Thoughts on Barbie (2023)
A Dark Miracle of Black Magickal Resurrection Issuing Forth Into the Unholiest Black Sabbath
November 7, 2023
This movie is a masterpiece, though critically distorted. I will get around to the distortions where appropriate. The point, though, is that it has dared to grapple with the very most important things. Even the distortions are “symptomatic,” so that rather than just tending toward defeat of the artwork, they call attention to themselves, and thereby strengthen its grip on the truth.
The movie takes places almost entirely within the mind of the dark, weird, creative mother, the appropriately named Gloria. Being a conscious human, her mind is split across the two hemispheres of her brain, as most of ours are, and so there are frequent trips across the corpus callosum…1
As a woman resident of the Grand Hotel Republic, the mother’s personality has been split as well (libido from ego, love from knowledge). And yet she is so much more than she seems. She works miracles of hypostasis, and functions as the privileged vessel of a miraculous resurrection.
Which brings me immediately to something I have discovered in my hard-fought acceptance of my Christianity. There is a reason Mary is important. She is the mother of Christ, obviously. That’s important, but it’s not enough. That would be retroactive justification begging the question all over again. “Anybody” can be a mother, right? All you need is female reproductive apparatus. And Mary, a poor teenager from the hood, was nothing special in any other way, as far as we can tell. So any woman could have given birth to Christ, so it doesn’t matter which woman it was. Right? Right. Anybody can be “the One.”
So, Mary is important because she is a virgin. That’s the supposed miracle. But then any old stray sperm could have impregnated her. Perhaps she and Joseph were making out one night, and he came on her leg, and she got pregnant by accident, unintentionally. That is an explanation that does away with any miracle pertaining to technical virginity. Given that people have known about how pregnancy works for thousands of years, why does Christianity still maintain that she is a virgin, and that this is miraculous? Despite this obvious technical possibility? What is so important about her virginity? Why is this so critical?
None of the churches have a clear stated explanation for this, though they differ in emphasis. They just maintain that it is a miracle. The Catholics therefore put Mary on a pedestal and worship her: they turn her into a saint, an angel, an everlasting fount of reactionary feminine identity. Protestants don’t make too much of it, but accept the mystery. The Lesser Orthodox churches—or at least the one I am a member of, the Armenian Apostolic Church—goes so far as to maintain that Mary was a virgin and remained a virgin forever. This got me thinking, and it is the key to the mystery of the Virgin Mary, which in turn is the key to understanding Barbie.
We wish our children to be healthy, happy, and whole, but we ourselves, mothers and fathers, are not. How can broken parents create a whole child? How can a broken woman give birth to a whole son? How can a broken father love either? How is this miracle possible, when the very act of love has been colonized, captured, repurposed by the state for exploitation? This is why Mary is a virgin. Her libido has not been taken hostage, ransom to her ego—her love has not been separated from her knowledge—and so her personality has not been distorted, malformed, perverted by fear, exploitation, and the threat of poverty and enslavement. She was subject to all those things, but not in her reproductive power. Not in her ability to create creativity. She needs must be innocent of that particular systematic exploitation, and the damage it does to one’s psyche, in order to raise Jesus to be the man he was to be.
The miracle is that Mary has never been raped.
Crisis
Barbieland is a reactionary fantasyland created by the state, but as with most things in ℝeality, it oscillates between this and another mode of experience. The girl child becoming woman fills Barbieland with deep and rivening spiritual forces that only grow stronger throughout her maturation, until the moment she puts away childish things.
So we see the reactionary dreams of foodless and drinkless sustenance, eternal cleanliness, and instantaneous product placement, but it is also a universe of magical play peopled by animate idols who speak in their own and differing voices. Barbie is huacan, godlike. She are the multitudinous feminine spirits haunting the Grand Hotel Republic, bottled up, confined to this inverted mirror dimension with no mirrors.
Stereotypical Barbie finds herself haunted, her mind adance with morbid fantasies. This is the first mystery with which we are presented.
She hurts herself in a high-heel shoe–removal accident: her feet go flat. For the very idol of bound femininity, to have one’s feet firmly planted on the ground is a problem. Barbies witness the horror, and so Barbie can no longer disavow her unease, pain, and unwellness, now become a physical ailment. There is no doubt that she is malfunctioning.
