Where Was Gamer Barbie?

2023-07-31

A personal essay on why I didn't like Barbie (2023). See also, my partner Danny's "I'm Too Butch for Barbie (2023)". I wrote this back in July to get my thoughts out but am just uploading it now that I'm making my site.

The first time I ever really, really wanted a Barbie doll, I was eighteen years old. I'd chopped off my hair after leaving my school's controlling theatre department and gone from brunette to... reddish brunette. I wore jeans and t-shirts every day, layered under button-ups and jackets so they didn't break my school's dress code. I was working on a video game.

So I saw Game Developer Barbie and I loved her: her dyed red hair, her soft gray t-shirt, her jeans, her jacket, her sensible sneakers. I couldn't get over that not just here was a Barbie doll that actually dressed like me, but the reason she did was because Mattel tried to figure out what outfit said "game developer" and picked an exact outfit I owned and adored. It was absurdly validating to my sense of identity. This was in 2017.

So five years later, I was excited for Barbie (2023). When I told my partner we should dress as goth and butch as possible to our 10am showing, the irony was intended warmly. I didn't expect anything revolutionary from a glorified toy commercial, but I felt confident that they'd at least meet the bare minimum I'd seen their toys clear for years.

I already knew, going in to the Barbie movie, that the Barbieland it celebrated wouldn't have room for my fat, butch partner, who sticks her wallet in her pockets and keeps his keys on a carabiner clicked to his belt. I figured my slim, long-haired masc-androgyny was pushing it as is. But I thought it'd have room for Game Developer Barbie. After all, she wasn't a real person. She was a doll made by Mattel to sell, with the added bonus of encouraging girls to dream of designing games.

But Game Developer Barbie - or Gamer Barbie, as I affectionately call her with friends - was nowhere to be found. There was no one who looked like her, no Barbie permitted to wear dark colors or jeans. When Sasha, the adolescent daughter of the woman who dreamed Barbie's existential dread into existence, enters Barbieland, her black and blue striped shirt and black baggy pants are automatically replaced by prim purple and pink dresses. Notably, the male Mattel executives who chased Barbie and friends into Barbieland saw no such changes to their wardrobes. They were allowed their sleek black suits, not magically changed into pink paisley versions or the loose fitting tanktops and swim trunks we see on so many of the Kens.

For a moment, I hoped it was part of Ken's takeover of Barbieland: the same misogynistic forces that shoved women into tiny maid skirts forced this tween into picture perfect femininity rather than her own comfortable clothes. But then the Barbies went on to save the day, and Sasha's old wardrobe wasn't given back to her, and the Barbie movie made it very clear: this is how Sasha should be. By embracing femininity, she embraced openness, warmth, and real (by its definition) feminism.

A world we're supposed to celebrate as a haven of feminism is explicitly against the barest gender nonconformity from women.

(This is the part where I disclaim that yes, I have since learned that one of the actresses who plays a Barbie is trans, and I'm thrilled to hear she got the role. But when transition has historically been gatekept from people who didn't or even couldn't meet a cis-enforced standard of what their gender "should" look like, that offers little counterargument.)

Barbieland is made up. It's intentional that dancing and partying are embraced as ways for the Barbies to spend their time, and video games and analyzing movies are only presented as hobbies in the Kens' parody of toxic masculinity. Each of the characters were deliberately casted and costumed, and which characters they chose and which they didn't means something. It means something that of their entire catalog of dolls, they chose not to include Conservationist Barbie with her muted button up and practical pants or any of the similarly dressed dolls. It means something that there was room for Mermaid Barbie and Pregnant Midge but that Game Developer Barbie was no where to be found.

It means that, textually, the Barbie movie demands women be so feminine that some of their own dolls don't even make the cut. If you enter Barbieland as a girl or a woman expressing yourself in any way other than skirts, tiny shorts or pastels, it will be magicked away from you so you can fit in with the other girls, all appropriately dressed in bright colors and dresses. This is not presented as a malfunction in the system, but the way it should be.

I understand why the Barbie movie spoke to a lot of people. We all get different things from art. But while you make your own meaning from it and feel validated by its central message, I hope you'll take a moment to listen to what it's also saying in the way it chooses to tell it.