Navy blue nights covered in Johnny Cash, early mornings that echoed with warm Iron & Wine and the spiky sound of The Cure. Pieces of moments connected in lyrics of The Sundays, Tyler Childers, Eagles, Alice Phoebe Lou, little stars made of the bright showings like Sufjan Stevens, neon and endlessly shown as I walked from place to place, clicking my feet softly on some asphalt pad, some soft ground of clay dirt. I can’t imagine my life without the music and listening I’ve always had, whether it was some song I snuck from the boat radio while my dad whipped us through Lake Marion, or a tune barely heard from my spot in the back of a pickup truck. Or the late night music that spread around my friends and I in spirals, holding us together with the occasional low-paid cover of a friends band of ours. 

So, when I lost my cheap pair of headphones I’d been using religiously around the end of November, it didn’t go very well at first. They are always in my ears — whether it’s in the early morning for my regular gym routine, or working on one of many essays as I endure my studies at college. It was all the stages of grief that you could name, believing that they’d surely appear again, until days and then weeks passed. Before I knew it I had gone almost 2 months without a constant playing in my ears as I went about my day to day. 

Still, even in my frustration, I found myself listening to a new kind of poetry. Even moreso, returning to a poetry I had forgotten, covered up by my quick moving, crowded life I’ve been so blessed to have. In those times of the day that would usually be watered down by the extra sound, I found moments for boredom that were more beneficial than I had anticipated. From these seven weeks I took 3 main things that I thought would be worth sharing with whoever may come across this piece. 

1. Hearing the birds sing at least once a day is good for your health 

I grew up in days that were almost always outside somehow, whether it was covered in dirt, swimming, or helping my dad with the yard work. It was always so integral to me as a kid waking up before everyone else on those mornings and hearing the mourning doves, Carolina wrens, and mockingbirds call to each other back and forth while the sun still crawled itself from its bed of bald cypress and evergreen. 

Now, at my university, there are many walks through our campus that are bordered in tall oak trees, with branches that reach across the grass-covered quad. The birds that live in these trees never stop their subtle, low songs, only slowing them as the days shorten into smaller pieces of sky blue, the cold crowding in and choking out the leaves. Usually, in my walks from class to class, place to place, I would not pay as much attention to these little voices. In the weeks I spent without music, and even now, as I have gained a new habit of listening more often, I catch the snippets of hellos and goodbyes, following them to the feathered sources in the shapes of chickadees, goldfinches, cardinals, thrashers. My walks have felt all the more peaceful and have made my often stressful days just a little less overwhelming. I’ve found myself going back, leaving to walk to class earlier so as to enjoy it slowly. 

2. Music is better enjoyed when less listened to 

I love to listen to a song over and over until I’ve quite literally drained it of all meaning and life force. Of all the habits I have, it’s definitely one of the worst. The most recent extreme obsession has been Flightless Bird / American Mouth by Iron & Wine — I highly, highly recommend it. I’ve often received messages from friends tracking my listening habits to ask why I had listened to the same song fifteen times in a row, and sometimes more. 

I’ve never quite been able to find a solution to this problem. As much as I could always tell myself I wouldn’t listen to a song over and over until I couldn’t enjoy it anymore, I still would return back to it inevitably. In a weird, unexpected way, not being able to listen to music as often helped. It feels silly — listen to music less, enjoy it more? I was only able to truly listen to music when I would be driving in my car, whether that was to an errand or three hours across the state to my parents house. I was able to appreciate those songs I love all the more because I simply hadn’t heard them in a while. And, while I have never been the type of person to say that withholding something makes it better, music may be one of those very few things. Let the songs marinate a little. Come back to them when the time is right. 

3. Regaining presence in your own life regains your agency to create 

All these things considered, one of the most influential things I found in this seven week long journey was a refreshed ability to write. I can get very, very stressed during the school year here at UNC Chapel Hill. The work can compile on top of me like the Blue Ridge Mountains. And when those stressful times come, not only do I shut myself into my own world that is contained by the gates of my noise-canceling headphones, but I have less time to be creative, and even less willpower to try. I spend so much time writing and working on school related things, that when I finally get the chance to sit down at my desk and flex any creative muscles, they’ve deteriorated in some hidden filing cabinet somewhere in my brain. I’ve always hated this. Writing and art have been a huge part of my life since as early as I could walk. 