Barbie tells Barbie that she must visit Weird Barbie Always in the Splits, the leprous grotesque at the fantasy’s edge. She is not a happiness pump,2 but a misery sink: a sin eater, a place for all the things that don’t fit the fantasy, but that somehow creep into Barbieland. She is a sacred sublimity, an oracle.
That’s why she knows what’s going on. Like Freud in his sessions with “Dora”,3 she has superior knowledge of Barbie’s condition. A portal has been opened, and Barbie has to do something about it. Someone is calling upon the spirits in such a manner that ℝeality is creeping in. Barbie must venture to restore the fantasy.
Weird Barbie Always in the Splits offers Barbie the choice Morpheus offered Neo in the Matrix, but with one important distinction. Weird Barbie Always in the Splits is insincere. Barbie, being a reactionary fantasy in a reactionary fantasy world, does not want to be redpilled, so to speak.4 She is a self-conscious, self-confessed reactionary, literally Stereotypical Barbie, and she knows it.
Making the same mistake Freud made with Dora,5 Weird Barbie Always in the Splits uses her superior knowledge to bully Barbie into making the right choice. She blackmails Barbie with an unimaginable “or else”: accept the mission or endure cellulite and weirdness—absolute corruption of the fantasy world.
Now, Barbie is sexless, so cellulite shouldn’t matter. But somehow it does… She simply must restore the membrane that separates her world from ℝeality.
Ken
“Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him.”
Ken has a rivalry among himselves, to see who will luxuriate under Barbies’ gaze. He engages in desperate displays of male…something. Not power. Nor sexual adequacy. Nor reproductive fitness. Ken performs with no purpose. His job is “beach.” Barbie has no purpose other than to play, because this is a girl child’s fantasy world, gifted her by Mattel.
Premature Distillation (No Wine Before Its Time)
Mattel’s fantasy world—“Female empowerment! You know… sparkle!”—is a genie’s bottle of spirits alchemically distilled from the dreams and illusions of pre-teen Western girls, conscious of romance but innocent of sexual desire. Pre-teen girls still beat boys at basketball games. They still win foot races and arm-wrestling matches with boys. They can do science and math and argue why this is bad and that is good. “Eleven-year-olds are not for sale,” says Carol Gilligan.6 So the spirits believe themselves to be the extracted essence of female liberation, whereas they are bottled before those challenges really begin.
This is why neither Ken nor Barbie have genitals. They are asexual but determinedly not nonbinary. This was confusing to me at first, but it is important. Ken and Barbie are precisely disembodied, unsexed gender roles.
Mattel’s fantasy world is a simple negation of a negation; it is a sexless inverted partiarchy. This desexes and disempowers important psychosocial dynamics in Barbieland, and weakens the movements there in a way, again, symptomatically deficient to the artistic representation of patriarchy. We’ll get to it. Mark ’em down.
Over the Rainbow
So Barbie and stowaway Ken are both creatures of a negated negation, and they are entirely unprepared for their adventure. They are conjured forth regardless. Neither can cope with ℝeality without a serious crisis, which also happens to be the crisis of ℝeality.
Meanwhile, beautifully, all the music in Barbieland is also reactionary. Matchbox 20’s “Push” (macho emo misogyny from 1996) and Indigo Girls’s “Closer to Fine” (anti-intellectual, pro-stupidity “college radio” garbage from 1989) are both seductively awful, thoroughly disgusting artistic creations on the order of Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle (1993).
C.R.E.A.M.
Ken and Barbie arrive in the state of Los Angeles, in the country of California, and it is good to wonder how they know about undertones of violence, vaginas, penises, and double entendres. There are precocious schoolgirls and boys who get into their parents’ bedrooms and read books about the Art of Erotic Massage and Our Bodies, Our Selves. I know I did. Hustler and Penthouse, too. But that was at a neighbor’s apartment. And the men’s restroom at my mom’s workplace.
The first problem is that commodity relations govern ℝeality. Every object of human desire has a number attached, which must be “paid” in “money.” Barbie and Ken are arrested multiple times for petty crimes that shouldn’t exist.
“Freedom”
Let us not forget that Ken cannot travel freely either. He is also hampered and hindered from participating fully in the glorious patriarchy. He can’t even beach. The movie consistently ignores Ken’s unfreedom, and of course this is symptomatic. It’s not time to get into it yet. Mark it.
