Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Premium: My Thoughts on Barbie

Transcript

Premium: My Thoughts on Barbie · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:00
Good day, human. Welcome to Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas. And there's a slightly, ever-so-slightly
0:07
dangerous idea. How about we have a nuanced conversation about the most beloved and most
0:15
controversial in some ways, movie of the decade, Barbie. Why, you ask am I doing an episode
0:21
about Barbie? So many weeks. Low these many weeks since it first dropped, since I first
0:29
saw it. Well, I wanted the dust to settle. I wanted to sit with it a little while. I didn't
0:33
want to jump on the bandwagon. I didn't want to insert myself into what seemed to be
0:38
some pretty crude criticisms of the movie by crybaby men who felt that it was, I don't
0:46
know, two feminists or something. That's not the point that I'm making. But the point
0:50
that I want to make is just that it's not feminist enough and not in the right way. And it's
0:55
not actually grappling with the issues that it thinks it's grappling with. Now, one could
1:00
say on this question, why would you bother criticizing a movie that is made for 13-year-old
1:05
girls and is just a comedy? To the extent that Barbie gives 13-year-old girls a sense of
1:13
the conundrum of womanhood that resonates with them, I think that's great. And I applaud
1:19
it. To the extent that it's only a comedy, I think that's great and I applaud it. But
1:25
the, it's only a comedy stop taking it so seriously line is a little bit tired. It's
1:32
a line that I never liked John Stewart using when he was the host of the Daily Show. You know,
1:36
people would call him out for some particular political position that I felt he should have
1:40
actually defended. And he would say, this is a comedy show. We're on after a show where
1:44
puppets make prank phone calls. I mean, you know, what do you want from me? I always felt
1:49
that was a dodge. He was an important figure in the politics and culture of the United States
1:54
at the time. And it behooved him in some way to acknowledge that. And similarly with Barbie,
2:00
the first two thirds of the film could arguably be a fun candy-colored popcorn, high heel,
2:07
extravaganza comedy. But the final act begins with a powerful and very serious speech by
2:16
the America Farara character about what it means to be a woman in the present day. And that
2:23
speech becomes the catalyst for the final act, which is an awakening of the women in Barbie
2:29
Land to essentially ferment a revolution and seize back control from the, from Ken and
2:35
his toxic masculine, masculine friends who have taken over Barbie's house. That is a serious
2:42
point. It's said with depth and profundity by America Farara. In fact, Farara has told journalists
2:51
that one of the first things that Greta Gerwig, the film's creator and director, mentioned
2:55
even before she'd read the script was she said, I wrote this monologue for Gloria, the character.
3:01
I've always imagined you saying this. And then it took them two days just to shoot America
3:07
Farara's monologue. She did 30 to 40 full runs of it top to bottom. It is the linchpin of the movie.
3:14
It's making a serious point. There are other kids movies that also make serious points and make
3:21
them in a profound and nuanced way. It's not too much to expect of a movie that's aimed at
3:27
young people. I mean, I hesitate even to call this a kids movie because of its massive success.
3:31
It's a movie for everybody. But let's take the critics at their, at their strongest position,
3:37
let's steal man them as they say and say, okay, well, it's a kids movie. Well, you know, inside out
3:43
is a kids movie that makes deep and profound philosophical points and pulls it off with nuance.
3:49
So is Toy Story. So indeed is the Lego movie, which oddly has a similar plot structure. The
3:56
Lego movie and Sonic the Hedgehog have a similar structure to Barbie, where a character from
4:01
a toy brand crosses some dimensional barrier into the real world and has to reckon with some
4:09
aspect of the real world. So I don't quite buy the, it's just a comedy stop analyzing it.
