#they're more than kenough. to me.

[jinxedshapeshifter]

I watched the Barbie movie for the first time yesterday and it made me realize that I don't think people get the point of the treatment of the Kens???

It's literally set up at the beginning of the movie. Barbieland is reversed from the real world, which is why the Kens are treated how they are. Additionally, I am pretty sure how the Kens are treated is meant to be a satirical way of exploring how women are treated by men in a way that men will see and understand, because the Kens are very much objectified by the Barbies. It's one of the reasons Beach Ken decides to turn Barbieland into a patriarchy (something he literally mentions regretting at the end of the movie because patriarchy "isn't about horses").

I've seen people say the Kens are back to where they were at the beginning once the matriarchy is reinstated and I just ... no?????

The Barbies realize what happened that made the Kens do what they did and they take steps to help them feel wanted and respected. The narrator even says "one day Kens will have the same rights as women in the real world" and while one person might take that as shitty, the Barbies already took the first step on the first day by allowing Kens to hold spots in government (granted not on the Supreme Court but they still are allowed to hold spots in government).

STEREOTYPICAL BARBIE LITERALLY TELLS BEACH KEN THAT HE CAN HAVE HIS OWN IDENTITY. This then leads the REST of the Kens to do the same; figure out their own identities outside of their Barbies and their roles. This is what the "I Am Kenough" meme refers to lmao. It's literally referring to Ken realizing he's more than Barbie, he's more than beach, he's Ken and that's okay.

The story is messy, I won't deny that. But also, saying the Kens are in the same place as they were at the start of the movie (objectified himbos with no role in government) is blatantly false. There's a massive difference between "the Kens don't run the government anymore" and "the Kens don't have any role in the government at all" lmao. There's still a long way for them to go from where they're at by the end of the movie, but saying there wasn't any improvement made is a blatant lie.

#barbie 2023 #the kens go from objectified himbos with no identity to having a sense of self identity. that alone is improvement lmao #movie analysis #tw sexism #not sure how else to tag this? #idk

[tobiasdrake]

I have had his song stuck in my head for two days now and I just. Okay. I need to gush about Ken. Heavy spoilers for the Barbie movie here, which would best be experienced unspoiled if you haven't already.

"When I found out that the Patriarchy wasn't about horses, I lost interest." Ken says this at the emotional climax of the film, when he's finally breaking down and being emotionally vulnerable. It's a funny joke, but it's also a wild statement to make, given that Ken bringing Patriarchy to Barbieland has been the main point of conflict for half the film.

But that's it. That's exactly how Patriarchy spreads.

Like other Alt-Right groups, the Manosphere recruits through fandom spaces. They show up wherever they aren't explicitly barred from being. They're in Star Wars spaces and Marvel spaces and fucking My Little Pony spaces, offering comforting rhetoric. Telling boys that the reason they're unhappy isn't their fault: It's them. It's the women holding them back.

And they're hearing this from people in their shared fandom spaces, people they effectively have community with and whose opinions they've come to trust. I think Spider-Man is cool, you think Spider-Man is cool, so I might be inclined to trust your opinion when you say that girls not liking me is a personal failing on their part. Especially if we've been having lively conversations about Spider-Man for weeks/months, and we're only discussing this now because I'm confiding my insecurities in you.

That kid just wanted to talk about Spider-Man. Now he's in a cult and doesn't even realize it.

Throughout the film, this is the only time Ken actually expresses that he wants something he hasn't been conditioned to pursue. Even before he knew about Patriarchy, his insecurity and pursuit of Barbie was driven from purpose more than anything else. The thing the film keeps bringing up is that he's "And Ken".

It's not that Ken wants Barbie. It's that Ken feels his purpose is to be with Barbie. He believes he isn't valid unless he's acting in his intended role as Barbie's Boyfriend. And for anyone who's had similar struggles with identity and masculinity, this rings so incredibly true. He's hurting himself and hurting Barbie, not because he wants to be a lover, but because he thinks being a lover is the only way he can be valid as a person.

And the Manosphere offers him... Not ways to achieve that illusory sense of validity, but harmful and hostile excuses for why it isn't his fault that he can't.

