Thoughts on how Mens and Kens can process our feels after watching the movie.
He was usually much more jovial and playful, but in the moment after I said it, the brother of my girlfriend at the time had a very different energy in his response to my comment.
It was 2006 and we were visiting his home, openly hidden in a rural area far from the city. His 4 year old son had a large G.I. Joe he was excitedly playing with. I told him it I liked his doll. His father quickly corrected me with word that leaped out as if to deflect a bullet: “It’s an action figure.” I playfully tossed back with a half-laugh: “I mean, it IS a doll.”
His response was slapped back even more sternly: “Action. Figure.”
This kind of defensive, angry energy can be found everywhere online these days. Including in response to movies…
There sure are a lot of Feels surfacing all over the place in reaction to the new film about the iconic doll. What feelings surface for you when you think about those moments playing with that special childhood toy?
I remember having G.I. Joe dolls/action figures as a kid. Endless hours of epic play complete with a storyline, intense dialogue, and a climactic final battle! I used to get cardboard boxes, markers and tape and create entire headquarters for them. I’d make windows, an entire second floor, and garage doors that opened. Little computer desks. Elevators that you could pull up and down.
You know, like a dollhouse.
It wasn’t all fighting with my G.I. Joe’s. They sat in the headquarters and discussed strategy with each other, or talked in the vehicle together.
You know, like dolls.
In my talks with men and boys, I talk about how we give little girls cooking play sets, gardening tools, and baby dolls so they can learn to nurture, learn to take care of others before they can even take care of themselves.
Meanwhile – at an early age, and at a certain point – we take a stuffed toy away from a boy and replace it with a war doll. Nowadays it’s a first-person shooting video game.
These days it feels like conflict is all around us. The Gender Wars of today in particular being among the most intense.
So, it is quite the time for this movie about Barbie to come out. I’m curious and hopeful about the conversations that it will spark, or deepen after having seen it. Conversations between parents and children. Conversations between friends and lovers. I loved seeing how many young men were going, many dressed in pink along with their friends, family, and partners. I wonder if they knew what they were in store for. I wonder how many actually did know, and how many have silently always known.
I wondered how many guys and young guys watching this movie remembered – maybe quietly, maybe secretly – finding a moment to play with a Ken doll, or maybe with a Barbie doll. Wishing they could play with it openly, wishing they could be more, wishing manhood could be more. More magical, more free.
I asked my dear homie Carlos Andrés Gómez (a speaker, poet, author and actor) what he thought of the film: “I admire Greta Gerwig so much as a writer and director (she’s a genius), so I was anticipating that it would be subversive and radical in its framing of Barbie, but I had no idea she would be able to make a film with the kind of searing critiques of patriarchy, restrictive masculinity, and just hegemony, more generally.”
“I don’t have any deep nostalgic attachment to Barbie. I never played with them growing up (that I remember). I played with other dolls (and mostly My Little Ponies) with my sister, but not really too much Barbie at all. That being said, it didn’t really matter. Whether or not you have strong feelings or a nostalgic attachment to Barbie, whatever your gender might be, I think it’s a powerful film.”
For some men who watched Barbie – or their fav loudmouth fragile talking head in a reaction review video that was as long than the movie itself – the realization that Ken was an accessory like Barbie’s dollhouse, latest outfit, or car, was hard to take.
It was a moment to take in a fictional flip on the reality that women and gender-expansive people in the real world are seen as and treated as accessories. I describe them as being treated like rungs on The Ladder of Manhood: my analogy for our fraught and doomed lifelong pursuit of identity, status and worth as men.
When Ken returns to Barbieland from ‘the Real World’, he attempts to establish a ‘Kendom’ – recreating that Ladder formula which is the real world we all live in. The outdated and harmful ideas of manhood which we still cling onto, try to reject, or double down on, are about pursuing our entire Identity, sense of self-worth, and status by holding and demonstrating Power. Our entire lives as men become a conflicted struggle trying desperately to find and hold it.
How is that formula working for you? How’s it working for us as men? For women and gender-expansive people? In another iconic film, there was a classic line that also speaks of this pursuit by Mens and Kens up the Ladder:
Manhood or masculinity is not bad, it’s about the ways we accessorize our masculinity to feel valued, to feel respected, to feel seen.
Much like the ways Barbie or Ken accessorize themselves to establish an identity in Barbieland, as men we choose the ways we accessorize our masculinity to be somebody in the Real World. Unfortunately for many of us Mens and Kens, the ways we choose to accessorize usually means choosing to weaponize our masculinity in one way or form, and that is our collective real life problem.
Accessorizing your masculinity like a GI Joe doll with ‘weapons’ like ‘aggression’ or ‘dominance at all costs’ might work in one specific endeavor like a basketball game or a boardroom interaction, but it’s not a way to live 24/7 in everyday moments throughout your life…
Men will discard accessories that we feel are just holding or weighing us down, and not of value in climbing that ladder so we can climb higher and higher. Accessories like empathy, vulnerability, or emotional literacy. As a result, recognizing, naming and identifying our feels can be hard for some men, and feel like doing algebra when we try to interpret feelings in general!.
Let’s talk about those feels, Mens and Kens!
Let’s name and talk about some of the feelings people have expressed regarding this film, and how they impact different people and our ideas around gender.