4:15
Greta Goig is a very smart person. She's made very smart movies. I loved little women. I loved
4:19
Lady Bird. And here she's trying to make a point. The problem I think is that she's making a point
4:25
about a culture that no longer exists or no longer exists in any dominant form. I mean, Barbie
4:32
is to me a searing satire of the 1990s or maybe 80s. Is it actually grappling with the gender crisis
4:43
in 2023? What is the gender crisis in 2023 before we get to the movie? Is the big problem,
4:53
the big problem right now that a dominant male patriarchy without any compunctions and without
5:02
any self-consciousness asserts its supremacy over all women. And that young men who grow up
5:10
experience the kind of understanding of masculinity that can glimpses when Ken and Barbie
5:18
go into the real world and suddenly see the patriarchy for the first time. There's this lovely
5:24
sequence which I actually loved at the time until I saw the film's payoff, where it can absorb
5:30
this kaleidoscope, this montage of positive visions of masculinity, banknotes with only men on
5:37
them, presidents who've only been men, men riding horses, men in ads doing all these very masculine
5:42
things at the same time as Barbie is confronted by being demeaned by wolf whistles realizing that
5:49
women are subservient and so on. And I thought that sequence was a great articulation or presentation
5:56
of what it has been like historically, to be growing up as a male and growing up as a female,
6:02
good, but the film isn't released unfortunately in 1982. It's released in 2023. And the idea
6:11
that the problem at the moment is that young men are growing up with an unruffled sense of
6:17
their own dominance is weird. I mean, we'll get to Andrew Tate and the rise of hyper-masculine
6:27
masculinity and the revival of flagrant sexism and misogyny. But to regard that phenomenon
6:35
as completely distinct from and detached from, the sort of aggressive identitarian self-consciousness
6:43
about sex and gender that has been fostered by feminism or some versions of feminism is crazy.
6:52
This is all an interplay. We're all living in the same soup here, like we're all interacting
6:57
with each other. We're responding to cues. So one framework is the problem of gender in 2023
7:06
is that men are on top and men don't care that they're on top and men are quite delighted to be on
7:11
top and women just have to suck it up. The other, I think, more complicated and more nuanced
7:18
explanation of what is going on with gender in 2023 is that you've had a very welcome
7:24
readjustment and overdue readjustment of gender power in that women, we can go through some of
7:32
the statistics about this, but women now outperform men along almost every metric apart from
7:40
like the number of CEOs. But if you look at university graduation rates, if you look at
7:46
expulsion from school, if you look at the number of schoolteachers and role models and so on,
7:51
there are a lot of ways in which young males are finding themselves confused,
7:57
sideline, without a role, without an understanding of what masculinity is supposed to be,
8:03
traditional British caveman understandings of masculinity are thankfully,
8:09
passe, and the new male is a difficult thing to get ones arms around. So I was really looking forward
8:18
to someone as smart as Greta Gerwig wrestling with that. And yet what happens at the end of the film?
8:26
Well, we'll get to that. Let's listen initially to the great speech, the big speech around which
8:34
Gerwig structured the entire movie and around which the resolution of the movie occurs on which it
8:42
hinges. I don't know if the audio of it, because you can't get it yet, but here's the script.
8:48
The character Gloria says it is literally impossible to be a woman. You're so beautiful and so smart,
8:55
it kills me that you don't think you're good enough, speaking to Barbie. Like we have to always be
9:00
extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong. You have to be thin, but not too thin.
9:04
And you can never say you want to be thin, you have to say you want to be healthy, but you also
9:08
have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass.
9:13
You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's
9:17
ideas. You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time.
9:22
You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer
9:27
for men's behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you're accused of complaining.
9:31
You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much,
9:35
or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be part of the sisterhood,
9:39
but always stand out and always be grateful and never forget that the system is rigged.
9:46
So find a way to acknowledge that, but also always be grateful.
9:50
You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down,
9:54
never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It's too hard, it's too contradictory,
9:58
and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you, and it turns out in fact that not only
10:01
you're doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault. I'm just so tired of watching
10:07
myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us,
10:12
and if all of that is also true for a doll, just representing woman, then I don't even know.
10:20
It's a beautiful speech. It's powerful. It brings tears to my eyes.
10:26
If young girls see themselves in it, then bravo.
10:35
It's not the only story. It's not the only story.
10:41
And it becomes the linchpin which the barbies then whisper into each other's ears
10:49
to usher in an awakening and hence a revolution. This is like sort of lifting the veil
10:56
off the eyes of the blind and foolish barbies in barbie land and getting them to understand
11:03
the real power dynamic that's going on and the impossibility of being a woman in their world
11:08
so that they rise up and take action against the men. I'm currently reading an amazing book
11:15
called Wifedom by Anna Funda who I already loved for her book, Starty Land about East Germany.
11:22
And this is a book just in case anyone thinks that my critique is coming from a place of like
11:28
hypersensitivity about masculinity and our privileges and the patriarchy. This is a book that really
11:35
does wrestle and provoke and grapple with the complexity, the contradictions of where we find ourselves
11:45
in this world, the insidiousness I guess of patriarchy and also of patriarchy in some ways.
