The highly anticipated live-action film starring Margot Robbie is an attempt to redeem the problematic toy. But it’s really just an expensive ad campaign for an outdated doll.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

A few months ago, my two sons, aged 10 and 15, told me they were excited to see the new Barbie film. I was surprised. They are not interested in dolls, and, in spite of Barbie being the top-selling doll in the world, they were not very familiar with the iconic toy until they saw an online trailer of the live-action feature film starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. Although I had played with a much-loved Barbie doll as a child, I had grown up to hate everything the doll stood for: dangerously unattainable beauty standards, the deliberate vapidity of femininity and feminism, and the centering of whiteness.

But, the clever marketing of the new film has people of all demographics eager to see it: “If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate the Barbie, this movie is for you,” proclaimed the trailer. There should have been an addendum: “If you’re indifferent because you have no idea who or what Barbie is, this movie is also for you.” Because, ultimately the film is a giant commercial for an outdated toy. Its interminably long marketing campaign helped generate breathless anticipation for months.

Launched in 1959 and conceived by Ruth Handler, one of the co-founders of Mattel, Barbie was modeled on a German doll named Bild Lilli, marketed to adult men as a sort of gag gift. According to Brennan Kilbane, writing in Allure, “Bild Lilli was a single-panel comic character in a German tabloid—a sweet, ditzy, curvy figment of the male imagination, frequently losing her clothes and enjoying the company of men. Each punch line hinged on Bild Lilli’s hotness, her horniness, or her lack of common sense. When a police officer informed Bild Lilli that the two-piece swimsuit she was wearing was in violation of decency laws, she responded earnestly, ‘Which piece do you want me to take off?’”

Handler wanted to market an “adult” doll to little girls because the prevalent dolls of her time were either baby dolls or else they had, in her words, “flat chests, big bellies, and squatty legs—they were built like overweight 6- or 8-year-olds.” Apparently, Handler, who appears in the film as a wise elderly grandmother played by Rhea Perlman, felt that a doll with impossibly frail wrists and a thin waist was a more suitable aspiration.

Vox’s Constance Grady put it best, saying, “The plastic body little girls are given to practice being grown-up with is the same as the plastic body grown men hang from the rearview mirrors of their cars as a dirty joke,” referring to the Bild Lilli dolls. This point is especially disturbing when, as Grady also pointed out, the first commercial for the doll featured a girl singing “Someday I’m gonna be exactly like you… Barbie, beautiful Barbie, I’ll make believe that I am you.”

The doll has always been tone-deaf. A few years after it was launched, just as second-wave feminism was gaining ground, Mattel released Slumber Party Barbie, who “came with pink pajamas, a pink scale set at 110 lbs, and a diet book on how to lose weight, with only one instruction: DON’T EAT!”

Since then, the doll’s history has been marked by a constant tug-of-war as it has attempted to market misogyny to a world whose women are tired of being trodden upon. The film is a similar mess of contradictions, and as Andi Zeisler wrote in a New York Times op-ed, it is “one that acknowledges and embraces that weirdness under the vigilant gaze of a corporate chaperone.” Zeisler admitted how she didn’t realize that “the film’s narrative would essentially serve as a Mattel redemption arc,” turning her as a viewer into, “an unwitting Barbie P.R. booster.”

Now, just as Mattel managed to reinvent a male fantasy as a girl’s toy, the new Barbie movie is reinventing the doll as a universally beloved character in our imagination. Forget product placement—the insidious insertion of branded products into films and television shows as a sly form of advertising—the Barbie movie is one giant advertisement, the inaugural creation of Mattel Films. Rather than creating new characters to tell a story and then milking the profits from the resulting merchandise—as is the traditional marketing ploy popularized by films such as Toy Story—Mattel has followed in the footsteps of companies such as Lego and its popular 2015 Lego Movie.

There has been little mention of this as problematic within the slew of glowing reviews of the film. Is this to be the future of film? Indeed, filmmaker J.J. Abrams is working on a new Hot Wheels film.