The real breakthrough? It's right here. It's this joke. Ken doesn't want to be Barbie's boyfriend. He doesn't want to be King of the Manosphere. He just wants to be a horse boy.

It's okay to just be a horse boy. I need everyone to understand that it's okay to just be a horse boy. You are valid for pursuing your interests regardless of what you think society expects from you. It's okay not to follow the roadmap that someone else made and gave to you. It's okay to be a horse boy.

That can be Kenough.

#barbie #the barbie movie #barbie 2023 #ken

[anonanimal]

ok we watched the barbie movie and i must be ovulating because the emotional levers were successfully pulled and i did cry but i was also mad part of the time.

i'd say i have a few thoughts and questions about the depiction of ruth handler lol but i haven't put it into succinct enough words yet

interesting they'd do the jokes about earring magic ken and growing up skipper and uh whatever pregnant midge was called and do a joke about ruth handler's...tax evasion? did she really do tax evasion? but they didn't touch on bild lilli. maybe they can't

sooo barbie is a god and mattel are her... stewards. lmao? what the fuck is gonna happen in barbieland if god is not in her heaven... whatever. just like in preacher when god goes missing (yes i watched part of the preacher amc series with my mother). i feel like the "barbie is a god, she is every barbie and every barbie is her" would have been the explicit focus of MY barbie movie (what can i say, i love a good story about a god becoming human, it's the christianity i've been steeped in) but they kind of don't do much with it

actually ruth handler = god, barbie = jesus?

ken becomes a ... men's (ken's) rights activist. lmao?

anyone else think the car chase was filmed like a car commercial. like weirdly obviously so? i feel like product placement has come farther than this

they want people to say it's a gay or trans allegory sooooo bad between the birkenstocks and the "you don't get permission, it's something you discover about yourself" they want it sooooo bad ok you win i'm saying it. but i know you wanted me to say it. you won fuck off!!!!!! or maybe i'm reaching because it's easy to read the emotional journey of coming out to yourself in a general coming of age tale. but come on. i'm not that smart so if i'm picking up on someone wanting me to think something, they probably do. the only way this movie could have been gay would have been if the weird barbies led a new society.

so was this their way of saying they're debuting a line of kens with jobs...?

i liked the comedy of 2001 monolith barbie and the barbieland physical comedy stuff. maybe i should have rolled my eyes but i'm easy. rollerblading executives also killed

i liked the little twist that barbie's crisis was precipitated by being played with, not by a maturing child, but her mother. kind of in line with how the movie itself is an ad for the barbie brand for adults. there's quite a few moments that i thought had to be intentional references to the function of the movie itself in the real world, and they all felt weird and bad, like someone screaming "let me out!!!!!" i've forgotten a lot of them now because i'm adding this bit in an edit the next day.

*guy who has only seen south park voice* getting a lot of imaginationland vibes from this

i kind of expected for there to be like a joke about allan being in unrequited love with ken but i now think there probably was in an earlier draft and it didn't mesh with the final product and they had to nix it. or like surely someone floated it at least

you know they tried to save it from being too much about ken by having someone literally say "what about barbie's ending?" and then doing barbie's ending but...it was still kind of more about ken i think. he did a dance number for christ's sake. i almost forgot that barbie got to dance too, but barbie's dance was also mostly about ken wanting her to notice him. "he's just ken" "kenergy" "i am kenough" come on. i think the biggest laugh in the theater was actually the kenough hoodie. biggest laugh for me personally? sasha saying, (and i'm paraphrasing of course bc i'm not bothering to look it up) "are you two shining?"

i got SO close to killing the mood when we walked out by saying "hey lets google mattel factory working conditions right now" but i decided that was too far / probably in poor taste for me to flippantly use in post-movie discussion

the feminism 101 stuff was whatever. it made sense within the setting of the movie since america ferrera as a human had to introduce ideas into barbieland for them to take hold, and ideas just kind of manifest whatever happens in barbieland, but i'm very surprised they didn't do a joke like "gee i wish it was this easy in the real world" like how did they miss that opportunity, it would have worked. or maybe they did and i missed it because i had my hater goggles on

sooo velveteen rabbit?