Without my headphones, I couldn’t shut myself away from everyone as easily. Sure, if I needed true silence, I could find it in my bedroom. But what I found was that this shutting myself off only made me more stressed, and, by proxy, made it even harder to do my work. I have never been one to give myself enough grace, but in these weeks I have caught myself in these hermit modes that do little to truly help me get any work done. Doing work with a few friends nearby, or next to my boyfriend on the couch while he did his own tasks, was worlds better. And, with this better habit, there was more time to write, more time to paint. Even in this last semester, I was able to work on a piece in this new free time that won me a huge award, and even the cash to replace those lost headphones. If I could allow myself the liberty to talk and enjoy my time working, I could just as easily spend my breaks doing something I loved rather than just doomscrolling on my phone with music blasting in my ears. 

In all the details of my life that have improved since losing those headphones, all of them return back to slowness. I overheard in a conversation that the young people of today can’t live life without headphones in, moving around like zombies in a living world. I’ve always thought that statement was harsher than need be, but now, with my seven weeks cold turkey, I have to agree. How do we come back to our lives that we do everything we can to separate ourselves from? Sometimes it’s just moving a little slower, taking pace without blocking ourselves off, easing tensions. Life with an entire sense cut off feels more like existing. But it doesn’t have to.

The post What I Learned From Seven Weeks Without My Headphones appeared first on The New Absurdist.

I start this not to suggest that there is anything I feel against this motif. I, too, am a lover of Wendy Cope’s The Orange, or Gary Soto’s Oranges, or even Roisin Kelly’s poem by the same name. My favorite rendition of this is JP Infante’s Yasica, Puerto Plata. 

“When I saw my great-grandmother peel a tangerine with her bare hands while men used knives for oranges, she became god.  I imagined what she could do with the sun.” (excerpt from Yasica, Puerto Plata) 

There is an endearment to writings like these, I think, that a lot of people find. That idea of someone taking you, the orange, in two gentle hands, tearing your skin to find what is truly you, pulpy and tender and hidden away. But why? Where does this come from? Why detach from our human selves and find understanding in citrus? 

Among the many opinionated literary folks of the world, there are some people who are completely exhausted by this idea, even calling it a cliché. Some string it alongside the common writings on pomegranate, a fruit that had come to have symbolism for feminism and love but has since become a sort of indicator for ‘bad,’ ‘performative’ TikTok poetry. The same has begun to happen with figs, after Sylvia Plath’s fig tree concept. 

But I am not here to discuss pomegranates or figs. Rather, I see oranges tumbling down into the same rabbit hole of dilution. 

For one, even as oranges find their way into language and writing time and time again, they can also be found in metaphor and phrases, like in Spanish. The phrase ‘mi media naranja’ or ‘my orange half’ refers to the idea that every person has another half that they are constantly in search of, suggesting a kind of destiny or generational connection that goes far beyond what we see in this one life we see presently. This is often linked back to the Greek myth recorded by Plato in The Symposium, where the idea that every soul is missing its other half is also expressed, claiming that Zeus caused this divide out of the arrogance of humans.

With this origin, I found a sort of poetry alone in the fact that oranges and many citrus fruits are the only fruits to be naturally subdivided, while usually for these orange metaphors the focus is primarily on the peel. You split one open — with a knife, maybe, like JP Infante’s poem — and half the work has been done for you, politely waiting with the segments in their expected places. 

I believe part of our exhaustion with oranges can be found in this. We give them surface level meaning, as surface level as the 3mm vivid, aromatic peel. The irony in this is that part of the symbolism we are always creating with oranges is about seeing things beyond their simplicity, like the orange peel theory; the idea that how or if someone peels an orange for you can indicate affection or care. 

Dare I say this theory has watered down the juice. To stop at the peel is to lose so much of the magic that can be found here! Dig a little deeper into the bright sun of it and find, perhaps, Amy Schmidt’s Abundance, in memory of Mary Oliver. 

“It’s impossible to be lonely 

when you’re zesting an orange. 

Scrape the soft rind once 

and the whole room 

fills with fruit. 

Look around: you have 

more than enough. 

Always have. 

You just didn’t notice 

until now.” 