Ken, living outside patriarchy, but wanting in, decides that he needs to start patriarchy afresh in Barbieland, unhindered by the rules and regulations of ℝeality. He doesn’t understand that the reason he was admired in ℝeality is because he appeared to have conquered and enslaved Sterotypical Barbie! He thinks it is just because he is a living, breathing man! Absolutely killer.
He enjoyed what he saw of ℝeality, particularly things having to do with rigorous work and animals, honor and solidarity. He sees with slave insight, as it was constructed according to Hegel and Nietzsche. He enjoys the spectacle of male power as well, but that is literally the last thing he sees on his solo walk through town, while waiting for Barbie to finish her hallucination.
Barbie gets her vision of the dark, weird mother’s daughter Sasha, and the pain brings her back to ℝeality, where she now sees all people in all their dimensions, laughing, loving, crying, and feeling in all their power, and being beautiful in all the ways people can be. This is slave insight, which she rightfully should not have. How did she get it?
This is not exactly lazy, pathetic, or ideological (man-hating), but it is a “logical problem”: it also happens to be very precisely symptomatic of the imbalance patriarchy has imposed. Even to ask the proper questions, we have to break the rules of logic and suspend judgments about “false analogy”. We have to break with formal equality, even in artistic inversions.
Making Connections
Sasha and the gang haven’t played with Barbie since they “were like 5 years old.” Barbie has been making women feel bad about themselves. Barbie represents everything wrong with our culture, set the feminist movement back 50 years, rampant consumerism, etc. Sasha calls Barbie a fascist. She is indeed: a nonpolitical fascist of the type of widow Frau Bertholt in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). She just didn’t know. She could not be said to have known. She disavows her knowledge, which she didn’t have. Being innocent of real politics, Sasha’s accusations hurt Barbie’s new feelings, and she runs away.
It is unclear how the FBI knows of Barbie and Ken’s escape into ℝeality, but I guess we are meant to assume that the high-tech police state functions even in make-believe worlds. Like Army and CIA newscasters and movie consultants. Fuck Ben Affleck, who set critical filmmaking back 50 years with Argo. In any case, the FBI notifies Mattel, and fires are lit under asses.
Barbie is kidnapped by the exploiters, and they demand—as they have since the Grand Hotel Republic opened its doors (closed the door to an alternate past)—that she get back in the box, a Procrustean apparatus ideologized as “female empowerment,” complete with handcuffs. No, of course being a man with no power does not make a man a woman.7 The simple truth is that exploitation itself depends on her being in the box. It is an enterprise “literally made of women!” Literally, for real, this is actually the case in ℝeality. They are “the freaking foundation of this very long phallic building!” Her escape threatens ℝeality, which is an exploitation scheme for men and an extortion racket for women. The bosses aren’t worried about Ken at all because patriarchy does a great job keeping men in line with the illusion that they participate in power.
Somehow, and for some unclear reason, Barbie knows that she must not get in the box, so she flees into a liminal space, a hallway full of doors, behind one of which she encounters an angelic elderly woman—whom we guess and is later revealed to be the inventor of Barbie—who tells her how to get to the street. “Women do more than work” at Mattel. Ain’t that the truth, Ruth. Barbie learns how to drink from a cup before leaving with the reassurance that she, Barbie, is just right. And ℝeality? Well, Ruth tells Barbie that ℝeality is never right, and that that’s OK, too. Barbie is getting closer to fine.
And so we finally discover the source of Barbie’s morbidity. It is not Sasha, the strong-willed critical tween, but Gloria, Sasha’s dark, weird mother, the receptionist at Mattel. She is a secret creator, as woman residents of the Grand Hotel Republic are usually fated to be. She has not ceased to play in the reactionary fantasy that is Barbieland, because she hasn’t overcome her Oedipal conflict. She is not an adult. She is trying to become one! Her only reason for revisiting Barbieland, and remobilizing her childhood spirits is to deal with adult issues there, in the girl-child fantasyland gifted her by the state. She is having trouble, obviously, because many things don’t fit.
