Abstract
This editorial reviews Barbie the Movie in the context of workplace and community health and well-being. Issues of gender equity, patriarchy, and the role of women in empowering women were all factors that were dealt with thoughtfully and poignantly in the movie’s script. A missed opportunity in the movie related to the role men could play as allies in the gender equity movement. Hence, I set out to reconcile this omission by proposing a story line for Ken the Movie. I present gender and health disparities as problems that will require leadership in, and best thinking about, gender equality from both men and women.
As an avowed health advocate and feminist, I anticipated I would be conflicted by, or at least ambivalent about, Barbie the Movie. The Barbie brand, after all, has been accused of everything from objectifying women to messing with their identities by creating false choices between professional and family life. Not only did the script cause me to rethink my antipathy toward Barbie, I loved the movie’s take on our cultural moment. This editorial happily joins in the praises by pundits and movie reviewers who felt that the movie’s director Greta Gerwig, along with her screenplay co-author Noah Baumbach, did a brilliant job of parsing between contempt for what Barbie wrought in girls’ body images alongside a provocative plot that captured today’s gender roles zeitgeist. This editorial does not have any movie plot line spoilers, but the reference to “KENough” in this article’s title is one of the movie’s punch lines, and, at the end of this article, I will also be disclosing some script lines from the movie’s most powerful monologue.
America Ferrara is the actor who plays Gloria, a woman who conjures up much of the Barbie doll’s relevance in today’s world. In the metropolitan theater where my daughter saw the movie, Ferrara’s delivery of a woman’s opus about the impossible expectations surrounding womanhood got applause. In the suburban theatre where I watched, there was no such enthusiasm. Indeed, this is a movie that has not only generated hundreds of artistic reviews, but it has also been fuel for our culture wars. Political fodder as wide ranging as abortion to LGBTQ + rights to China’s territorialism have been injected into Barbie the Movie. 1 Health promotion theory and practice wasn’t likely on the minds of the script writers and performers, nevertheless, health equity is bound to gender equity. On this front, Barbie and Ken offer up a conversation worth having about where we’ve been and where we’re going per how much of our current approaches are byproducts of patriarchy.
Like Gerwig’s well earned praise for her writing and directing, Margot Robbie’s performance was also a tour de force that featured her uncanny ability to make Barbie a sympathetic character. She transformed her cluelessness about the unrealistic expectations placed on women in the real world into existentialist epiphanies she would carry forward in Barbie’s fantasy world. I commend the movie to anyone ready for some nuanced thinking about women’s issues. However, I was disappointed that relative to the fully formed life passages the Barbies in the movie traversed, the men, the Kens, left me wishing Gerwig could have scripted a Ken more ready to meet Barbie’s profound and pithy moments. Instead, the movie’s takeaway for Ken’s character was merely that he need not settle for a bit part, that there could be more to life than the beach. While the Barbies were challenged to reconcile the complexities of their competing roles, the writers settled for gender mollified Kens.
In the end, Barbie is heading toward full actualization as a woman. We are left with a clever and funny example of how her life might be different with her new found agency. In contrast, Ken simply concludes that he is happy to be “KENough.” To be sure, hoping for a fully fleshed out resolution to eons of masculine mores is more than I should expect from Barbie the Movie. Taking the women’s movement to task was more than enough for One hour and 54 minutes of screen time. Arguably, every movie is a Ken movie and every day in America already favors Kens. Still, I wished they had at least introduced principles of allyship as I have attempted in these pages in the past.2,3 So, herewith, I submit a working draft of the screenplay for Ken the Movie.
Inspiration for Ken the Movie
The day after I watched Barbie the Movie, I dropped by a neighbor’s house and left feeling their household embodied the issues awaiting a reckoning in Ken the Movie. I stop by from time to time to play with their kids, ages 5, 7, and 9, who are always willing to give me a break from office work for a game of catch or to have me spot them in gymnastics. I was surprised to find “Dr Barbie” home as she’s an obstetrician with a demanding, highly unpredictable schedule. She answered the door in surgical scrubs and let me know the kids were all out for the day with other planned activities. I asked why she was home midday, and she told me, without a hint of fatigue or irony: “I finished a C-section early, so I ran home quick to get in a load of laundry.” How many male surgeons, I wondered, have ever verbalized anything resembling that answer? A few days later, I knocked again to see if the kids could come out to play. ”Engineer Ken” was home with all three kids as well as three other kids around the same age so that Dr Barbie could go with her friend on a fifty-mile bike ride. Engineer Ken works for a large manufacturer as a patent-holding inventor who designs equipment and fixes machines. In his off hours, he is similarly astute in designing play dates and fixing boo-boos. I took two tykes off his hands for 30 minutes and left marveling at his capacity to keep communing with kids, in good spirits, for the hours to come.
