This was really wonderful. I haven’t seen the film, but I have heard about the speech and think that your version for men is a necessary addition to the original. The problem is that our culture places unrealistic expectations on everyone and is too ready to condemn people for minor infractions and missteps. We should all strive to be a bit more understanding and forgiving.
But really I also wanted to say that I am going to share your version of the speech with my young-adult son, so thank you.
Not exactly equivalent because I'm not answering "so hard (ok, literally impossible) to be a woman" with the opposite sex perspective, rather with a subset of women, namely mothers. Some might relate, some not, but here it goes:
It's impossible to be a good, or even good enough mother. You're supposed to make a birth plan (Did any cavewomen do that? Are references to cavepeople xenophobic?) but you're also supposed to take it all easy, naturally, but safety first of course. Dare you even ask if breast-feeding is optional, or if bottle-feeding your baby will make it sickly, low IQ and your bonding deprivation is bordering or child abuse? Either you will be nursing for too long or not long enough, you should be worried about toxins in food when (if) you wean the baby, but not so much that your organic food habit reeks of privilege and profligacy.
If you can afford to stay home and waste your education, you're trad (are you married? Trad Wife!) and not a great role model, especially for daughters. If you go back to work, you're missing out on childhood, no two ways about it. If you're a strict mom (roar Tiger!), you're raising robots and crushing the little ones' spirit. If you're a laissez-faire, anti-authoritarian mom, your little ones become lil' tyrants that will crush the nerves of those around them. Either way you'll look pathetic.
More on affordability: if you send your kids to private school, you're an elitist snob and making your kids into the same. If you opt for the not so great city public school, you'll have to deal with a lot more than fundraising calls. Just sayin'. So go ahead, move to the suburbs and be boring.
Let your kids eat everything, incl. snacks and sweets, and they'll get bad teeth and big butts. You can't comment on a big butt or a diet because that's fat-phobic, but if you don't intervene, social media will. On that: Once you give your kid a smartphone, you've allowed ruin forever. Good luck trying to raise them unplugged, with no friends or fun.
How many do you want? Only one? You're creating a spoiled narcissist bound to be lonely, not to mention when you die or require care. Two, especially of the same sex, will bicker and be lifelong competitors. Three's a crowd, traveling gets tricky, almost makes four seem better, but whoa, hold on, four or- gasp!- more, what are you, Alec Baldwin's faux-Spanish wife? Catholic or Mormon? Then we can make fun of you!
Whatever you do, moms, will be wrong and your fault, so on this I have to agree with the Barbie speech. Oh, and if you let you daughter play with Barbies, she will turn out absolutely fine, and if she doesn't, it won't be Mattel's fault but you know whose.
Better than the Barbie movie version! But then, your "mother version" could never be in the Barbie movie, because Barbie is by definition--not a mother.
A resounding YES to this! No matter what I do as a mother, it is criticized. Countless professionals out there are telling mothers all the ways we should be parenting, and are skeptical that we could just instinctually parent, because that would obviously ROYALLY fuck up our kids. We need to get a PhD in parenting, and give more, more, MORE. And less. So much less. Because we are helicopter parents raising entitled brats. Totally our fault.
Can't add much to that, Andrea, or rather we could all add so much we'd never fill the barrel...though, truth be told, kids of any generation- that would include us - are royally fuck-upable by their parents, most of whom mean reasonably well and yet get a lot wrong. At the same time, kids are resilient, and (most) parents hopefully do more right than wrong, so we're none the wiser but should have some tea and relax.
I have not watched the movie. But I saw this speech. What I find most distracting about this speech is that it encapsulated the task of any person growing up and conflates that with unique problem of being a woman. Growing up, for both men and women, means taking responsibility for yourself and your actions, worrying less about how you appear to others, being comfortable with your strengths and weaknesses, and becoming the best version of yourself. At some point, the platitudes espoused by the character become meaningless because you realize that you have to move beyond what others want and think of you, and determine meaning for your life with those around you. It means projected less upon the world your anxieties and fears, and becoming a moral actor in the here and now, creating relationships with the people around you, and cultivating those friendships. Her speech may arouse passions, but I am not moved by it. I would say to this character that she should worry less about what she think she should be and carry less shame. Cultivate an inner deep life to be a good friend, lover, partner, employee/er, mother/father, etc.
I appreciate your doing this! Spot on. I would add: "You absolutely cannot be a f*g. But you will be examined for most of your life for signs you actually are." This is something that all gay men and most straight men know.