all in all, as a member of the moviegoing public, i guess i got what i wanted. an experience that left me with something to think and talk about.

p.s. this was, for me personally, an ad for ryan gosling. i didn't find him interesting until now. they really got me there.

p.p.s. obviously any criticism i have of the like existence of the barbie movie is hypocritical because i haven't said it about gundam (yet)

[mrmallard]

One of the reasons I've been going world-ending doom spiral - and trust me, it's a benign fuckin reason compared to some of the other stuff - is the sheer state of political division in everything. The right wing going absolutely fucking bonkers and the left just sorta. doing what it's gotta do. a bit too passively imo, but you know how it is.

And the way I'm choosing to present this divide is via the Barbie movie. It's clearly levels of magnitude more fucked than how people reacted to the Barbie movie, but hear me out.

I remember two big reactions to the Barbie movie. The first one was pleasantly surprised that the movie made such an emotional, heart-rending story out of the subject matter, and how it was a solid feminist movie about the commodification of women vs their innate humanity which tends to be glossed over for their looks.

The second reaction - when it wasn't the usual screaming chuds being mad at women and pink - was calling the movie an "anti-woke masterpiece" (the actual term I saw) for its portrayal of Ken and his issues. This is a movie that took MALE struggles seriously, and had a surprising amount of MALE depth in a FEMALE/WOKE DOMINATED MEDIA LANDSCAPE. This film is good because it's ANTI-FEMINIST, for rounding out a MAN'S struggles for the first time in FOREVER.

And the thing that's contributing to the spiral is that - to my understanding, having not seen the movie - the movie does both of these things. Ken is good enough on his own, he is Kenough. He has a whole arc about his own insecurities as an accessory to a greater whole, and he finds confidence and self-esteem.

Barbie has to wrestle with the commodification of her looks and her Brand, with being a product to be sold to a mass consumerist audience - but she isn't that shallow, vapid product. She is a real person, with real inner beauty and humanity and autonomy, fighting a monster who just wants her to be the fucking brand so they can profit from her.

But the only way that one side of its approving audience can stomach the fact that they enjoyed this movie is by insisting that it's actually a Subversive Anti-Woke Movie, for Us, the Anti-Woke Squad. Despite the fact that these fucking cretins clearly enjoyed the same movie as the people celebrating its deft feminist touch (while also being a corporate toy commercial, granted) and its heartbreaking crossroads scene where Barbie doesn't know who or what she is any more. It has to be "anti-woke" for them to engage positively with it. Half of its entire point and personal conflict, in the trash to make Ryan Gosling's Ken a poster boy for the Men's Rights Movement and seemingly nothing else.

Tangent: There's a great Dar Williams song called You're Aging Well about the "signs" and "signmakers" who exist to make women insecure and shame them into running the competitive, cisnormative rat race of looking conventionally attractive and landing a husband before you're thirty. I'm hazarding a guess that Barbie's crossroads and Dar's rejection of the signs and their makers sort of approach the same subject matter, where "what this societal standard means for a woman, and why you should want that standard instead of your own personality, humour and comfort" is a constant, looming force that singles women out for their human traits if they don't fit a toxic, hostile mold of an Ideal Woman.

And it just. gets to me. That despite two VERY DIFFERENT political camps of people finding something to like in this movie, that they can't even bond over common ground because "it's NOT WOKE, it's ANTI-WOKE and all the WOKE FANS need a REALITY CHECK to see how ANTI-WOKE the movie really is". Despite liking the SAME FUCKING MOVIE, there's STILL some forced political divide so that some redpilled fuck can justify liking the same thing that a feminist does. "They're just Liking It Wrong".

Like the fact that people can't even see eye to eye on BARBIE, despite both camps finding something about it to love, comes across as a minor symptom of a major crack in the foundation of political discourse. It feels like there's an unavoidable Us vs Them now. It really does feel like there's no going back to normal, where shit-for-brains channers and neo-nazis still existed but were shunted off to their own closed-off hovel because the social reaction to what they said and did was basically "there's no place for this dogshit in broader society, stay the fuck away from me and my family you fucking freak".

