Trust me, I would have loved nothing more than for there to have been some bisexual themes within the Barbie movie that we could break down, but alas! While I think there’s an argument that there was queerness within the film (Barbie and Ken seemed to be, uh, kinda forcing their relationship and waaaaay more interested in homosocial relationships, for instance), I wouldn’t really say there was much to unpack in a bisexual vein.
However.
I should start here by noting that (no spoilers, I promise) I came out of the film with mixed feelings. There was a lot that I loved (the weirdness, the aesthetics, a lot of Barbie Land) but also a lot that left me feeling underwhelmed (the real world arc, America Ferrera’s speech) and overall, the feminist message mostly left me feeling kinda bummed out. For a movie that is so much about pink and fun and fashion, it felt odd that the main thrust of the message for women seemed to be “being a woman is hard, but we deal with it” and not, like, something more aspirational or, dare I say it, fun. And because I am me, I felt the need to critically engage with my frustrations, to talk about how I understood the film’s messaging, and where it both succeeded and failed for me.
Which is why I was, uh, slightly put off when I started seeing posts on social media about how the Barbie movie shouldn’t be subject to rigorous feminist critique.
(I swear this is going to get to bisexuality in a second.)
The general thread I have been seeing in the “Don't criticize Barbie!!!” messages is that the Barbie movie is a) a corporate product about a fashion doll and b) “for kids” and thus cannot be expected to have more than a feminism 101 movie; that to put something as boring and dry as high level feminist theory in a fun summer movie is akin to encouraging kids to eat Brussel sprouts ice cream. Let ice cream be ice cream, etc.
And what bugs me about that is… I mean what do people think that feminist theory is? Do they think it is just dusty books and impenetrable academic writing? Because I’m not going to say that it’s never that, but at its core… most feminist theory is not actually hard to understand. I mean it can be — use enough academic jargon and even a sentence as basic as “See Spot run” becomes incomprehensible — but the ideas themselves, they’re… they’re usually relatively straightforward. To the extent that they are challenging at all, it is because they ask us to shed our preconceptions about how the world works, to abandon the shorthand we use to get through the day. That part — that unlearning of a previous mode of thought — that’s the hard part. The ideas themselves are usually… pretty easy.
Which (and I promised you I would bring this back to bisexuality eventually) is also how I feel about fighting biphobia, on some level? There is a part of me that feels almost embarrassed to be writing so regularly about an argument that is functionally “leave people alone and stop giving a shit about who they partner with.” That’s so basic, right?
And yet: the unlearning that we have to do to get to that point, to really internalize it… it’s a lot. We have to unlearn the shame and disgust we’ve been taught to feel around queer sex, we have to unlearn the knee jerk assumption that people’s entire identities are bound up in the sex that they are attracted to, and that they can only be attracted to one sex, else wise they will be in constant internal conflict. We even have to unlearn this idea of a “one true love” — at least in the sense that that “one true love” often leads us to negate and devalue the attractions and experiences we might have outside of that one “true” pairing.
It’s a lot of work, just getting to the point of truly accepting that very, very basic idea — especially when you live in a culture that’s structured in utter opposition to that very, very basic idea. And yet the idea itself: very basic! A literal child could get it (indeed, I would argue that my five-year-old niece, who told me I should marry a girl because “it’s better,” was perfectly capable of understanding my response that if I choose to marry someone at some point they could be of any gender).
Anyway. I just get frustrated because, whether we’re talking about feminism or sexual freedom (or both, I mean there’s a lot of overlap there), this idea that the concepts behind them are dry or boring or difficult — it just feels like a way of discouraging people from thinking differently about the world around them, from doing the work of rebuilding their understanding of how things could be. A Barbie movie — a movie literally about the imagination of young girls! — isn’t incompatible with high level feminist ideas. It’s actually the most perfect venue for reimagining the world.