Didn’t want to see this movie but I’ve been surprised by the positive reviews from people whose opinions I trust, so I may bite the bullet. As the mother of a boy, I’ve become less sympathetic to the “woes of womanhood” and wholly support the notion that young men are in trouble, with how they are forced to draw the shortest straw in our society today (ie not encouraged to live up to their potential and be rewarded for it), so thank you, Meghan, for your rewrite!!!
This exactly is the reason I think you are a genius - whatever your IQ! Seriously, this was wonderful. It's going straight to my Facebook page (as I have no other place to broadcast it.) I have read so many articles about this Barbie, and yours is just perfect. And I think Greta Gerwig (and Noah Baumbach) would too. I hope they read it. In the meantime, I agree with Caeli - the last line was really wonderful.
By the way, Gerwig did say of that speech in a NY Times interview: "this tightrope she’s explaining is something that is present for women in the way that she’s describing it, but it’s also present for everybody." In other words, men (though maybe she has some trans friends??) So, yes, I think she wanted you to write exactly this!
I just read that article and was struck by the same thing. She says:
Obviously, these systems are terrible for men too. When America was giving her beautiful speech, I was just sobbing, and then I looked around, and I realized everybody’s crying on the set. The men are crying too, because they have their own speech they feel they can’t ever give, you know? And they have their twin tightrope, which is also painful. There’s something about some of these structures that is just, you know, “Somebody make me stop!” That’s sort of, I suppose, the feeling behind Ken.
Boilerplate feminist pablum is the best description I’ve heard of the so-called political message of Barbie. I agree the film was fun, but the feminist critiques were 50 years old. I’ve got some gendered complaints that I would like to register with the broader society, but they were not addressed in Barbie.
"The platitudes work both ways." I said almost this exact thing to my partner as we sat through the credits of the film.
I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, apart from that one scene and maybe a couple of lines here or there in the second half of the film. That speech got a round of applause in my screening.
I think the heart of the movie is generally in the right place, though, so I'm happy to forgive the blunder. I don't even disagree with the sentiments of the speech, just the... oppositional nature of it.
Nailed it! (shocker). I was so ready to smirk the whole time and instead was laughing/crying for most of it. (When I wasn't cringing.) Also - one of the alltime best last lines! Thanks for going to a godforsaken actual theater for us!
I look forward to seeing the film, but holding off until some of the buzz has quieted down. I do not want to see moviegoers in pink, but the Barbie phenomenon has been on my mind--curiously waiting for Meghan's commentary, always an interesting perspective. Hopefully, a podcast will follow. Thanks for sharing the clip with the speech and your reversed version spoken by a man. Of course, these ideas have been around for several decades for any woman paying attention. Guess the younger generation requires their own special delivery in pink. The issues around choice remain. Making choices means you can't have everything and be everything to everybody. Nobody wants to hear that.
Of the few things I’ve heard about this movie, your opinion is the one I trust Meghan. I’m looking forward to hearing you and Sarah talk about the movie.
I am Barbie in so many ways: Born in 1959; played with Barbie dolls as a kid but actually preferred my pink-haired Troll figures; my mother's name was Ruth; my own divorce was finalized one week before Ken and Barbie split up on Valentine's Day 2004; I took my daughters to the Musée des Poupées in Paris some 20 or so years ago to see an exhibition on 2,000 years of fashion, displayed on Barbie dolls. That said, I did not allow my daughters to play with Barbie dolls. I objected to what I viewed as their personification of impossible beauty standards and materialistic culture. Then I lightened up. I collected a few very Weird Barbies at flea markets, and my mother Ruth bought me a few fancy, glamorously dressed Barbies - partly as a joke, partly because the gowns are simply stunning. Anyway, I took my younger daughter and my 12-year-old granddaughter to see Barbie last night, on a whim, without knowing anything about it (We live in Switzerland). We all loved it! It was pure camp, good fun, a comic take on the whole franchise and Mattel with a few (pseudo?)serious undertones. We are all Barbie. We are all Ken. Mattel did a fantastic job cashing in on our inherent sense of inadequacy and our apparent need to be like everyone else.
Excellent re-work. I loved the Barbie movie but also thought it was a bit on the nose, as they say in Hollywood. To your point and maybe also to Barbie's, life isn't fair for anyone and maybe we can chose our own message.
This was really wonderful. I haven’t seen the film, but I have heard about the speech and think that your version for men is a necessary addition to the original. The problem is that our culture places unrealistic expectations on everyone and is too ready to condemn people for minor infractions and missteps. We should all strive to be a bit more understanding and forgiving.
But really I also wanted to say that I am going to share your version of the speech with my young-adult son, so thank you.
