‘Barbie’ Has Women Grappling With Its Mixed Empowerment Messages

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“Barbie” is a sure box office hit, but is it a feminist one?

As the movie was raking in moviegoers over its premiere weekend, women found themselves in a lively debate on whether they had the right to criticize the box office hit.

Among the most strident discourses on social media, women and others from marginalized groups prefaced their comments with statements akin to “It’s flawed, but I liked it” or suggested they were afraid to share any opinion perceived as critical.

“I am a little bewildered,” TheWrap editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman tweeted on Sunday. “The power of ‘Barbie’ and success of the movie is undeniable. And yet women who I talk to said they found the movie heavy-handed, ‘preachy’ (heard that a lot) [and] ‘good’ but not particularly entertaining. All respect to Greta, [because] crazy box office, but…”

“This is exactly how I felt about ‘Barbie,'” writer Carla Meyer responded. “But as a woman from [Greta Gerwig’s] hometown of Sacramento, it feels like sacrilege to voice. Plus, the guy got all the best lines!”

The feminism of “Barbie” has been central to its online discussion. To “Backlash” author and feminist writer Susan Faludi, “Barbie” was about “shock and horror over what happened to us — what happened to women — from 2016 on, with the double whammy of Trump and then Dobbs,” she wrote in a recent opinion piece for The New York Times, adding that “abortion was the subtext to a lot”of the movie.

“It’s this hugely popular film directed by a woman, that has a real women’s empowerment message,” Meyer told TheWrap. “You just really want to support that, especially given how the situation is in the United States for women these days.”

It’s understandable. Though women directors have won Academy Awards, those interviewed for this piece agree they haven’t seen a female filmmaker craft a movie on this scale — the film boasts a $145 million dollar budget — and don’t want to look like buzzkills. But the film’s preachy quality many referenced is hard to ignore.

“I feel like it’s a bit, I won’t say ‘didactic,’ but at a certain point I did turn to my friend and say, ‘This is not very entertaining,'” said Meyer.

“[The film] is expected to do everything at once and not allowed to make mistakes,” said Emily Gagne, co-host and programmer for the film series “We Really Like Her” focused on female filmmakers. Gagne herself admits to feeling shamed for liking “Barbie,” particularly in contrast to her friends who felt the movie was not weird enough and represented a specific type of feminism.

“I felt they felt negative about it, which [is] in the spirit of what ‘Barbie’ wants to say, [that] women should feel how they want to feel and express their feelings as they want,” Gagne said. “We shouldn’t be ashamed to feel either way.”

But does criticizing the movie make one a bad feminist? Or at least at odds with feminist ideology as we know it?

“It’s important to note and underscore that there’s no fixed definition of feminism in general,” said Milony Thakar, founder of the organization Mind the Gender Gap. “There’s different theories out there. And quite often in the mainstream media it just gets clumped into one umbrella term as this is what a feminist interpretation of the ideal the world looks like.”

For Princess Weekes, a pop culture critic whose YouTube channel regularly deconstructs the intersections of women and media, the debate about the feminism in “Barbie” hints at the fact that too often movies about women are placed on a pedestal that isn’t able to appease every woman.

“Not every movie that you enjoy is going to be a feminist masterpiece nor does it necessarily need to be,” she said. “I think that’s a very narrow way through which we discuss media, especially on an intersectional way.”

Thakar understands the critiques that are out there: For example, Margot Robbie’s representation of stereotypical Barbie still places a white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, thin woman in the cast. But the fact that the movie is being self-deprecating in its awareness of that does allow for the message to come through, according to Kirsten Schaeffer, CEO of Women in Film.

“I definitely think it’s a feminist movie,” she said. “It’s giving a lot of women who may not identify as feminists, and who see this film… really smart and subtle messages around male power.”

But for as much as Meyer appreciated the film’s message, even she admits that the film’s attempt to deconstruct the patriarchy felt a bit simplistic.

“Misogyny is too prevalent in this world to to just have a lesson being learned in that way,” she said. “I think when you exist within a patriarchy, as we do, you have been careful about how much you’re making the idea of the patriarchy entertaining.”

The back-and-forth debate is leaving women who are critical of “Barbie” feeling like they’re bad feminists. As Gagne explained, the film’s use of America Ferrera’s Gloria and Ariana Greenblatt’s Sasha did attempt to bring diversity into the story and minimize Robbie’s Barbie as a white savior. (Sasha even calls Robbie’s character “White Savior Barbie” at one point, turning the trope into a winking joke.)

For Gagne, that’s a message women do need today.

“It’s the message that we really want to be hearing right now when we know that white women voted for Trump in droves,” she said. “But then I also go, there are so many women… thinking in a way that is not feminist anymore and are rejecting feminism. So is it also important to remind them the basics of feminism at the same time?”

Marginalized women, specifically women of color and those with disabilities, have called out the movie for what they see is a movie focused on specifically white, heterosexual and able-bodied feminism that’s leaving them out entirely. And they are the ones most open to expressing their outright displeasure with the movie at the risk.

“It felt like a portrayal of both white feminism and a misinterpretation of the basic ideals of feminism as a whole,” said Raven Brunner, a writer for Decider. “I just feel like I was a little misled going into it, given the the marketing push that this movie [is] an act of radical feminism, as well as other critics, who I will say were mainly white women, talking about this movie as if it’s a profound piece of art.”

“It’s not just feminism on one side and not feminism on the other,” Weekes said. “If we want to fight Ben Shapiro about ‘Barbie’ I say we go in full throttle, but we’re all feminists. But if we’re all people who believe in the empowerment of women and the intersectional stuff, then we shouldn’t take it as inherently a threat if one of us does not love the ‘Barbie’ movie.”

What it boils down to is whether women are able to balance the entertainment with the sermonizing. Can they find it entertaining in spite of a message that is weak and reductive?

“Women are learning to say ‘and’ instead of ‘but,'” Weekes said, citing a concept coined by fellow culture critic Dani Fernandez. “‘Barbie’ is a really well done movie. I think that it talks about patriarchy in a really accessible way. I think that its feminism is rudimentary and we can use it as a building block to have other conversations… about what womanhood itself looks like and where it needs to be going and why it feels so stagnant.”

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