That period of history is over.

People are bringing munted messageboard shit into real life, and it's being legitimised by mainstream media outlets and politicians. And it's not just America. Australia has a neo-nazi problem too. It's been on the rise for well over a decade now, but it feels like right now, we're reaching a fever pitch where an emboldened right wing has this massive hand that's growing, stretching - until one day, it clasps shut and it SQUEEZES AS HARD AS IT CAN.

And I get how "oh the barbie movie showcases this broader political split and foreshadows this upcoming unstoppable ideological nuclear fuckstorm lalalalala" comes off as flippant and silly. But it feels like a signifier of the dark days to come just by virtue of how it seems to reflect the ongoing political incompatibility between the left and the right, with the right wing seemingly CONSTANTLY gearing up for a violent altercation and the left trying to abide by what passed for normal ten, twenty, thirty years ago, to no fucking avail. Yeah, the Barbie example is flippant and tenuous. It's also really fucked how prominent this divide is over a well-received corporate toy commercial, that BOTH SIDES SEEM TO LIKE, on the eve of what looks like an armed fucking uprising by an emboldened fascist right-wing.

That's just one reason I'm spiralling right now.

#messyposting #toxicposting

[annbourbon]

Barbie movie is living in my head rent-free. I swear. It keeps reminding me that I'm Kenough, even if I don't have or get a partner, that I don't need to fit, that I am pretty but it doesn't need to hold to social standards. That other opinions do not matter more than my own.

It has actually managed to make my own head, soul and heart so quiet I don't know right now what to do because all I keep doing is, healing. And that's beautiful ✨

Whenever I think it's not enough or I'm taking too much time to pull myself together, I keep remembering the movie over and over. And remembering that I can be whatever I want to be without worrying or feeling guilty. Yes, life's short, but if you don't solve your inner struggles it becomes a nightmare.

Somehow anxiety, depression and all those feelings keep showing up, but it's like right now they're just standing there, watching me struggle, and not even saying a word. It's so quiet...

So... different from what it used to be. I've cut some toxic relationships. I'm struggling over my feelings on it. But at the same time I don't feel pressured to get it done or make it right. It's pure freedom.

#barbie 2023 #barbie movie #barbie rant #just ranting #again #even against everything you can do it 💕

[writingenuity]

Watched the Barbie movie the other day and, as a conservative, I loved it. Women should be judged on their merit and able to be feminine in so many different roles. Women can be leaders, they can also be mothers, or they can be simply ordinary if they want (which is enough). And men? Just like women, they are kenough as they are. Just... let yourself breathe a bit and know you have the right to exist whether or not you end up doing something great (man or woman).

Women shouldn't make men feel less-than or unimportant because they're not. They have feelings too and, while Ken's thing may have been "beach", there were other Kens who could do other stuff, I'm sure. Men are so important, unique, and deserving of respect.

Along the same lines, men shouldn't make women feel less-than. I don't need to see an equal number of women in every workplace, but I'd like to be taken seriously. I've been blessed to only have known wonderful men in my life (dad, brothers, fellow church members, etc) who acknowledge me and love me back.

It seemed to me like the movie was about mutual respect and, while it did focus more on women (it was a Barbie movie, so that made sense), men weren't left out of the conversation and so much was acknowledged.

I don't call myself feminist on a daily basis, because that seems like it tends to be synonymous with misandry these days. And you won't catch me dead hating an entire gender. Still... if feminism were more like that movie? Where everyone was respected? Gosh... I'd call myself feminist in a heartbeat. I want to see that kind of feminism. It restored my faith in humanity a bit, ngl. 🥰

#barbie #conservative #movie review #you are kenough #feminism

[selznick]

i saw Barbie and i just... im so underwhelmed and melancholy.

It wasnt fun, pink and hyperpop. Which is fine, but not overly fun.

It trys to be deep and feminist and dismantle the patriarchy, but it doesn't do that either. Just superficial statements and surface level feminism that never digs any deeper.

