Favorite recs from my month-long Barbie binge (thread)

It's been like a smorgasbord of smart takes on feminism and girlhood and patriarchy and Ryan Gosling.--here are my 8 favs. What are yours?

Matriarchy Report is a reader-supported publication. To support independent female journalism, become a paid subscriber, starting at $5 a month, using the link below.

If this newsletter is useful to you, your help (likes, comments, shares, subscriptions) make a big difference in making this newsletter sustainable. Thank you.

---

Last week, I wrote about how the “Barbie” movie shows how patriarchy is bad for everyone, including men and boys. There’s a monologue for Ken in it, in which he rails against the damaging effects of constructed masculinity, ala the America Ferrera speech, but the dude version.

(Feel free to pause and read “Come on Barbie, dismantle patriarchy” here. You can come right back!)

This is my humble contribution to the nonstop conversation of Barbie-analysis that has been feeding my spirit. The first thing I did after I saw the film was text my sister and one of my best friends about it, and then went on a reading/listening/watching binge. The conversation, IRL and online, has been extremely satisfying. The last month has been an unfolding intelligent conversation about feminism and girlhood and patriarchy and motherhood and Ryan Gosling. All the things that I love are suddenly in the headlines.

Reader responses to the piece I wrote last week piece already gave me new things to think about (any other Allan fans out there??) and pointed out things that I missed. My dad called to say he read it and that he used to scour garage sales for Barbie stuff, which is how my sisters and I amassed a war chest of Barbie outfits, and a Barbie McDonald’s that, in retrospect, is an unholy union of American capitalism kitsch and also was SO MUCH FUN (tiny burger patties and buns that you assemble yourself and place on tiny replicas of those gross brown McDonald’s trays—what more could a kid want??)

In this thread I offer some of my favorite smart, beautiful, funny and weird writing and Barbie-related content that I’ve binged in the last few weeks. Please share your favorites too in the comments!

America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt /Barbie/ Warner Bros.

1. “Hi Barbie” by Carley Moore at My Subby is a delightful read about girls playing with dolls, women and dolls as fetish objects, and all the sex our Barbies were having (we all did this, right??), amongst other things. “My Barbies…were proud sluts, and they didn’t care what anyone thought of them.”

2. “Parenting in Barbie Land: A take on the film for weird dark crazy moms” by Amanda Montei at Mad Woman is a beautiful blow-by-blow of watching the film with her daughter. It articulates the heartbreaking tightrope of raising girls with girl power while preparing them for a world that’s…the opposite of that…better than almost anything I’ve read.

   “It’s really a film about motherhood and girlhood, about growing up and growing apart— about mothers and daughters losing each other when girls come to understand the world they will age into and how hostile it is towards women. It’s a film about no longer being able to inhabit the fantasy world we once shared with our moms.”