FEELING LEFT OUT
I remember many years ago – preparing for a talk the next morning – sitting in my hotel bed with notes spread all over the sheets. A new film I still hadn’t seen yet was playing in the background: Iron Man. I watched parts out of the corner of my eye as I worked. I paused to watch the final scene where Tony Stark steps from the podium and declares: ‘I Am Iron Man’.
SWOOSH. BOOM. Cue adrenaline of Black Sabbath rock riffs and swirling credits. The inner child in me was suddenly summoned to the surface and was soaring in that bed thinking: ‘YES I AM IRON MAN!!!”
I then imagined people of other genders, maybe a young girl watching thinking: …‘yesss, I am… his personal assistant Pepper Potts?’
Our inner boys got all the full-live-action treatments for our childhood dolls. Now it was time for the iconic dolls that many girls and gender-expensive kids played with to hit the big screen. Unfortunately, however, just like at the toy store when they didn’t get their way as boys, some men couldn’t help but have a throwback tantrum.
As my pal Risdon Roberts – a sex and intimacy coach who works a lot with men – told me: “I will say as a hot hyper girlie blonde I felt very seen by this movie and it was a lovely feeling.
I think the world building of women as heroes (the Barbies) and the Kens as accessories really just blew my mind. Like what if I lived like that? Or had grown up like that? It was empowering. Just the idea of being like my job is to do me to the best of my ability. And to be happy. Instead of primarily also kinda looking for the person who is supposed to complete my story.
I think I’ve mainly divested from that because I’m almost 40 but so many of my micro decisions throughout my life have been through the lens of being appealing and attractive to men as a partner. Its fucking wild. It was just such a flip from most narrative films with her being primary and him kind of tagging along and wanting to be loved. A glorious mind fuck.”
I felt a yearning watching the opening scenes in Barbieland. Imagining we could also create a world where women and gender-expansive people are free to focus on what makes them happy versus trying to make someone else happy, nurture and take care of others. Mens and Kens also discovering who we are. For me, I wondered to myself: ‘How can men play a role in helping us getting us there?’
Some men didn’t see it that way.
FEELING HATED ON
I can totally see watching this movie and being stuck in the uncomfortable feeling like: ‘Hey! This movie just makes men look like dorks’ or that it’s anti-men. Stay with me here, dig a little deeper.
To this, Risdon said: “Maybe it’s just interesting to unpack what feels threatening about being an accessory or supporting character in the world. Because women are used to it.”
FEELING CALLED OUT
So much of these harmful ideas of manhood are about performance. Perception being more important than reality. So we all become actors as guys, trying to be the leading man and not admitting when we feel like an extra. Liana Kerzner of the ‘It’s Not Therapy’ podcast tells men: “Be the Hero in your own story, not everyone else’s’. That really should feel freeing to hear, but the problem is we are programmed to measure our worth by being the leading man in the entire real world.
So, we carry out a performance we carry out everyday and in every moment as Kens.
Aren’t you tired of it?
The sad thing is men that were frustrated after having seen the film, probably weren’t able to recognize themselves, or did and hated seeing their reflection.
The value in a mirror is not to see if our performance is accurate, so much as to see the truth of who we are. Truly see ourselves.
The moment truth sinks in can be rough.
“…you need to understand how society shapes men’s expectations of themselves. This is important because many men have developed ways of dealing with these social demands. In many cases, men aren’t even aware of how society influences them.”
It makes sense that it takes a minute to process seeing how the sausage is made. Truly seeing yourself, and feeling seen.
FEELING SEEN
Men got our toy doll movies. Women were due their superhero movie too. Exhausted Moms are due a chance to play too. So, not necessarily having to watch a film and the narrative arc is of an unattainable being like a Wonder Woman, but an ‘Ordinary Barbie’, which is not an insult. Everyday women and gender-expansive people doing everyday shit can be and are superheroes too.
A moment that stood out to me was when Barbie, for the first time, felt an ever-present feeling for women in the real world. A woman names and identifies the feeling for Barbie: Anxiety
It continues to move me, hearing women describe what it’s felt like to feel seen on a mainstream level with a juggernaut film, versus say a lovely arthouse film that few have seen. To be in a full ass theater and feeling the energy, and know it’s happening worldwide. To have a variety of life experiences acknowledged.
Take for example Emily Sears’ tweet:
Feeling seen is also a big part of the conversation for us Mens and Kens. When Ken is hoping for Barbie’s attention, that is the whole ‘gotta be somebody’ turned into ‘gotta be The Man’ …and you realize you’re not just vying for Barbie’s gaze, but to appease the mirage of manhood you are chasing.
We all deserve to be seen, feel seen.
FEELING COURAGEOUS
You Ken Do It!
It’s for the Ken’s who want to change, and the Ken’s who feverishly fight to hold onto the hand pushing them further into the mud.
Barbie isn’t anti-Ken or anti-Men. In fact, she invites him to find himself, be himself. It’s an invitation for the Kens who want to change, and also for the Kens who feverishly fight to hold onto the hand pushing them further down.
It’s only when we restore our own humanity as men, that we can help and someday see the humanity of women and gender-expansive people restored. Feminism fights for the betterment of people of all genders, including the men who hate them. As Deeyah Khan says here:: “Our values only matter when we’re willing to extend it to people we don’t like.”
You Ken Do It!
The sad quiet moment when we put a toy away and say to ourselves ‘okay, I don’t do that anymore’.
Playing can be so critical in learning, about ourselves and one another. Or maybe you’re someone who is always at play.
‘Cause Men, you are Kenough.
higherunlearning.com 