This poem follows Mary Oliver’s Oranges, which I think also seeks further into the idea. 

“Cut one, the lace of acid 

rushes out, spills over your hands. 

You lick them, manners don’t come into it. 

Orange−the first word you have heard that day−”

(excerpt from Oranges) 

I think what often happens with poetry as it circulates online is a gradual misunderstanding of meanings. This present day loves to take a concept and spin it into one specific thing, keep it contained in a box that doesn’t allow further critical thinking or creativity (like orange peel theory!). We consume things quickly, in small rushes of dopamine that fade as quickly as they come. The same has happened to oranges.

When do the mundane things become beautiful, and vice versa? How does the repetitive nature of our modern day prevent us from being able to enjoy these poetic motifs? Sometimes things must be taken deeper than they are, looked at from a new angle, given new life. What I mean to say is sometimes you can’t garner the meaning from the simplest of explanations or viewpoints. Take a dip into another set of eyes, find the angle. 

To be able to absorb these ideas with a grain of salt — seeing past the misuse and confusion caused by modern day media — is to be able to peel past the skin, find the segments, see what more there is to something mundane.

The post In Defense of Wendy Cope, Gary Soto, Roisin Kelly, etc. appeared first on The New Absurdist.

September is the start of New York Fashion Week, making it a prime time for brands like Dove to launch their new advertisement campaigns. With these subway ads, a quippy hashtag, and the help of Dove pop-up stands – or “pit stops”— giving away free merch and MTA cards, it makes sense that the ad campaign has gotten lots of praise online in the last few days in the press.

If Dove’s ad campaign was the final drop in the bucket of confidence you needed to bare your armpits with pride, that’s great! But it’s important to understand that Dove cares more about your wallet than your pits. Dove is not aspiring to create a social movement that makes women feel confident unless they are spearheading the ‘movement’ with their own merchandise. 

The first red flag is that for a campaign that claims to be about not judging armpits, especially unshaved ones, there’s not a single bushy armpit in the bunch. At most, there’s a slight hint of stubble.

Ad images of Dove’s #Freethepit campaign sourced from Ogilvy

It’s no coincidence that Dove has chosen NYC and Times Square to debut #freethepits when this is a central location to #freethenipple protests. And with women’s freedom to go topless, or even braless still being a controversial social issue, it feels as if Dove has chosen to appropriate one women’s liberation movement in the name of creating their own social media campaign.

Dove’s #freethepit campaign is just the latest, local example in what is called Commodity Feminism, also known as “Femvertising” and “Empowertising.” 

Commodity Feminism

Commodity Feminism refers to the way companies will align themselves to feminist ideas and imagery, all because it will help them sell more products. Similar to how companies use Greenwashing to create a false public image of being eco-friendly, companies use feminist buzzwords to sell products to women, such as alway’s #likeagirl campaign.

If you’re not thinking too hard about it, these campaigns may seem full of liberal or progressive ideas, but keep in mind these are giant multi-billion dollar companies. These movements come out of allegiance to their investors, not grassroots activism. Logically, it only benefits companies to keep women, their main clientele, happy and buying. If dissing women would have made these companies money instead, you can bet they would have.

The way these commercials work is to associate women’s power in society with their buying power. Since women have money, they have power, and with this money they can buy things to pamper themselves. 

These ‘pamper products’ tend to be geared towards unpleasant ‘luxuries’ like shaving, waxing, disguising odors, and dieting- all things to make a woman more conventionally sexually attractive, if not to men, then at least themselves. This in turn increases a woman’s self confidence. Femvertising creates the illusion of an equal society, where the more money women spend, the more power they have. 

Often, this ‘type’ of ‘feminism’ is targeted at middle to upper class, heterosexual white women and neglects the experiences of BIPOC, trans, and disabled women. But where there’s money to be made, the ‘inclusion’ will eventually follow, if femvertising is not an example in itself!

A deodorant by any other name would smell just as sweet. Whether you call it Commodity Feminism, Femvertising, or Empoweritsing, the fact remains that the visual and written language of this advertising still is meant to obscure how Dove is still marketing off the insecurities of women.

How Feminist is Dove, Really?

