Last week I was hanging out on the beach with a guy I’ve been seeing for the past few months when he uttered the hottest words a man can say to a woman in this, the summer of 2023: “Do you wanna go see the Barbie movie together?”
Because I am a human woman with a beating heart, this was an easy yes. I was dying to see the movie and, TBH, it had been a minute since I last gave a hand job in a movie theater went on a movie date and I was excited to revisit the height of high school romance with my grown-up crush.
Now look, I get it if you think getting all pinked out and going to see Barbie is a sacred female ritual that should be reserved for the girlies and girl’s girls—no boyz or Ariana Grandes allowed. But first of all, I have never really been someone who happens to be in possession of a large or even moderate group of female friends—less for pick-me reasons and more for just generally having a kind of off-putting personality reasons. Also, when a hot doctor asks you to see Barbie with him, you don’t say no.
More importantly, it turns out that a man’s reaction to the Barbie movie can reveal some crucial intel—namely whether or not he is a secretly sexist loser whose masculinity is fragile enough to be wounded by a movie about a doll.
Obviously, the loud-and-proud Fox News types have already gone out of their way to make it very clear that they are, in fact, deeply threatened and angered by the doll movie—presumably because it depicts a version of society in which women are not victims of patriarchy (they hate that!) and because it reveals in hilarious, hot pink detail just how flimsy the logic, ethos, and “masculinity” underlying said patriarchy really is in practice. If you are dating one of these men, then I don’t think taking him to see this film is going to tell you anything you don’t already know. In fact, I’d imagine he has probably already made his feelings about Barbie and everything it stands for very clear. Good luck to you, friend.
But for your run of the mill straight dude—the generally well-meaning type who certainly doesn’t think he’s sexist but has likely not done much in the way of unpacking his internalized misogyny and acknowledging the ways in which he, however unintentionally, benefits from women’s subjugation—the Barbie movie is the perfect litmus test for what level of casual, uninterrogated sexism you’ve got on your hands.
While the film has received some not totally unfair criticism for being a bit reductive in its feminism (but again, it’s a movie about a doll, let’s maybe temper our expectations), you know who the perfect audience is for a little Feminism 101 refresher? Literally almost every not-vocally sexist straight man—the ones who likely identify as “feminist” in the sense that they don’t actively hate women and do think we deserve rights, but probably couldn’t tell you who, say, Mary Wollstonecraft is.
If you are this kind of man—one who benefits from patriarchy and wouldn’t necessarily want to give that up but have never really given it much thought because, hey, you’re a man so you don’t have to—I can absolutely see this movie making you squirm. Barbie presents two things your average “Sure, I’m a feminist” guy rarely if ever has to consider: (1) A version of the world in which patriarchy doesn’t exist—potentially uncomfy for a man who thrives under it and has yet to realize just how reluctant he would be to see it go. (2) The ways in which women and other non cis-men very much still suffer under it—something that is usually pretty easy for men to ignore or dismiss.
There’s an extent to which your average, well-meaning if not particularly well-informed man kind of does think we live in Barbieland. Not in the girl-power, women-rule-boys-drool way, but in the sense that women can vote and have jobs and bank accounts and most men don’t consciously want to enslave us, so that means we’re all equal now, right?! Barbie makes it clear—in easily digestible and generally non-threatening terms—that we do not, in fact, live in such a world. This has the potential to be an understandably uncomfortable realization for a man who has never had to consider that the women in his life are in fact suffering under a system in which he, if through no direct fault of his own, prospers.
While some men might use this realization as an opportunity for some self-reflection, it’s no secret that many of them will instead go on the defensive, writing off the Barbie movie as an exercise in man-hating from a bunch of overdramatic feminists who clearly haven’t noticed that we’re obviously all equal now, duh.
So when a crowded theater meant Plan A (movie theater hand job) was canceled and we’d have to resort to actually watching and enjoying the show like civilized adults, I anxiously waited to see how my crush would respond to this bright pink news flash that “Hey, guess what? Patriarchy is real and not good and still happening!”
Much to my relief, nay delight, this man absolutely ate that shit up. I honestly think he had more fun at the Barbie movie than I did, and I obviously had a blast. He laughed at literally every single joke (seeing Barbie with a Not Particularly Online Guy is especially fun because he hasn’t already seen all the memes and is rather endearingly entertained), and wasn’t offended by the movie’s completely on-point if intentionally over-the-top mockery of traditional masculinity or the fact that Barbie just wasn’t that into Ken. (His response was actually just, “Awh, he loves her!”) In short, he got it, didn’t think about it too hard, enjoyed it, and in the process, managed to confirm himself to be the respectably non-toxic man I’d cautiously assumed he was.
Look, is the bar rather low? Why yes, yes it is. Do I now want to marry this man and consummate our love with a movie theater hand job? Honestly, yeah, kind of. The TL;DR of it all is, if you’ve got a man in your life, you should be aware that an innocent Barbie movie date conveniently (or perhaps devastatingly) doubles as a test of his feminism tolerance levels. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Associate Sex & Relationships Editor