Genital jousting endings free#

This dimension-wherever or whatever it might be-has no clear beginning or end. She meets, once again, with her creator, Ruth Handler (as portrayed by Rhea Perlman), who takes her betwixt the membranes of the Real World and Barbie Land.

Genital jousting endings free#

But the fight does not end with Barbie restoring the Great Feminist Order to her world, where the Kens are free to beach each other off into oblivion instead, she realizes just how flawed her understanding of gender was from the beginning. The film tickles these gendered defenses until they collapse, culminating in a confrontation in Barbie Land between the recently brainwashed Barbies and the newly educated Kens, who’ve decided to bring patriarchy back to Barbie Land in the form of beer and horses and the vocal inflections of Rob Thomas. This fact does not seem to bother Barbie herself it is Ken, rather, who appears humiliated by the revelation. Within hours of Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie stepping into Barbie’s “Real World,” she enlightens a group of men heckling her with the simple truth that she has no genitals, and neither does Ken-so, hey, the joke’s on them. Which is exactly why the Barbie movie’s ending is so delightfully subversive.Īnyone, and certainly any woman-whether cis, trans, or otherwise-or non-binary person, will tell you that genitals mean a great deal to a great number of people, regardless of whether or not they should. Barbie herself has remained smooth and ageless and, importantly, without reproductive organs of any kind for the entirety of her 64 years on Mattel’s factory line. As narrator Helen Mirren informs audiences in the opening scenes of Barbie, Midge was discontinued for being “too weird,” apparently too difficult to reconcile with childhood imagination.

Barbie was never meant to be a mother the pregnant doll Mattel invented as a proxy for Barbie was Happy Family Midge, whose removable-baby belly was condemned for “promoting” teen pregnancy. Barbie the movie, director Greta Gerwig’s record-breaking box-office hit, takes this contradiction seriously, in so far as any film combining corporate branding, cellulite, Matchbox Twenty, and death can take itself seriously. Barbie is not a mother, unless you count the millions of young girls she’s shaped in her image-whom, of course, you must count.