I reflected on the movie with my neighbor, Dr Barbie, and asked her about how she balanced her professional and domestic demands, and she quickly turned to the intricacy of her partnership with her husband, Engineer Ken. “I feel guilty given my crazy schedule,” she admitted. “But he is always assuring me that he is happy supporting my work. He not only wants to be an equal partner at home, he wants to be a part of my professional success. He is proud to play a role in enabling me to bring new life into the world.” The inspiration, then, for Ken the Movie is a household where leadership and followership roles are intermingled and inextricable. Where men and women in Barbie the Movie compete for power, Ken the Movie is about power displacement. In Barbie’s world, every day was the best day ever because Barbie can be whoever she wants to be. Ken is an afterthought. In Ken the Movie, every day is the best day ever because Ken and Barbie want to be their authentic selves and are full partners in achieving same. As you will see, unlike my neighbor, Engineer Ken, who is not conflicted by gender equality, ”Executive Ken” is engulfed by gender role stereotypes.
The Plot for Ken the Movie
In Barbie the Movie, the Mattel executives are all white males who are cast in buffoon mode throughout the film. Nothing is cringe-worthy about their male role stereotyping given they play their cluelessness so over the top. In our real world, by the way, Mattel’s Board of Directors has 6 men and 5 women with a male Chairman and CEO. 4 In Ken the Movie, a Mattel corporate re-organization is in the making and Executive Ken, who is played by an ever-ingratiating Jason Sudeikis (of Ted Lasso fame) finds himself on the short list as Mattel’s next potential CEO. Unlike the CEO-like character that Will Ferrell plays in Barbie, who is an unredeemable dope, Sudeikis’s Executive Ken is an avuncular leader known for building a Mattel division through more advancement of women than any other. Still, his tendency to patronize men and women alike evokes plenty of cringes. His detractors say his allyship is performative as he advocates for woman-friendly human resources policies while he models and expects exhausting work schedules.
As much as Executive Ken is determined to present as a team player deeply committed to allyship, his rivals competing for the top job are two women leaderss who regularly surface his awkwardness. He is most threatened by a confident “C-Suite Barbie,” played by Viola Davis (The Help, Fences). C-Suite Barbie is modeled after Sheryl Sandberg who famously coined and wrote Lean In, a book that makes the case that women can and should challenge the policies and practices of male dominated workplaces. Perhaps less famously, but no less pertinent to the plot of Ken the Movie, Sandberg also champions the cause of men “leaning in” at home. Her “All In Movement” argues that men must be equal partners in childcare, eldercare, and domestic duties. 5 C-Suite Barbie brings data laden PowerPoint presentations to her job interview showing how more women executives at Mattel will boost employee recruiting, increase well-being, and drive profitability. She was instrumental in expanding the STEM Barbie product line, and, going forward, she is advocating for a larger portfolio of “Tech Start-Up Barbies.”
Executive Ken is fond of the other contender for the CEO post, fun loving “Arty Barbie,” who is played by Frances McDormand (Fargo), but he discounts her as a serious contender. Arty Barbie is modeled after Anne-Marie Slaughter, known for her widely acclaimed The Atlantic article: “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.” 6 Though pundits have often contrasted Sandberg’s and Slaughter’s views, Slaughter is on record as being a proponent of Sandberg’s ideas. 7 She agrees with lean in principles related to the systems changes that should occur when more women are in leadership. Where Slaughter feels she differs is in her orientation toward larger systemic, societal changes that need not await women assuming leadership roles. Sandberg is also sympathetic to the problem many women face where leaning in is risky, even unthinkable. In Ken the Movie, Arty Barbie is pitching a new Ken product line with childcare workers, nurses, and elementary school teachers.
As Executive Ken campaigns for the top job, he cherry picks the presentations of C-Suite and Arty Barbies for those ideas he thinks will be most popular with the Board. Why can’t Kens be both servant leaders and top executives? Why can’t Barbies be both homemakers and scientists? The more Ken struggles to impress his superiors with his readiness to lead a gender equity agenda for the company and the world, the more his doubts surface that he is the right man for the job. In a final plot twist that reveals the moral of this story, Ken calls into question whether anyone is qualified to decide what women want. I’ll leave it to you to write your ending about who gets the job.