11:55
So what does the film tell us? Look, as I've said, plot structure is similar to other movies
12:03
about brands. You have these fictitious creatures moving into the real world, realizing what the real
12:08
world is like and then bringing some lesson back to their artificial universe. And when barbie
12:17
and Ken, like it's interesting to look to begin with at the Ken character right, all Ken wants in
12:23
barbie land is to be close to barbie and all he gets is rejection. And when they leave, he learns
12:31
patriarchy, barbie learns the conundrum of being a woman in the modern world. They bring back this
12:38
lesson and Ken turns into a kind of and rotate figure when they get back. He takes over the barbie
12:46
house. He becomes a flagrant misogynist and encourages all the other males to do so. And when
12:52
that happened, I thought the film was approaching something profound because it seemed to be acknowledging
12:58
that part of what's going on in the world at the moment is young males feel confused about the
13:04
role that females expect them to play. They feel excluded and listless as Ken does towards barbie.
13:11
He only exists in relation to her as an appendage to her. His whole universe is that he is beach.
13:19
He is beach Ken. He's not a lifesaver. He's not a swimmer. All he is is beach. All he wants to be
13:25
is close to her. All he gets is rejection and being snubbed. And when you snub and reject
13:33
young men, they do feel excluded. They do feel lost. And one solution for them is they find meaning
13:41
in toxic masculinity. They go towards the worst aspects of Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan
13:49
as embodied in noxious creatures like Andrew Tate. And there was a possibility there that when you
13:57
see Ken and the men articulate a vision of masculinity that's so horrid that barbie and the girls
14:04
might realize that actually playing the zero sum game of one sex against the other and winner
14:11
take all is fruitless. It only leads to division and domination that the solution could have been
14:21
for cooperation for a datant. Instead, the barbies take over, they have this awakening moment where
14:31
they whisper in the years of all of the other barbies, the reality of the patriarchy. They all have a
14:36
kind of almost a robotic instant epiphany and then able to realize that they have to rise up
14:43
against the men. They do rise up against the men and they tell the men to leave the barbie house
14:48
which the men do. Then the men ask if they can have one person on the Supreme Court, which is
14:53
stacked entirely with women in barbie world. And barbie says no, you can't have a single Supreme Court
15:00
justice and everyone lives happily ever after somehow. Well, I don't know if it needs saying,
15:09
but the Supreme Court in the actual world is four women and five men. In barbie world,
15:14
it's either all men or it's all women. The Mattel board, which in the movie is hilariously
15:21
played with Will Farrell as the incompetent boss of Mattel and a whole board full of pale gray
15:27
middle aged presumably straight men. In reality, the Mattel board has five women and six men.
15:34
The movie is a scathing social satire of a society that no longer exists.
15:40
And the solution that it offers is not that we should split the Supreme Court
15:45
down the middle male and female, but that it should be dominated entirely by women.
15:52
And even, I mean, quite apart from whitewashing, the role that women's rights have had in creating
16:02
the gender confusions that currently exist. And this is not to demean in any way the good work
16:10
done by like the me too movement and the urgent necessity of working towards equality between
16:16
the sexes. But it's to understand causes, right? I mean, when we, you know, when when 9-11 happens
16:24
and we say, okay, what's going on in the Muslim world? Why does ISIS, why is ISIS coming into existence?
16:29
What is this all about? We're not justifying terrorism by saying, okay, here are some of the causes.
16:38
Ditto Palestinian terrorism, Ditto Israeli overreach, I mean, pick whatever social or cultural
16:43
phenomena you want to understand what is giving rise to grievances is not to justify the misdeeds
16:50
of people who are motivated by those grievances. So to understand the way in which the shifting
16:55
gender dynamics of the past 10, 15 years have given rise to Andrew Tate and to a spike in toxic
17:03
masculinity is not to justify in any way misogyny or sexism, but it's to try to ascribe correct
17:11
understanding a correct model of causation here. Now, is that asking too much again of a movie that
17:20
presents itself as a comedy for 13-year-old girls? Well, no, not if you're going to have that speech,
17:25
not if that speech is going to motivate the entire final act and the resolution of the film.
17:31
And that speech does not just pretend to be one point of view. This is the point of view
17:37
that unveils the reality about not just Barbie world, but the real world. The real world that
17:42
Barbie and Ken have gone and had their eyes opened in. This is the speech that reveals the fundamental
17:48
dynamic between males and females and that sets the stage for the resolution at the end of the film.