Not exactly equivalent because I'm not answering "so hard (ok, literally impossible) to be a woman" with the opposite sex perspective, rather with a subset of women, namely mothers. Some might relate, some not, but here it goes:
It's impossible to be a good, or even good enough mother. You're supposed to make a birth plan (Did any cavewomen do that? Are references to cavepeople xenophobic?) but you're also supposed to take it all easy, naturally, but safety first of course. Dare you even ask if breast-feeding is optional, or if bottle-feeding your baby will make it sickly, low IQ and your bonding deprivation is bordering or child abuse? Either you will be nursing for too long or not long enough, you should be worried about toxins in food when (if) you wean the baby, but not so much that your organic food habit reeks of privilege and profligacy.
If you can afford to stay home and waste your education, you're trad (are you married? Trad Wife!) and not a great role model, especially for daughters. If you go back to work, you're missing out on childhood, no two ways about it. If you're a strict mom (roar Tiger!), you're raising robots and crushing the little ones' spirit. If you're a laissez-faire, anti-authoritarian mom, your little ones become lil' tyrants that will crush the nerves of those around them. Either way you'll look pathetic.
More on affordability: if you send your kids to private school, you're an elitist snob and making your kids into the same. If you opt for the not so great city public school, you'll have to deal with a lot more than fundraising calls. Just sayin'. So go ahead, move to the suburbs and be boring.
Let your kids eat everything, incl. snacks and sweets, and they'll get bad teeth and big butts. You can't comment on a big butt or a diet because that's fat-phobic, but if you don't intervene, social media will. On that: Once you give your kid a smartphone, you've allowed ruin forever. Good luck trying to raise them unplugged, with no friends or fun.
How many do you want? Only one? You're creating a spoiled narcissist bound to be lonely, not to mention when you die or require care. Two, especially of the same sex, will bicker and be lifelong competitors. Three's a crowd, traveling gets tricky, almost makes four seem better, but whoa, hold on, four or- gasp!- more, what are you, Alec Baldwin's faux-Spanish wife? Catholic or Mormon? Then we can make fun of you!
Whatever you do, moms, will be wrong and your fault, so on this I have to agree with the Barbie speech. Oh, and if you let you daughter play with Barbies, she will turn out absolutely fine, and if she doesn't, it won't be Mattel's fault but you know whose.
Love this!
Better than the Barbie movie version! But then, your "mother version" could never be in the Barbie movie, because Barbie is by definition--not a mother.
This is a tour du force. Love it.
Thanks so much! I was just getting warmed up-- the hits keep coming no matter what age!😆
A resounding YES to this! No matter what I do as a mother, it is criticized. Countless professionals out there are telling mothers all the ways we should be parenting, and are skeptical that we could just instinctually parent, because that would obviously ROYALLY fuck up our kids. We need to get a PhD in parenting, and give more, more, MORE. And less. So much less. Because we are helicopter parents raising entitled brats. Totally our fault.
Can't add much to that, Andrea, or rather we could all add so much we'd never fill the barrel...though, truth be told, kids of any generation- that would include us - are royally fuck-upable by their parents, most of whom mean reasonably well and yet get a lot wrong. At the same time, kids are resilient, and (most) parents hopefully do more right than wrong, so we're none the wiser but should have some tea and relax.
I have not watched the movie. But I saw this speech. What I find most distracting about this speech is that it encapsulated the task of any person growing up and conflates that with unique problem of being a woman. Growing up, for both men and women, means taking responsibility for yourself and your actions, worrying less about how you appear to others, being comfortable with your strengths and weaknesses, and becoming the best version of yourself. At some point, the platitudes espoused by the character become meaningless because you realize that you have to move beyond what others want and think of you, and determine meaning for your life with those around you. It means projected less upon the world your anxieties and fears, and becoming a moral actor in the here and now, creating relationships with the people around you, and cultivating those friendships. Her speech may arouse passions, but I am not moved by it. I would say to this character that she should worry less about what she think she should be and carry less shame. Cultivate an inner deep life to be a good friend, lover, partner, employee/er, mother/father, etc.
I appreciate your doing this! Spot on. I would add: "You absolutely cannot be a f*g. But you will be examined for most of your life for signs you actually are." This is something that all gay men and most straight men know.
I almost included something to that effect in the speech (not in so many words) but thought better of it. So thank you.
Didn’t want to see this movie but I’ve been surprised by the positive reviews from people whose opinions I trust, so I may bite the bullet. As the mother of a boy, I’ve become less sympathetic to the “woes of womanhood” and wholly support the notion that young men are in trouble, with how they are forced to draw the shortest straw in our society today (ie not encouraged to live up to their potential and be rewarded for it), so thank you, Meghan, for your rewrite!!!