Audiences are supposed to overlook the ethical conundrums presented by the Barbie film in part because the film’s creator, Greta Gerwig, apparently identifies as a feminist. But, she’s hardly a critic of the doll and its regressive representation. According to the film’s costume designer Jacqueline Durran, “Greta really liked… [the outfits in the film that had an ’80s aesthetic because] they chimed with the date of the Barbies that she used to play with… She was a great Barbie fan.”

Additionally, because the film validates the various criticisms leveled at the doll over the years, audiences are expected to embrace this bizarre brand-turned-film as entertainment. “The role comes with a lot of baggage. But with that comes a lot of exciting ways to attack it,” said Robbie, who was one of the iniators of the project and who stars as the main (white/blond) Barbie protagonist  (there many other Barbies in supporting roles) in the film.  But the film doesn't truly attack Barbie’s baggage. The opening scene of the film, showcased in its first trailer, was a nod to the deeply problematic original Barbie, with Robbie appearing in the same black-and-white striped bathing suit worn by the first version of the dolls to hit store shelves in 1959.  

In spite of the film’s clever marketing as a universal project, it does not challenge Barbie’s main function as a dress-up doll. Durran told British Vogue, “Barbie really is interlinked with fashion, because how you play with her is by dressing her,” and that aspect remains central in the film.

Audiences are being encouraged to wear the doll’s signature Pepto-Bismol pink to theaters—the same color associated with gender stereotyping of girls from birth into adulthood. It’s not enough anymore for little girls to aspire to Barbie’s standards; “Barbie will certainly strike a chord with adult women—even more so than with young girls,” explained a Harper’s Bazaar shopping guide for what to wear to the film.

One “trend expert” explained the push to wear pink to People Magazine, saying, “[w]ith many nostalgic for simpler, sunnier, and more carefree times, it only makes sense that this ’80s-inspired, unapologetically pink aesthetic is taking center stage as the ‘it’ style of the summer.”

So effective is the film’s branding campaign that there is now a massive social media fashion trend called #Barbiecore on TikTok garnering hundreds of millions of views for posts created by young women influencers heavily caking their faces with makeup to look like the doll, wearing pink tulle, batting fake eyelashes, and pursing plump glittery lips coyly. Their posts are tagged with the recognizable Barbie logo, fulfilling Mattel’s wildest marketing dreams while setting women back decades. This is apparently the new face of feminism.

The criticism that the film is a blow to feminism is not overblown. The Barbie movie has popularized the horrific-sounding label of “bimbo feminism” (really!). “Instead of abandoning femininity to succeed in a patriarchal society, bimbo feminism embraces femininity while supporting women’s advancement,” wrote Harriet Fletcher in the Conversation. In other words, women are supposed to attain career success while also shaping themselves to fit the male gaze.

There persists a belief that Barbie is indeed a feminist icon in spite of Mattel steering clear of embracing the f-word. Robbie Brenner, head of Mattel Films, has decided that his company’s film is “the ultimate female-empowerment movie.” This disturbing state of discourse on feminism is the direct result of relying on corporate America to define women’s rights and status. While America Ferrera’s character as a real-life woman struggling with the pressures of patriarchy is the film’s most refreshing and powerful aspect, she remains relegated to a supporting role.

Even the ridiculous right-wing backlash to the film, casting it as “anti-man,” is being touted as a measure of the film’s feminism. If it’s pissing off the misogynist incels, surely it’s on the feminist track, claim the film’s defenders. “[I]t’s not a Barbie doll that threatens women’s rights, opportunities, and safety—it’s the patriarchy,” wrote Fletcher in the Conversation. Really, though, both are true, just to different extents.