17:56
And as we know, all films end with like a nice tidy resolution of an aspirational
18:01
future, an aspirational set of affairs, which in this case is women seizing back control completely
18:07
and not allowing males to have a single seat on the Supreme Court. That is the resolution
18:11
to the problem of patriarchy as the film sees it. Well, can you imagine an alternative speech
18:19
from the male perspective, not the perspective of Ken, not the perspective of the patriarchy? Well,
18:27
perhaps it is the perspective of Ken when Ken is lost and listless and trying to seize back control
18:32
from Barbie House during that period of the film. But let's take it out of the world of the film
18:37
and put it in the perspective of the young male who is currently causing us so many woes.
18:44
And let me be clear here, this sort of stuff doesn't concern me because I'm worried about women
18:48
getting too much power or something. This stuff concerns me because of the backlash from men.
18:54
This stuff concerns me because I want young men to be good, to be the best that they can be,
18:59
to care about women and to treat them well, and to care about all of society and culture,
19:05
and to treat it well, and to treat other men well, other boys. So what are the conditions in which
19:11
that can happen? The most dangerous force throughout the history of humankind has been young males.
19:19
Young males are terrifying. Young males demolish societies. Young males ruin civilizations.
19:25
Young males rape and pillage. We have been able to set up a civilization, a system in which we
19:34
somewhat constrain the misbehavior of young males. But if you want to turn down the volume on
19:40
forces like Trumpism and Andrew Tatism, then we have to understand what's motivating them,
19:45
to some extent. It's not good enough to just say, well, toxic masculinity, okay, but why does
19:50
toxic masculinity wax and wane in different circumstances? How can we create conditions in which young
19:57
males have a context for understanding justice and respect and civil society? Probably not by telling
20:08
them that the sole truth, the guiding principle that is going to motivate the resolution of all that
20:13
ails us, is the American for our speech, I just read. Because I can equally imagine a speech
20:21
from a young male that goes something like, well, you can tell a girl, she looks nice,
20:29
but not too nice, and you can't say it too often, or you're a creep, or a sexual harasser.
20:34
It's so hard being a male. If you compliment her, you're sweet, but you're also weak,
20:40
she says she likes nice guys, but she actually dates kind of ass holly guys, so you never know
20:44
what she really wants and what's just a game you're supposed to play. If she complains and you
20:50
don't help, then you're useless. If she complains and you do help, then you're man-splaining.
20:55
If you actually know how to fix a problem, then you're a know-it-all. If you don't know, you're a
20:59
schmuck. It's so so hard to be a male. If a man takes up too much space, he's man-spreading. If a
21:06
woman takes up too much space, you need to respect her autonomy. The sins of every man are on
21:12
your shoulders as a man. Domestic violence, it's your fault, rape, it's your fault. The kind of
21:16
guilt by association and collective blame that we would never accept towards any other group
21:21
is legitimate as long as the group is men. When women joke about boring, loser,
21:27
straight, white, middle-aged men, when they generalize about toxic masculinity and tweet out
21:32
to hashtag KillAllMen. You must play along. If you feel offended, you need to grow some balls.
21:38
But not balls that are too big because that's toxic masculinity and don't tell anyone
21:42
else they should grow balls because that reinforces a stereotype that women are weak for having
21:46
ovaries. But don't say women have ovaries because not all women have ovaries, you sexist,
21:51
transphobic pig. We're supposed to accept claims like women earn 70 cents on the dollar.
21:56
Even though every economist knows that once you adjust for hours worked and occupations
22:00
chosen and time off to raise kids, the gender wage gap almost disappears. This hypothetical
22:07
male might say, not Josh Steps. He might say we're supposed to pretend that the only reason
22:14
there are more male CEOs is solely due to sexism, not also due to the larger number of alpha male
22:20
psychopaths who want to work 16 hour days every day of their lives. We need to pretend to enjoy
22:24
being gaslit with such statistics or we're just privileged men in trenching our privilege,
22:31
our privilege to be incarcerated at massive rates to die in mines and in wars and on oil rigs
22:37
and in rescue helicopters, always the last on the lifeboat and the first into the burning building.
22:42
But don't mention it, that would be toxic because men have always enjoyed the privilege
22:48
of toiling in fields and factories to feed their families.
22:54
School boys lag behind girls in maths, they're a full year behind in English.
22:59
They bail out of high school at about the same rate as girls who live in poverty.
23:04
80% of high school dropouts in the United States, boys. Of the top 10% of students academically,
23:11
2 thirds are girls. Nearly twice as many boys have to repeat kindergarten. 95% of children
23:17
diagnosed as hyperactive, boys. 70% of medicated preschoolers and kindergarteners, boys.
