were invented!” —Sasha, the teen girl to Barbie in the movie.
OK, but what is making young women and girls feel bad about themselves today? Is it still Barbie, or something more insidious? Isn’t that worth exploring?
Girls are being told there is a ‘solution’ to the anxiety of puberty, and that boys are better at being girls:
Even if you’re a teenage girl who’s the girliest of girls—a wannabe Barbie, as it were— you could still lose a beauty pageant (and the accompanying scholarship that goes along with it) to a boy.
I’m not suggesting Barbie needed to be a breast fest, but if you are including in your ‘meta’ story the creator of the most famous girls’ toy of all time, you have to acknowledge the cruel irony that became a through-line in Handler’s life and work. Handler herself acknowledged this:
“Somehow, my life has revolved around breasts,” Handler said on American television matter-of-factly in 1994.6
Greta Gerwig did her research on Ruth Handler in writing the film, but somehow none of this leapt to her attention? She didn’t connect the dots to Handler’s story and the tragedy of what’s going on with girls today? There was no ‘aha moment’?
“It is literally impossible to be a woman.”—America Ferrara’s character in Barbie.
And yet! Mattel and Warner Bros. gave Hari Nef honorary womanhood because he grew his hair out and put on a dress. Seems like the message of the movie is that being a woman is pretty simple. [I suppose it’s no surprise that Mattel is onboard with this, since they made a Laverne Cox Barbie.] If we could talk to Ruth Handler’s ghost, as the movie imagines, I wonder what she would think about casting a man as one of her Barbies?
What would Ruth Handler have to say about the current state of ‘Pride’, in which—like Legos—women lop off breasts and men have surgeries to add them, and then get the honor of celebrating this on the White House lawn.
What would she think of…this spectacle at a Let Women Speak rally in New York City?
I wonder what Ruth Handler would think about the detransitioners, who as confused teenage girls were allowed to make the life-altering decision to cut off their breasts.
What would Handler the breast cancer survivor make of girls, with their whole lives ahead of them, blithely electing to cut off their healthy breasts? What would she make of the media ignoring this tragedy and deciding the real problem that needs to be addressed is trans women being able to breastfeed?
Greta Gerwig could have made a film about all of this, but instead she decided the biggest issue facing females was…the Patriarchy. (Reasonable fodder, I suppose…as long as you acknowledge that Martine Rothblatt and Jennifer Pritzker are part of the Patriarchy.)
There is a thought-provoking movie to be made about Barbie, Ruth Handler, and girls…but that’s not the one that Greta Gerwig chose to make.
Further reading:
‘An explosion’: what is behind the rise in girls questioning their gender identity?
TikTok Doctor Performed Breast Removal on “Trans” 13 Year Old Girl
Is Violent Porn Making Girls Identify as Transgender?
Dear BBC, you've got your facts wrong about 'trans milk'
https://www.vice.com/en/article/nz8xx8/a-doll-with-breasts-the-radical-legacy-of-barbie
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/ruth-handler-barbie-creator-barbara-b2382149.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/ruth-handler-barbie-creator-barbara-b2382149.html
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/handler-ruth-mosko
She uses they/them pronouns. I refuse to.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/ruth-handler-barbie-creator-barbara-b2382149.html
Gary, this is brilliant. I doubt there's another person in the entire world who has made the profound connections that you did in this piece. I'm old enough to have played with Barbie, but I had no interest in it and only just learned from you the history of Barbie's creator and her fraught, historically relevant relationship to her breasts.
I chose not to see the movie. When it came out, someone directed me to a review by a guy named The Critical Drinker. He loathed it because of its over-the-top misandry, and that was good enough for me. Things I used to find funny, I no longer do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J7aJtGphVs. In my younger days, I was a lesbian supremacist, but over the years my superiority complex faded where men are concerned. Now, when I hear the term "toxic masculinity" I can't help but recall all the shitty relationships I had with women, LOL.
Even if I had watched the film, I would never have made the leap from Barbie, to Barbie's creator, to the quaint custom of "non-binary" women cutting off their breasts in hopes of achieving shame-free sexlessness -- while men get breast implants, steal women's trophies and invade our single-sex spaces.
All of trans ideology is upside down and backwards, but "non-binary" may be its tragic nadir.
Your exquisite sensitivity to this women's issue is very impressive. Thank you. (And thank you as well for the links at the end, which everybody should investigate.)
But of course, it's not just a women's issue, since men are castrating themselves to achieve the same shame-free results.
I've never loved my boobs more than this moment. Seeing Daisy in that photo you posted is so utterly heartbreaking and on the flip side the teen vogue article is... the opposite of everything pure, beautiful, innocent, natural and good. It's an insult to life. On a lighter note I love that Donny Osmond doll. 💜💜💜