In the same survey that Dove sources to use as slogans and quotes for its advertising campaign, “80% of women believe society promotes an ‘ideal’ underarm; most say the ‘ideal’ underarm should be hairless, smooth, odorless, and even-toned.” (Dove Underarm Confidence Survey).

You don’t see the mention of anything other than hair in Dove’s slogans because… well, to encourage women to not judge armpits based on odor would be a bit counterintuitive to the interests of a deodorant company.

This isn’t the first time Dove and OgiIvy’s partnership has encountered controversy for their ads. In fact, the debut of the “Dove Campaign for Real Beauty ” in 1994 is considered to be one of the first ‘Femvertising’ Campaigns.  As part of the “ Dove Campaign for Real Beauty,” there is no digital retouching in any ads, and all photographs are approved by women. And yet, in their casting calls, Dove has continually searched for women with “no tattoos, perfect skin,[and] bodies that aren’t too curved or too athletic.”

In this new #freethepits campaign, we see that the ‘no tattoos’ rule has been lifted, but the models chosen still fit within a restrictive standard of beauty (light, clear, unwrinkled skin and uncontroversial body types.)

And for an ad campaign based in New York City, there are no South or East Asian women featured in the photographs, with South Asian/ Brown girls being one of the primary demographics in America historically especially to be ostrasized for having body hair. The ad campaign also didn’t consider representing anybody older or visually disabled.

Compared to the other full upper body shots of the ad campaign, there is one close up of an ethnically ambiguous woman that perhaps is meant to serve as an all encompassing diversity figure for any body that wasn’t otherwise represented. 

Femvertising aside, when we dig a little deeper and recognize that Dove is the baby of its much larger parent company, Unilever, Dove’s integrity regarding its pro-women campaign seems compromised Unilever has come under fire for human rights issues in its supply chain, including slavery and forced child labor in palm oil and cocoa plantations.

I’m all for freeing the pits, but I think Dove should work on liberating people – or not enslaving them– before it “liberates” women’s armpits.

If you’re interested in learning more about Commodity Feminism, I recommend “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of A Sensibility” by Rosalind Gill, where I sourced much of the information about commodity feminism in this article. I also sourced information from “The Rise of Femvertising: Authentically Reaching Female Consumers” by Elisa Becker-Herby.

The post Something Stinks with Dove’s New #freethepits Campaign appeared first on The New Absurdist.

In the animated Netflix original Kipo, the titular character, Kipo is biracial Black and Korean. The two supporting human characters, Wolf and Benson are Black. Benson openly announces he is gay and Kipo and Wolf are debated amongst fans to be queer-coded. The rest of human society is filled with multiracial characters and peaceful racial coexistence is the norm, at least among humans. 

As a biracial Asian American growing up, it was rare for me to see this level of racial representation in film or animated children’s media. Nowadays, it’s apparent that representation of all kinds is becoming more important especially with younger audiences seeking out more content that reflects their demographic.

Kipo Fandom Wiki: Kipo And the Age of Wonderbeasts poster

To speak a little about the plot: 

Kipo has been living in the Burrow her whole life in an underground, suburban coded utopia (and quite literally sub-urban, as she lives below a city) for humans where they can protect themselves from the surface world, where mutated animals known as “mutes” dominate. When she is accidentally separated from her family in a mega-monkey mute attack, Kipo goes on a mission to get back home, meeting friends and making allies along the way. Kipo’s world is set 200 years in a post-apocalyptic future, and the range of race and sexuality are easily accepted, addressed, and normalized. The main issue of discrimination and specifically racial tension focuses on the animosity between humans and mutes. 

Racial Redesigns

Kipo and the Age of WondersBeasts was first created in 2015 by Radford Sechrist as a webcomic. It was eventually turned into an animated series by Dreamworks and Netflix, and all three seasons were released in rapid succession in 2020. 

While the TV series starts off fairly similar to the original webcomic in plot and character roles, many racial aspects of the main characters were changed. Benson was changed from a middle aged white man into a young Black teen. Wolf is redesigned from a racially ambiguous, potentially Asian character to match voice actress Syndney Mikayla ‘s Black American ethnicity. And while Kipo looks the same as she does in the webcomic, she was not originally created to be the bispecies, biracial (Blasian) character that she is in the show (Kipo was originally intended to be Korean, but her character was not redesigned to reflect changes in the show). 