23:26
Three times as many boys as girls get expelled. Meanwhile, let's talk about role models.
23:33
90% of primary school teachers are women. 97% of kindergarten teachers are women.
23:40
Role models? How about occupations and careers in the future? Everyone talks about getting girls
23:46
into STEM. That's working. The proportion is nearly doubled, almost a third of STEM workers in America
23:51
are females. But STEM jobs are only 7% of all jobs. There are four times as many jobs
23:59
in the fields of health education, literacy and administration. Those are women-dominated fields
24:06
and it's getting more and more and more. The share of men in those occupations, which are four
24:12
times as prevalent as STEM, is 26% down from 35% in 1980. Among psychologists under the age of 30,
24:23
5% are men. Healthcare is one of the fastest growing best paid sectors of the university degrees
24:29
awarded in healthcare fields, men get 16%, women get 84% of university degrees in healthcare
24:38
fields. 60% of university students overall are women. Now I'm not saying this means anything in
24:49
particular. I'm saying you can imagine a coherent case being made by a young male that life is
24:58
very, very tough for men at the moment. And this movie that presents itself as a new
25:06
onstand sophisticated takedown of gender roles, satirizing the ridiculousness of Barbie and Ken
25:15
is focused only on one side of the pie. At any time you focus only on one side of the pie,
25:22
you alienate and exclude some portion of the population and when you alienate and exclude some
25:29
portion of the population, when you build a cultural narrative in which they don't see themselves
25:34
reflected, they try to find meaning in other ways. Sometimes in ways they really shouldn't find
25:42
meaning. Look at the finale of the movie, where Ken and his toxic masculine Andrew Tati friends
25:52
have taken over Barbie house. And Barbie and America Ferraris character realize that they have to
26:00
take it back so they whisper their pearls of anti-patriarchal wisdom in the years of all of the
26:06
other Barbies and they go and they have a revolution and they take back Barbie house and in
26:11
system no miles on the Supreme Court and whatnot. The way they take over Barbie house is they just
26:18
tell the men that they can't live there anymore and the men leave. Well, that's even doing a disservice
26:28
to toxic masculinity and to the danger that we face in trying to navigate this new terrain.
26:35
It even whitewashers what men are capable of and how bad patriarchy can be.
26:42
Because what happens in the real world when men are going awry and going crazy when they've been
26:49
driven to the brink of toxic masculinity is not that women come along and say sorry you have to
26:56
get out of our house and leave now so we can take back power. What happens is that the men get back
27:03
to a house that has been taken over by the women and the men pillage the place all hell breaks loose
27:10
they burn it to the ground they rape. That's what actually happens in the real world when young
27:17
males are pushed to the brink of feeling totally excluded from power structures.
27:26
Now I'm not saying that happens because of women that happens because of men and that happens
27:30
because of the jostling and the power dynamics between men, the desire for supremacy between men.
27:38
But to kind of leave out the jigsaw piece of the whole jigsaw puzzle which is that patriarchy and
27:46
toxic masculinity are not just about the number of people on the Supreme Court or the number of
27:49
people on the Mattel board problems I add which we have already solved in the real world.
27:55
They're about trying to constrain the worst impulses of the most dangerous cohort of society which is young
28:01
males. I was hoping for a movie that would grapple with that that would grapple with how you achieve
28:13
self fulfillment and equality for women at the same time as managing the instincts of young males
28:22
and trying to make things equitable for everyone. And we end up with a movie that articulates
28:29
a vision of the patriarchy that no longer exists that assumes that young men walk through the world
28:38
with as unruffled a sense of their own dominance as can find when he enters the real world and
28:44
experiences that montage of male presidents and men on banknotes. That is not the world
28:50
in through which young men are currently walking. They're currently walking through a very
28:55
confusing minefield in which they're not sure what they're supposed to be doing. And the solution
29:01
to that is not to rub their nose in the dirt kick them out of the house and tell them they're
29:06
never going to have someone on the Supreme Court because now it's our turn to construct a patriarchy.
29:12
So those are my thoughts. I thought it was a lost missed opportunity. I still enjoyed the film.
29:17
It's a funny film. Go to it. See it. Laugh at it. Have fun. Whatever. If it inspires 13-year-old
29:24
girls to feel better about themselves, great. But let's not pretend that it's the kind of biting
29:31
cultural and social satire that it thinks it is. Thank you so much for being part of the uncomfortable
29:36
conversations community next time back to regular programming.