When I was about 8 or 9, my immigrant parents bought me a Barbie doll. They were proud to be able to (barely) afford a pricey Western toy for their daughter. My Barbie was blonde and blue-eyed, and I happily played with her for years, well before I ever met a blond, blue-eyed person in real life. My doll set the standard for feminine beauty—one that was out of reach of a brown-skinned, dark-haired kid like me whose body type was chubby in contrast to my Barbie, but typical for my age and size. In 2016, Mattel attempted to diversify the doll’s body types. But “curvy” Barbie was still thinner than most real-life women.

Defenders of the film also point to its racially diverse casting and its embrace of varying body types. After all, Issa Rae plays a Black Barbie, Simu Liu is cast as an Asian Ken, and Nicola Coughlan is a gorgeous plus-size version of the doll. But, as Kilbane explained in Allure, “The Barbieverse distinguishes between two Barbies. There’s Barbie ‘the icon,’ or ‘brand,’ who can be blonde and short, or Black and svelte, or Frida Kahlo and white. There’s Barbie ‘the character,’ who is exactly who you’re thinking of, and will be played by Margot Robbie.”

Unlike Disney’s recent reboot of The Little Mermaid, which actually dared to reimagine the central character as a young Black woman played by Halle Bailey, Barbie—the “real” Barbie—will remain white, blonde, skinny, and conventionally pretty, the ultimate aspiration. The rest of us are part of the supporting cast, as per usual.

Even though Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz said, “It’s not about making movies so that we can go and sell more toys,” that’s a misleading claim. Toy company executives are hoping that the movie renews interest in dolls to the tune of billions of dollars. It is an attempt to redeem Barbie and its problematic history so that people will go out and buy the doll. Ultimately the clearest description of the film—enjoyable and thought-provoking as it is—is that it is a $145 million ad campaign for a toy that should have faded away years ago.

Author: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute

T

By Alex Thompson  

Ballet and Engineering

Born in 1933, Judith Love Cohen set out from an early age to do things girls were simply not expected to do at that time. She had a deep passion for maths and was very good at it, to the point where her fellow classmates would pay her to do their homework for them. As she grew up Cohen realised she was more interested in engineering and studied at college whilst also performing in New York’s Metropolitan Opera Ballet company.

Though this may seem an odd mix but Cohen was used to being unique – as she went through school, she had noticed that she was the only girl in the majority of her maths classes. This continued when she went to study at the University of South California, completing both her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science courses without ever seeing another female engineer. She studied at night whilst working in the day as a junior engineer for North American Aviation. Upon joining NASA, she was one of only a handful of female engineers employed by the space agency at the time. Not that this discouraged her. She later remarked “I had already figured out that I was going to do things that no [other girls] ever did.”

Project Apollo

Cohen worked on many of the first spacecraft in America’s space programme, including Pioneer, where she worked with her first husband, Bud. However, she considered her greatest achievement to be her work on the Apollo missions. Her most important engineering feat was her contribution to the Lunar Module’s Abort Guidance System, which played a critical role in the safe return of the Apollo 13 astronauts after an oxygen tank exploded on their way to the Moon. The return of the astronauts alive and well is considered one of the most incredible moments in the history of human spaceflight and Cohen was present when the astronauts paid their thanks to the TRW facility for their crucial role in their return.

A Star is Born

It was whilst working on the Abort Guidance System that the story that went viral took place. At the time of the first Moon landings in July 1969, Cohen was already eight months pregnant with her fourth child. On one particular day the following month Cohen came into work as usual when her waters broke. On her way out of the door she grabbed a printout of a problem she’d been working on and continued to work on it whilst in labour. According to another of her children, Neil Siegel, she phoned her boss later that day and “told him she had solved the problem. And… oh yes, the baby was born, too.” The child she gave both to that day was future School of Rock and Jumanji star Jack Black.

Yes really.

Engineer to Author

Cohen continued to work at NASA throughout the 1970s and 80s, working with then-husband (and Black’s dad) Tom as satellite engineers on the Hubble Space Telescope.