Images from Kipo Fandom Wiki, From Left to Right: Benson, Wolf, Kipo

Radford Sechrist has offered up some reasons through interviews and comments on Reddit, one of them being that the producers wanted the characters all to be kids and for Kipo to be “special” somehow.

What does it mean to be special? The transformation of Kipo’s character from a mono-racial, human character to a biracial, bi-species character has done two things. Her biraciality on her human side can be read as a symbol for her dual species. Furthermore, the purple skin offers viewers a foreshadowing indication of her mute DNA. It can also be read as a way the show codes Kipo’s Blackness and status as POC.

In the history of animated film, there has been a pattern of portraying POC, particularly Black people as animals or in colors that deviate from skin tone to indicate a non-humanness to them. Tiana, the Black main character in The Princess and the Frog spends most of the movie as a green frog. Similarly, the Black main character, Lance Sterling, in Spies in Disguise turns into a pigeon.  In Soul, Joe Gardener is immediately turned into an amorphous blue blob and literally disembodied. At one point in the film, a white woman’s soul even inhabits his Black body – animating a black man’s body through the desires and thoughts of a white woman.

People of Color have historically been depicted in animation as non-human characters that appear to exist outside racial constructs. By portraying POC as whimsical colored or as creatures, the animation industry can attempt to circumvent accusations of racism while still appealing to white audiences with the humiliation and exploitation of non-white characters. These character designs of POC skirt realistic depictions and stories as a way to appeal to that demographic that historically only mattered (with their buying power): white audiences.

Despite Kipo’s mostly successful attempts to provide representation that doesn’t rely on negative stereotypes surrounding race, it does still end up using established racial tropes in animation that viewers are already familiar with in their visual vocabulary. 

Multiracial Asians in Film and Animation

The show actively plays on Kipo’s racial ambiguity to build up the postmodern, suburban utopia that Kipo grows up in: “The Burrow.” The show introduces Kipo’s father as her primary caretaker, making it immediately clear that despite Kipo’s appearances, she is indeed Black. And because Kipo’s mother’s Korean ethnicity and Part-Mute nature are not revealed until later on in the series, Kipo’s character design and story arc become heavily tied into her own racial ambiguity. Both Kipo and the audience learn more about her heritage the further we watch the series. 

In addition to Kipo, the Burrow has quite a few racially ambiguous and multi-racial characters in the background and ensemble cast including Troy Sandoval, who is also a multiracial person, this time of Asian and Latino descent. Troy too, joins Kipo on her mission of resolving tensions between the mutes and humans and ends up befriending a giant frog named Jamack.

Kipo Fandom Wiki: Troy Sandoval

The coding of ‘white’ and ‘black’ can change between the mute world and the human world.  In season 2, “The Ballad of Brunchington Beach” a mute restaurant refuses to serve humans, mirroring twentieth century American racial segregation. In the same episode, the TheaOtters put on a show stereotyping and dramatizing Team Kipo and other humans, which seems to allude to minstrel shows in which white people would put on blackface to entertain white audiences. It’s interesting to note that as these acts of racism take place against humans on the mute dominated surface world, the three main human characters in which these acts of racial violence occur are all black.

Troy and Kipo both share a multi-racial Asian identity. As multiracial people, they serve as an example of a film trope where multiracial characters act as a bridge between cultures.  Through these characters, the animation is able to represent racial differences between humans without actually addressing racial issues during the script. Furthermore, because of their status as Asian Americans, they are members of “both the targeted, racialized, group in US immigration policy and yet [part of] the least ‘colored’ group in racial debate. Asian Americans offer a charged site where American nationhood invests much of its contradictory desires and anxieties.’ The prominence of peaceful racial coexistence amongst humans as evidenced by multiracial people indicates that this is a postmodern society where humans live in a race free utopia.

The idea that multiracial people are symbols of the declining significance of race also lends itself to the future that Kipo is working towards: a world where humans and mutes thrive and live together peacefully without adversity. The explicit identification of multiracial characters in Kipo can be read as a symbol for hope, for a future where ‘color-blindness’ is the norm and racial categories are continuously blurred.

This comes with its own set of qualms, as it can ignore much of the context of racial upbringing and cultural heritage that comes with being a Person of Color, let alone one with a mixed background.        

