This Barbie... is afraid to hurt Ken's Feelings. Until She's not.

When a woman is afraid to hurt a man's feelings, she does both men AND women a disservice. So how do we stop coddling men when we are afraid not to? We gas each other up and embrace our unlikability.

The following post contains Barbie spoilers, so if you haven’t watched it yet you might want to read this after you do. I also want to thank all of you who upgraded your free subscriptions to paid this week. It meant a lot to me to read your messages these last few days. Your support makes such a difference in my life and in my work. Thank you all very much.

There is a moment in the Barbie movie, just before the climatic Barbieworld battle of the sexes, where Barbie admits that in spite of everything Ken has has done to Barbieworld (turn it into a Kenarchy that subordinates Barbies!) she doesn’t want to hurt Ken’s feelings.

It is not the first time we have seen/heard Barbie react this way to Ken. It’s pretty apparent from the beginning that Barbie is working very hard to gently handle/coddle/pacify Ken — instead of just telling him straight up she doesn’t want to be his girlfriend. And that he’s… annoying.

In fact. She never kicks him out of anywhere even when it’s clear she wants to. Even when he sneaks into her car to join her in the Real World she’s like UGH FINE YOU CAN COME I GUESS EVEN THOUGH YOU WEREN’T INVITED, putting his needs before her own. Mother shit.

All throughout the movie we watch her babysit Ken. Giving him *just enough* of her attention so that he doesn’t feel sad, angry or triggered in any way.

But in the climatic “monologue scene,” referenced above, wherein Gloria (played by America Ferrera) rips into the female experience, suggesting that women can’t have it all because we’re too busy trying to win everyone over, Barbie actually says the words out loud.

But I don’t want to hurt Ken!

But I don’t want to hurt Ken.

“But what about Ken!?”

It is here in this moment, that her reluctance to fight for her Dreamhouse — feels at once upsettingly familiar and frustratingly real. It is also when Gloria looks deep into Barbie’s eyes and says something like:

“But, Barbie. He took your fucking house!”

Twenty-two years ago I dated someone who needed several thousand dollars to pay off his first set of college loans so he could go back to school. (He was quite a bit older than me.) I had the money at the time and paid them ALL off because I loved him and believed in him and wanted him to succeed. The plan was always that he would pay me back when he was done with college and in the career he was working towards securing. He started to pay me back — a hundred bucks here and there — 15 years ago and then stopped. As did all communication between us.

My reluctance to go nuclear on him as the years came and went was par for the course. I didn’t want to emasculate him or make him feel like shit for never paying me back. I didn’t want to… hurt his feelings.

“But what about Ken?”

Finally — as in very recently — I woke up fucking furious. I will not go into the particulars of why because at some point I will write another book about my recent growth spurt, but one trigger led to another and I finally reached my breaking point.

I spent all night formulating a very curt email demanding the money be paid back in full and in the morning, pressed send.

I didn’t ask him to pay me back, this time. I told him. He responded within minutes and apologized. Acknowledged that I was right. That he could afford to pay me back and should have years ago.

A week later he wired me the money.

I was shocked.

Not only because he paid me back but because in his response to mine, he made it clear that for all these years — this money — knowing that he owed me — had been weighing on him, too.

And while he should have been the one who HIT ME UP and not the other way around, I could tell, he was relieved not to owe me anything anymore.

And while I wish we lived in a world where everyone JUST DID THE RIGHT THING, we don’t. So in order to get what is RIGHTFULLY OURS, sometimes we have to write emails or essays s or character monologues about how fucked up this shit really is.

Sometimes we have to make make men uncomfortable. Even men we love.

As Margaret Atwood so succinctly wrote about the gendered experience, “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them,” and while there are no deadly weapons in Barbieland, the tension exists. And it doesn’t take much to trigger the Kens, all of whom are unstable in their dependency on women for attention and eventually go to war over… they don’t really know, actually. They just feel like it’s something they’re supposed to do now that they have a paradigm for Men in Power.

Perhaps Greta Gerwig, just like her heroine, Barbie, and so many women and girls who sat riveted in the audiences of her film this weekend, also struggle with this. Perhaps, Greta, while making this film had to decide whether or not she was cool with pissing a WHOLE LOTTA DUDES OFF. (I’m not on twitter much these days but hoo boy, are some men VERY MAD at this movie.)

The fact that both Barbie, the character and Greta, the filmmaker had to choose between knowingly — willingly — hurting men’s feelings in order to take back/and build their own Barbie Dreamhouse(s) was the coup I found myself cheering for most of all.

Because in my experience, the moment you realize YOU ARE HATED by the very people you have tried SO HARD to be loved by, you are free.

Because now you don’t have to try so hard anymore.

Because the moment a woman realizes that she cannot control the way she is perceived she can finally live her fucking life.

And in Gloria’s monologue, I heard Greta Gerwig giving herself the same pep talk Gloria was giving Barbie and everyone else. Gassing herself up. Because any woman making a movie with that kind of budget/cultural pressure/expectation would absolutely have to.

ED: The fact that every woman/girl I have heard from these last few days mentioned Gloria’s monologue means that regardless of what Barbie we associate ourselves with based on professional and personal appearances, we ALL associate ourselves with Can’t Fuckin’ Win FFS Barbie.

Because under a patriarchal system, we literally can’t.

But here’s the thing: neither can men.

They can appear to.

But in the end, the pressure they put on themselves to BE BETTER STRONGER MORE SUCCESSFUL, POWERFUL, ETC ultimately makes them feel worse. And then they end up fighting each other for no reason, exerting hollow power as a defense mechanism.

Even in those early scenes when Barbieland was Barbielanding — the Barbies still had to deal with the Kens (all of whom seemed mildly unhinged, directionless and dull) often pretending to want them around, even when they didn’t.

It isn’t until Barbie finally tells Ken the truth (that she doesn’t want him) that she can take back what is rightfully hers, setting everyone in Barbieland — Ken, included — free.

And all it took for her to get there was an existential crisis followed by some well-articulated truth bombs followed by the rallying of a community who believed in each other.

At the end of Gloria’s monologue she says to Barbie, “I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie ourselves into knots so that people will like us.”

Which is why, every time I read anything skewering Barbie for its messaging, I feel a jolt of pride. For Greta Gerwig. For everyone involved in the making of Barbie. And for myself.

Because the only way to untie ourselves from aspirational likability is to establish a level of comfort with not being liked. Not just with men but in general.

And while supporting each other for being brave enough to be human won’t solve everything, it’s a start.