Cohen retired as an engineer in 1990 and set up a publishing company Cascade Pass with new husband David Katz. She wrote and published a series of books called “You Can be a Woman….”, which was aimed at young girls and encouraged them to follow various careers in science, with David illustrating. They also published another series that encouraged younger children to practice environmentally friendly exercises called “Green”, and a book named “The Women of Apollo” which featured four biographies of women who had helped put humans on the Moon, including Cohen herself.

Legacy

Judith Love Cohen is much more than an interesting anecdote. She was a mathematician, a dancer, a publisher, a highly talented engineer and an advocate for women in the workplace. Some of the practices we take for granted today, such as internal listings of jobs in companies and formal descriptions for every vacant position, were Cohen’s ideas, with the main purpose being to encourage more women to apply. Upon her passing in 2016, Siegel wrote “she must have influenced tens of thousands of young girls to become interested in professional careers of one sort or another.”

And that is the true legacy of Judith Love Cohen.

About the author: Alex Thompson is a Space Communications Presenter at the National Space Centre.

Focusing on the struggles, achievements, and courage of those with disabilities during Disability Pride Month.

By Brianna Letendre

Think about it.  Which is true and which is a bucket of sh--(misinformation)  There are no saints in this game but one side will destroy us while the other gives us some hope.

A recent government report documents that women and people of color are being denied jobs, harassed and subjected to other workplace abuses.

By Jessica Kutz

As the construction industry booms, the longstanding issue of discrimination and sexual harassment is still running rampant on job sites. 

A recent report from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) documents that women and people of color are being denied jobs, being harassed and subjected to other workplace abuses.

Charlotte Burrows, chair of the EEOC, the federal agency that investigates complaints of job discrimination, described some of the cases that have come before the agency as “egregious.”

The construction industry employs around 11.8 million people as of 2022, with trillions of federal dollars from recent legislation powering years of future job growth. In theory it should represent an opportunity for many Americans to move into the middle class.  

Most trades offer paid training through apprenticeships and don’t require a college degree. They also typically come with salaries much higher than the minimum wage — the median salary of a construction laborer is $42,970 and $59,300 for an electrician, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There is also a shortage of workers, leaving money on the table for companies that can’t fill contracts fast enough. As of 2021, 89 percent of contractors were having a hard time finding workers, according to the Associated General Contractors of America, an association for the construction industry. 

And yet: “This is an industry where we still have folks saying, ‘We just don’t hire women,’” Burrows told The 19th.

The report details several instances in which the EEOC found companies had discriminated against people because of their race or gender in the hiring process. In multiple cases, job applicants were told simply that companies they had applied to were not going to hire women. In other instances, apprenticeship programs denied opportunities to Black applicants. 

Women make up 4 percent of construction trades workers, and 11 percent of the workforce overall when accounting for administrative positions. Black workers account for 7 percent of workers. 

When women did get hired, harassment often drove them out, impacting their ability to earn better wages. 

“When we talk about the gender pay gap, it’s not just I’m going to pay you less in dollars and cents but also, what happens to your paycheck when you have to leave a job or an industry because you can’t take the harassment?” Burrows said.   

The report details cases that have come before the EEOC, including incidents of sexual harassment in which women were groped, or commonly subjected to jokes, comments and workplace graffiti that sexualized them. In 2021, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research surveyed workers who identified as women and found that 26.5 percent of respondents said they were ”always or frequently” harassed for being a woman. 

LGBTQ+ people also faced workplace abuses. In that same IWPR survey, 19 percent of LGBTQ+ respondents said they were always or frequently harassed due to their sexual orientation.

In response to the report’s findings, Sean McGarvey, president of the North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU), a labor organization that represents more than 3 million trades workers in the United States and Canada, issued a statement: “Harassment or discrimination in any form cannot be tolerated on construction sites, and, as we have said repeatedly, the construction industry can and must do more to prevent these terrible and pervasive workplace issues.”

Melissa Wells, special assistant to the president of NABTU, said the organization is undertaking several initiatives to make the trades more hospitable to women and people of color, including creating a voluntary project certification in collaboration with the federal government and other partners to incentivize a safe workplace culture. 