Multiracial Ambassadors

Kipo is what we call a multiracial ambassador in Hollywood, a persona well established in film history. The multiracial ambassador is a main character who often appears in action films that is supposed to reflect the diversity of younger generations and their interests in seeing people who represent them. Instead of relying on brute strength, the contemporary action hero is distinguished by, in the words of Mary Beltran, “their natural ability to navigate in, command respect and when necessary, kick ass in a variety of ethnic communities.”

The multiracial ambassador normally operates within a multiethnic cityscape, a setting that appears frequently in Hollywood action films. It is appropriate then, that Kipo’s world is set in a reimagined Los Angeles called “Las Vistas.”

Las Vistas, Kipo Fandom Wiki

One of the key features of the Hollywood multiethnic cityscape are turf wars based on racial tensions. We see this in the gangster films in the 20s and 30s, social problem films from the 40s, and movies concerning white flight in the 50s and 60s. Non-white people were seen as violent criminals in urban centers, prompting white people to flee to the suburbs.

For those who have seen Kipo, this may ring some bells. Humans retreat to the safe societies they built below the surface, far away from the upper world where dangerous mutes live on the surface. Despite the racial diversity of the human characters in Kipo, the humans can be read as symbols for white society in relation to the mutes. The predominant narrative surrounding mutes in the Burrow is that they are uncivilized and dangerous.

But with the appearance of the multiracial ambassador, such as Kipo, characters are able to navigate complicated and nuanced racial tensions  Kipo is able to navigate relationships between humans and mutes not purely because of her biraciality, but because she is willing to listen to others and develop connections with people. However, her biracial-ness mirrors this cultural savviness.

Political Blackness

Kipo’s portrayal as both a black and Korean character also allows the world’s environment and music- a core theme in the show- to be built around her: Black and Korean musical themes and cultural references are woven through the fabric of the show. However, while this ‘cultural Blackness’ is celebrated, ‘political Blackness’ (including the persistence of racism) is disguised more as a class struggle, similar to the conflict between Mutes and humans. Kipo’s biraciality and Black identity is diluted as an appeal to mainstream pop culture, and a more fantastical interspecies conflict of humans vs. animal Mutants.

While the plot of Kipo heavily relies on considering racial tensions and discrimination, the show avoids directly acknowledging the way that Blackness affects and shapes the characters’ lives. In terms of the postmodern future, animation and science fiction tends to see human society as color-blind, yet at the same time uses racial allegory to create the ‘other’ the same way POC have been ‘othered’ and dehumanized in film history. The tensions between the Mutes and the humans can be read as an allegory for racial tensions we have had in human history and are having currently.  However, the post-racial lenses that show views of the human world in Kipo don’t acknowledge racism in human history or how it may affect this fictional future, instead focusing it on the adversity between humans and mutes.

Final Thoughts

I thoroughly enjoyed watching Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, and would highly recommend it to anyone looking for an animated series with beautiful world-building and well-developed characters. I think the steps it takes towards building well developed and diverse characters are highly notable and to be commended. However, I think it’s important to acknowledge the circumstances in which Kipo was created to be a multiracial character.

 Kipo builds on a legacy of multi-racial tropes in Hollywood and takes advantage of popular trending ideas of our time such as Black hip hop, anime, and LGTBQ representation to create an action TV series that is neatly packaged for younger and older audiences alike. The show skirts over the political context and histories for its human characters in favor of more light-hearted and marketable content. At the same time, it attempts to touch on complicated issues regarding racial discrimination and prejudice through Mute-human interaction.

 This post-apocalyptic, post-modern future of humans aspires to be a post-racial utopia where a multiethnic population can thrive, first in terms of multi-ethnic humans and by the end of the series, for both humans and mutes, now deemed ‘Wonderbeasts.’ 

There is further work to be done in animation yet in creating multi-ethnic characters without their identity ‘becoming’ the plot, and in acknowledging the political and cultural heritage of People of Color, but I am optimistic and look forward to the progress being made by creators in the industry.

The post Kipo: Biraciality and Blackness appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Leading up to its theatrical release, Greta Gerwig’s third feature film continues to be all anyone and everyone have been talking about. This and of course, its tonal and seemingly gendered juxtaposition with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023): a beautifully organic, fan-driven internet phenomenon that will forever hold a black-and-pink space in cinema history. 