The Denouement
Usually the denouement of a movie, that ribbon on the package, follows after conflicts are resolved and characters have their epiphanies. In Barbie the Movie, I felt the denouement came early when actress America Ferrera delivered the aforementioned stirring observations about women’s roles. Some excerpts from her advice to her daughter include: “It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough... And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin…You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time…You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood. But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged.”
8
Unrigging the system is central to both Sandberg's and Slaughter’s arguments even though they both share stories about the intractability of gender roles. In her The Atlantic treatise on why women can’t have it all, Slaughter is keenly conscious of how her decisions as a mother were clashing with her workplace’s bureaucracy in ways that men seldom experience. She describes a speech she gave to young Rhodes Scholars about her realization that, in spite of a highly supportive husband, she couldn’t balance work and family to her satisfaction. One woman thanked her “for not giving just one more fatuous ‘You can have it all’ talk.” Just about all of the women in that room planned to combine careers and family in some way. But almost all assumed and accepted that they would have to make compromises that the men in their lives were far less likely to have to make.” 9
In Ken the Movie, the denouement will come at the end of the movie when Ken is in his final job interview offering his closing thoughts to the Board of Directors about his vision for Mattel. Says Ken: “I’m probably not the right pick for this job. Like most, I see the logic of putting the future of Barbie in a woman’s hands. But isn’t that reasoning that assumes that men will continue to play a subordinate role in the achievement of gender equality? My hope for our Ken product line is one where Ken is ‘all in’ so Barbie won’t have to ‘lean in.’ I’m saddened by the growing number of pundits forecasting ‘the end of men.’ Declines in college enrollments are driven by men, with the lowest number of males (41%) enrolled in decades. With men also ten percent less likely than women to graduate, the education attainment gap is growing.
10
Related to this, so-called ‘deaths of despair’ are disproportionately occurring in white men without college degrees. Drug overdoses, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease are behind the fastest rising death rates in America, increasing, depending upon age, between 56% and 387%.
11
And educational attainment by race adds an even more disturbing level of inequity given over two-thirds of white people complete some post-secondary education compared to 58% of Black people and 45% of Hispanic people.
12
“Of course, it is a fool’s errand to champion the plight of men without inspecting the road most women and minorities travel compared to that of White men. The happy ending for Ken in Barbie the Movie was essentially ‘you be you.’ Be content because that’s ‘KENough.’ I think that falls way short of Ken’s potential to be a critical actor in the evolution of the gender equity movement. Being KENough is not enough when gaps in well-being are growing within and between gender groups, age groups, and economic classes. Absurdly enough, some politicians are campaigning on platforms of white grievances at a time when health and well-being disparities among women and people of color have never been greater. Black, Hispanic, and Asian people fare worse than White people in life expectancy, access to insurance, getting mental health services, and getting a flu vaccine. And Black and Hispanic kids are twice as likely as White kids to come up short on having enough to eat.
13
“With disparities in health and well-being so far reaching, don’t we need Barbie and Ken to model what equality can look like? I’m fine with blaming the patriarchy for what got us here, but how is competing over power going to model empowerment for our kids? If men are the problem, shouldn’t men be a part of the solution? Have I been one of those leaders expecting 24/7 availability from myself and my colleagues? I’ll plead the fifth. And have I been as clueless as most men about the smoother path I’ve traveled to attain power compared to women and minorities? Yup, guilty as charged. But I’m doubtful life’s unfairness will be solved simply by turning the keys over to the Barbies. Well-being solutions have less to do with what gender has more power and more to do with whether we are making changes that will improve health and well-being for one and all.”
Sparking Fires for Gender Equality
Barbie the Movie seemed to get far more than its share of critical reviews. I take this to mean that, as the writers likely hoped, the movie was as effective as a form of social commentary as it was a form of entertainment. Having had the pleasure of regular glimpses into the developmental lives of my neighbors’ kids for many years, I’d submit that a toy doll may tease a kid’s imagination, but it is their parents who spark their fires about the possibilities ahead. I see the creativity of my Engineer Ken neighbor show up often in his kids. And just as often, I see the indefatigability of my neighbor Dr Barbie get expressed in the kids’ jam-packed days. And, more influential still, I know the kids see their mom and dad as equal partners in looking out for the family’s health and well-being. Surely, they will expect the same from their future colleagues and partners.