While still in the early stages of development, the national certification would be a way to encourage contractors to maintain a safe and welcoming workplace culture and ensure there are reporting protocols in place when an incident does occur. It would work similarly to the LEED certification process, which incentivizes and upholds green building standards. 

“Our goal is that this will have teeth,” Wells said. “We want there to be accountability measures.”

Reporting harassment on a jobsite is complicated in the construction industry, Burrows said. A worker may be unsure of who to report to when there are multiple contractors and companies involved for a single project, adding to the pervasiveness of the problem. 

“It’s terribly confusing for an employee who’s just trying to get some oversight and trying to get some relief,” she said. 

NABTU launched a tradeswomen committee program this year that would help address this issue as well. The first three committees formed in Chicago, Las Vegas and D.C., and are housed within local building trades councils. They are a way to empower and train women in the trades but will also work with local unions on initiatives to better recruit and retain women. The committees can also serve as a mechanism for informing a council about an incident of harassment. 

“In reality when these incidents happen … tradeswomen on the job maybe don’t know how to quite respond but they’ll usually go to trusted people to talk about it,” Wells said. 

Donna Hammond, interim executive director and founding member of Oregon Tradeswomen, a nonprofit that works to ensure women have access to the trades workforce, said she appreciates the research conducted by the EEOC. 

“We needed this report,” Hammond said. “ [Now] everyone gets to share this report that’s telling the truth about our industry, because everybody doesn’t feel the same.” 

She recounted how after the murder of George Floyd, the local chapter of her union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, distributed anti-racism stickers. She said a couple of White men sent their stickers back. 

When she asked why, they told her it was because they’d never witnessed racism — or sexism — on the job. To Hammond it was indicative of a bigger problem.  

“If you’re a White guy and you’ve never had any women or people of color on your job, you would never have seen any racism or sexism.” 

However, as the EEOC report points out, racism is pervasive on job sites. Between 2015-2022, alone, the agency received at least 64 charges related to nooses hung on construction sites. 

Hammond, a Black woman who worked for four decades as a union electrician, is adamant that there are also a lot of allies in the industry who want to do the right thing and who have helped her succeed in her own career. But still, she said, the report illustrates the need of highlighting the problem and finding solutions quickly. 

“How do we really use this report and who can we contact for the next steps to work with the EEOC as they try and implement?” she asked. “There are a lot of improvements that could happen, especially with what is happening with the mega projects. They need us, so how do we really work together?”

Burrows said it is a priority to work together with unions, trades women organizations, and civil rights groups on addressing this issue.

Jennifer Todd, president and founder of LMS General Contractors, a company that does demolition and remediation work in South Florida, points out that this issue of discrimination has been persistent for decades. She is skeptical around the motivations of tackling it now. 

“The reason why the problem is being highlighted at this point is not because of the continued injustice, it is because of the labor shortage.” 

Usually, change doesn’t happen unless it starts to impact the masses, Todd said, and in this case general contractors and construction companies are seeing what happens when a large percentage of the population has been left out for so long. Todd, like others interviewed for this piece, emphasized the need to focus on keeping women and people of color in the industry. 

“We see all of these apprenticeship programs and outreach and collaborative efforts. But you don’t hear much talk about retaining the existing workforce who continue to leave at a rapid rate because they don’t feel safe and welcomed,” she said. 

In 2019, Todd, who is a Black woman, started her own initiative, A Greener Tomorrow, which aims to recruit women and people of color into trade work. The initiative came out of her work on affordable housing projects, where she offered jobs to tenants to work on her construction projects. 

“What we found was that people want to work when given the opportunity,” she said. “If you train them, they will come to work, they will show up. They just need the tools, and they need the opportunity to do so.”

This story was originally published by The 19th, Friday, July 7, 2023.

Author:  Julie Kutz, Gender, climate and sustainability reporter.