But I want to focus on the woman of the hour herself. The doll. The myth. The legend. Barbie. (Trademark of Mattel Inc.) 

Who is she behind the painted face? What was she made for? 

Growing up, I hated Barbie. But not for any socially relevant reason like the size of her (white) body or internalized misogynistic one like the perceived size of her brain as suggested by her blonde hair, love for fashion, and 1992 struggles in math class. 

I hated Barbie like I hated all hard dolls. I hated the way their plastic bodies felt. I hated that it hurt if you stepped or fell on top of them. And quite frankly, they scared me. Barbies, Bratz, American Girls, you name it. Before I opened presents at my birthday parties ages 3 to 5, I would announce this to the friends and family gathered around me, immediately making several of my parents’ friends feel bad as they had inevitably bought these dolls for me as a kind, thoughtful gesture. I even wrote a whole essay about my hatred and fear of hard dolls in the third grade; it really was that serious. 

Instead, I played with Groovy Girls, Manhattan Toy’s line of fashionable dolls. They were marketed as the funky and more ambiguously diverse alternative to Barbie and introduced to me by my aunt for that exact reason. But their most important feature? They were soft and I could sleep comfortably with them in bed. (There was an East Asian-looking Groovy Girl named Caring Caitlin, but at 5 years old, I didn’t have the language nor context to express why that meant so much to me at the time.) 

Groovy Girls were not as popular as Barbie. Not even close. In 2019, Manhattan Toys retired the Groovy Girls, while Barbie today and more broadly, Mattel, are stronger than ever. Those poor Groovy Girls never had a chance. Since her creation in 1959, Barbie has always been more than just a doll. She herself is a brand with over 40 films (I adored many of them as a child despite hating the doll itself), TV shows, a now taken down-website filled with online games, skincare/makeup lines, and clothing. 

She also embodies a movement: packaged yet personified feminism of the past and present. She’s held over 200 jobs and with that, has her own money, dreamhouse, plane, etc. Barbie was the first toy to reflect and encourage the unique aspirations of little girls. They didn’t have to play and train for motherhood anymore; now they could be whoever they wanted to be. As the 2023 film so accurately states, “Humans only have one ending. Ideas live forever”: a sentiment that summarizes the great reckoning Margot Robbie’s Barbie confronts and the reason behind the commercial success of Barbie the doll. 

Greta Gerwig, along with the actresses in the film, will be the first to tell you that Barbie is “most certainly a feminist film.” Robbie Brenner, Executive Producer of Mattel Films, and other Mattel executives are quick to say the exact opposite. Whose words do we believe? Whose words hold more weight? Is it Gerwig, the woman who co-wrote and directed this film, or is it Brenner, the woman spearheading the years-long rollout of the next MCU: Mattel Cinematic Universe? (More on that later.) 

Greta Gerwig is an artist. A visionary. A filmmaker. Robbie Brenner, as she stands as Executive Producer, speaks for Mattel, the multinational corporation whose executive leadership team consists mostly of men. In fact, in the over 60 years Barbie has existed, Mattel has never identified Barbie as explicitly feminist; instead, she’s been associated with vague promotions of female empowerment and girl power. “Feminist” is too politically charged for Barbie; it’s us, society at large, that has projected feminism onto a plastic doll. 

Where does this leave a film that’s smashing box office records with a multimillion-dollar omnichannel marketing campaign to match? 

Well, as it will reveal—perhaps in a punchy five-minute-or-so monologue—somewhere sort of in between. 

Spoilers ahead. 

True to Barbie canon, every Barbie in Barbieland is…everything. She’s the President, a mermaid, a diplomat, a lawyer, a doctor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the Supreme Court Justices, a Nobel Prize-winning author, and a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. The lead protagonist, Margot Robbie’s Barbie, is “Stereotypical Barbie,” presumably a fashion model and the enduring original from 1959. She’s the brand, nay cultural icon, the feminist, nay fascist symbol, the role model, nay impossible beauty standard. She’s the most everything anyone could ever be. 

And the film does its best to acknowledge and tackle this dichotomy, albeit in chaotic, rushed scenes. You have to remember: Mattel’s CEO is watching Barbie’s every move, both Will Ferrell’s unnamed character in the film and the actual current Mattel CEO, Ynon Kreiz. 