And sure, its just barbie so does it need to be deep? Well, id sure hope so with how everyone is hyping it up! But maybe everyone is just impressed by popular media that states the obvious because no media dares to touch it anymore, or those that do are aimed at people who does basic feminism anyway.

A lot of it feels very Knuckle the Echidna is a Feminist but done worse.

And there are so many times when they set up for something to be explored deeper, it just leaves you wanting when they abandon digging.

Like Sasha's speech that ends with calling Barbie a fascist, and Sasha calling barbie a 'nutjob' before quickly changing to more politically correct phrasing could start to make a really good point about how language can be used by people who don't actually know what they're talking about and are just parroting points they've heard other people say. And about how people want to be seen as progressive without doing any of the work to know what they're saying or accusing others of.

It just fall flat though. Because thats basically what the entire movie is doing - basic progressive sounding language without actually exploring any of the points made. The points aren't unique either, in fact, they're pretty common takes for feminism and particularly online feminism.

They also Could have made a point with weird barbie, about how those ostracised from society are best at judging what is and isn't fair, how good changes can be made and what changes will negatively impact people. Also a point about how society can onky change if we involve those that are ostracised. But instead they make her a pretty, socially pop-punk for the second half of the movie. Where the scribbles on her face too much to commit to for the whole movie? Why can't a protag actually be weird by society's standards?

They could have made a good point with Ken, and the dad, about how men rely so much on their girlfriend/wife to do everything that they are nothing and no one without a woman to do all the work for them. But even though that's sort of Ken's whole point for the movie, they fail at this too for me. Ken's growth and development as a character is because Barbie acknowledges him and apologises to him. Ken doesn't realise he can be 'kenough' by himself, Barbie tells him that and he does whatever his woman says because the movie doesn't actually acknowledged men's dependence on the women in their life in any meaningful way. And the dad being useless by himself is played for a joke.

The Barbie movie is great at acknowledging that thing happen. We live in a society. But it doesn't really do much more than that.

It's disappointing with how much people are praising it that it falls so flat for me.

I will be glad if it introduces more women to feminism, to actually thinking about how the patriarchy and feminism affect their everyday lives. But it also concerns me how much praise this film is getting for doing the bare minimum.

#barbie movie spoilers #my thoughts on Barbie

[couchpotatowithartistictalent]

There are like some spoilers for the movie but it's not like a detailed spoiler, it's just random points in the movie that I liked so.. yeah

I came into the cinema several minutes late yet the movie still makes so much sense.. kinda? I mean, I have zero idea on why Barbie did the whole 'travel to the real world' thing apart from something about the space time continuum

Okay, first thing, ALLAN IS SO CUTE, WHAT??? SAME THING FOR THE LIKE, CEO AND THE OTHER GUYS FROM MATTEL??? WHY ARE THEY SO LIKE, CUTE AND WEIRD AND STUFF???

Second, the way Ken is just hanging from the spaceship in that one scene is so funny to me--

Third, Barbie doesn't even question where Ken slept before the humans (forgot what their names are) asked--

Fourth, Ken's Mojo Dojo Casa House. That's all

Fifth, the Kens fighting each other and then bursting out into a like, dance battle sort of scene is so WONDERFUL

Sixth, in the same scene, one of the Mattel guys got SHOT. Like, you'd expect that he'd be fine because it isn't real but NOPE. LATER ON HE'S IN A CAST. Two questions, where did you get the real gun and WHEN did you get the real gun

Seventh, the way the Mattel guys run is so funny like-- THE CHASE SCENE WAS PERFECT. ABSOLUTE PERFECTION

Eighth, Barbie having a mental breakdown. That's all

Ninth, that 'I am Kenough' hoodie thing that Ken wore at the end is something I want

Tenth, each time clothes were thrown, they just unfolded, floated in midair and had this cool advertisement-like vibe to it

Eleventh, the Mattel guys just going through the transport scene but MUCH MORE SLOWER than I ever expected was so weird to me, like it literally took them until the Ken war was like starting when they arrived. They're either slow or there's just like, a CRAP TON of them

#barbie #barbie movie #spoilers i think #potato randomly talks