This exactly is the reason I think you are a genius - whatever your IQ! Seriously, this was wonderful. It's going straight to my Facebook page (as I have no other place to broadcast it.) I have read so many articles about this Barbie, and yours is just perfect. And I think Greta Gerwig (and Noah Baumbach) would too. I hope they read it. In the meantime, I agree with Caeli - the last line was really wonderful.
By the way, Gerwig did say of that speech in a NY Times interview: "this tightrope she’s explaining is something that is present for women in the way that she’s describing it, but it’s also present for everybody." In other words, men (though maybe she has some trans friends??) So, yes, I think she wanted you to write exactly this!
I just read that article and was struck by the same thing. She says:
Obviously, these systems are terrible for men too. When America was giving her beautiful speech, I was just sobbing, and then I looked around, and I realized everybody’s crying on the set. The men are crying too, because they have their own speech they feel they can’t ever give, you know? And they have their twin tightrope, which is also painful. There’s something about some of these structures that is just, you know, “Somebody make me stop!” That’s sort of, I suppose, the feeling behind Ken.
Get her on the Unspeakable!
Here’s a link for anyone interested:
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2023/07/barbie-movie-greta-gerwig-interview/674817/
Just a shame that she didn't include that part of the speech in the movie.
I felt the movie really doesn't convey an "everyone has it tough" message.
And at the end of the movie the women have learnt to think for themselves whereas the men/Kens are just sent off with "find something else to do".
But it would be interesting to hear her hash it out with Megan - and also Sarah.
Boilerplate feminist pablum is the best description I’ve heard of the so-called political message of Barbie. I agree the film was fun, but the feminist critiques were 50 years old. I’ve got some gendered complaints that I would like to register with the broader society, but they were not addressed in Barbie.
"The platitudes work both ways." I said almost this exact thing to my partner as we sat through the credits of the film.
I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, apart from that one scene and maybe a couple of lines here or there in the second half of the film. That speech got a round of applause in my screening.
I think the heart of the movie is generally in the right place, though, so I'm happy to forgive the blunder. I don't even disagree with the sentiments of the speech, just the... oppositional nature of it.
Nailed it! (shocker). I was so ready to smirk the whole time and instead was laughing/crying for most of it. (When I wasn't cringing.) Also - one of the alltime best last lines! Thanks for going to a godforsaken actual theater for us!
I look forward to seeing the film, but holding off until some of the buzz has quieted down. I do not want to see moviegoers in pink, but the Barbie phenomenon has been on my mind--curiously waiting for Meghan's commentary, always an interesting perspective. Hopefully, a podcast will follow. Thanks for sharing the clip with the speech and your reversed version spoken by a man. Of course, these ideas have been around for several decades for any woman paying attention. Guess the younger generation requires their own special delivery in pink. The issues around choice remain. Making choices means you can't have everything and be everything to everybody. Nobody wants to hear that.
Sarah and I are going to talk about it on our next episode. Which we're scrambling to get out.
Agree agree agree!
You have to strenuously hate men but also seem oppressed by men. It's impossible.
Of the few things I’ve heard about this movie, your opinion is the one I trust Meghan. I’m looking forward to hearing you and Sarah talk about the movie.
I am Barbie in so many ways: Born in 1959; played with Barbie dolls as a kid but actually preferred my pink-haired Troll figures; my mother's name was Ruth; my own divorce was finalized one week before Ken and Barbie split up on Valentine's Day 2004; I took my daughters to the Musée des Poupées in Paris some 20 or so years ago to see an exhibition on 2,000 years of fashion, displayed on Barbie dolls. That said, I did not allow my daughters to play with Barbie dolls. I objected to what I viewed as their personification of impossible beauty standards and materialistic culture. Then I lightened up. I collected a few very Weird Barbies at flea markets, and my mother Ruth bought me a few fancy, glamorously dressed Barbies - partly as a joke, partly because the gowns are simply stunning. Anyway, I took my younger daughter and my 12-year-old granddaughter to see Barbie last night, on a whim, without knowing anything about it (We live in Switzerland). We all loved it! It was pure camp, good fun, a comic take on the whole franchise and Mattel with a few (pseudo?)serious undertones. We are all Barbie. We are all Ken. Mattel did a fantastic job cashing in on our inherent sense of inadequacy and our apparent need to be like everyone else.
Excellent re-work. I loved the Barbie movie but also thought it was a bit on the nose, as they say in Hollywood. To your point and maybe also to Barbie's, life isn't fair for anyone and maybe we can chose our own message.
You weren't the only one, Meghan. Thank you.
Thanks for the kind words, everyone. I am a defender of men!