(Barbie’s also a major plastic pollutant and the factories she’s made in have a long history of unsafe and inhumane working conditions, but that’s a bigger issue that doesn’t begin and end with Barbie. Mattel would never want you to know that though.)

Margot Robbie’s performance as Barbie is grappling with the culmination of ideals, expectations, and politics she represents is a marvel to behold. But it is America Ferrera’s monologue as Gloria, receptionist to Mattel’s CEO (Ferrell’s version), that has followed people long after they leave the theater. Ferrera articulates the sobering reality of the female experience, answering the film’s central question: if all this pressure is placed upon a doll, how does this manifest for women in the real world? 

Literal impossibility. A paradox that would make philosophers the likes of Plato and Bertrand Russell shudder. 

Gloria’s feminism is pure. It’s real. It’s relatable. 

At the same time, it’s pretty uncontroversial and not revolutionary; in other words, it’s perfect for Mattel. This merely enhances the trendy Barbiecore aesthetic taking the world by storm. 

Feminism goes far beyond the individual. It’s systemic. It’s global. It’s inherently political. 

That isn’t to say Barbie is completely devoid of 21st century politics. One can deduce where Gerwig stands on more contentious social issues concerning Americans today, say for instance the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade. In Barbieland, the Supreme Court is packed with women until Ryan Gosling’s Ken, who I have purposely not mentioned until now, brings patriarchy and unravels everything the Barbies have ever worked for in a day. 

With the issue of bodily autonomy, Barbie just scratches the surface. The key difference is these hints are far more subtle than the otherwise spoon-fed messaging on what it means to be a woman. Mattel has to appeal to the pro-lifers after all. 

But I’ll cut the film some slack. The overt yet simple feminism of Barbie works for the narrative too. The Barbies are still dolls, empty vessels made of toxic plastic. In the end, Robbie’s Barbie decides to become human, accepting that she will realize how much worse the real world is in time. 

This time, however, she won’t be experiencing it alone. She has Gloria and Gloria’s daughter, Sasha, to lean on. Gloria may be a Mattel employee, but she’s, more importantly, the owner of Robbie’s Barbie. 

Which brings me back to my original question. Who is Barbie? 

When we push everything we’ve pushed onto Barbie aside, what is left? 

A doll. No, still not just any doll. She’s your doll.

She’s an extension of every child that’s played with her. 

And Mattel knows this. Boy, do they. 

Fourteen Mattel properties are in active development for their respective film adaptations including but not limited to Barney, Polly Pocket, American Girl, Hot Wheels, UNO, View Master, and more. 

Hollywood has our nostalgia in a chokehold, squeezing out every last dollar. 

Who cares about the controversies that have plagued Mattel as a corporation? Thanks to Barbie, they now have enough advertising to distract us for at least a decade. Unlike Will Ferrell’s character, Ynon Kreiz is no bumbling idiot. 

I get it, I do. If by some miracle there’s a Groovy Girl film, you know I’ll be the first in line. 

As another self-proclaimed pop culture nerd, I’ve fallen victim to the consumerist dystopia that comes out of fictional “utopias” such as Barbieland. (I’m staring right at my Harry Potter and Marvel Funko Pop collection.) You can use fantasy and capitalism as an escape! 

It’s not wrong to be nostalgic. It’s not wrong to revisit our favorite stories—in this case, toys—and reimagine them with a fresh new take. Greta Gerwig had a point to make. A point that was diluted to appease a billion dollar company, but a point nonetheless. 

The announcement of Robbie Brenner’s MCU has me nervous. The joint success of Barbie and Oppenheimer is exciting and yet it is happening against a backdrop of a historical double SAG-AFTRA and WGA strike. We talk of million dollar earnings when there are writers and actors who can barely afford to live. 

Barbie is feminist and it is not. 

Barbie belongs to you and she does not. 

At the core of Barbie, the film, and Barbie, the doll, is a fascinating push-and-pull between art and money, consumer and corporation. 

Looking back, Groovy Girls were not nearly as interesting. (I love them dearly, Bác Xuyến/Aunt Kelly; I’m kidding.) 

If only I had inserted myself into this conversation sooner as a 3 year old.

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