But this explains the earlier scene, where we assumed that Sasha—heart aflame with anger and wrath against the injustice of the role for which she is being prepared—was the morbid one. But, hell no, the daughter is not morbid at all. She is fighting to be human, and to preserve her voice and autonomy. Carol Gilligan noted in conference that, in contrast to men’s coming-of-age stories, most women’s Bildungsromanen begin just as she begins to be aware of how she shouldn’t compete with men, how men don’t like this or that, how boys will like her better if she does this or that or the other thing. They don’t begin with birth and childhood, but just before puberty.
Oedipus Wreck
Gloria has had a cheap victory over male authority in the form of her useless, dickless husband, but apparently that was too easy to do anything for her. Her challenge, which is the conflict the entire movie enacts, is to confront the state and her need for its reactionary fantasyland.
She birthed the spirits in order to wrestle with them.
Gloria and Sasha rescue Barbie from Mattel, speeding off and navigating alleys in reverse like Claude in Grand Theft Auto III. Gloria is a marvel of hidden talent. She can even take everyone back over the rainbow, and she does, accompanying Barbie back to Barbieland! What a miraculous journey—one Sasha is certain never to forget…
In her desperate haste to escape the agents of the state, Barbie abandons Ken. She doesn’t pause a moment to think about taking him back over the rainbow.
That’s just as well, I suppose? Because Ken has already abandoned Barbie and flown himself back to the fantasyland he intends to colonize and reform with his new science of patriarchy. He praises patriarchy in fashion terms, as an “immaculate, impeccable, seamless garment of logic.” The Barbies have no defense against this. They are part of the fabric, as is Barbieland itself. Of course Ken would have no defense against it either. Neither was prepared for ℝeality.
Heterosexual Love In the Age of Exploitation
Ken felt unrespected, unloved. Barbie failed him somehow, but he doesn’t understand it. He is a leftover piece of an intentionally confusing puzzle palace built to entrap and thereby enslave little girls. He really has no place in Barbieland, but this is also symptomatic. Mark it. Consider that Ken has an unrequited, sexless love for Barbie. He loves her the way a Western girl child believes Prince Charming loves Cinderella. The important thing is not Ken’s love, but that he loves her in that way. There is nothing else for him to do in the mind of the girl child. She has no libido, and therefore she has no real use for him. More precise, she has not had her newly awakened sexual being ripped away from her and held ransom to some man who might let her experience it again. This is the terrible bargain offered to women, and it is the basis of marriage. It is a spiritual circumcision that occurs in puberty, when girls becoming women first become aware of the dangers they face when skipping, sauntering, Sashaing down its hallways of the Grand Hotel Republic.
Barbie has never been ripped up by her longing for Ken because she has never been through puberty. She lives in a state of perpetually arrested development. And all this pain and suffering belongs to Gloria, still struggling to reconcile reactionary femininity with actual adult womanhood.
But Ken’s importation of patriarchy must therefore be incomplete. It cannot possibly work, either in the movie as a poetic device, or in any hypothetical real world, where we are used to people trying to right wrongs with wrongs, despite the warnings of literally scores of generations of elders.
Get Your DSM Ready
It’s time to talk about the symptoms I’ve asked you to mark.
The movie’s primary failing, and its most symptomatic weakness, is Ken’s importation of patriarchy into Barbieland. I’m sure every heterosexual man’s heart fell when this weak shit first hit. It is very sad and pathetic.
However.
However.
However.
It is a beautiful, exquisitely rendered weakness.
Yes, Ken’s patriarchy lacks the valences of real-world patriarchy. His is the unrequited love of a mere appendage, whose only function is a childishly idealized devotion. This is not the same as the unrequited love of a devoted man in the real world, obviously, though he is still working in the logic of exchange, tit for tat, Justice, recompense. He asks Barbie, pointedly, “How does it feel?”
Let us not forget that Barbie is a self-confessed, self-conscious reactionary. She said it twice herself. She has always wanted things to remain exactly the same. She is a prisoner of the ideology that created her, though she has been forced to struggle to keep the worlds apart, under the force of another terrible bargain, the terms of which she doesn’t even have the capacity to understand: cellulite versus knowledge of the universe, blackmail delivered by oracle Weird Barbie Always in the Splits.
All this is still powered by Gloria’s unresolved Oedipal conflict, her need for the reactionary fantasyland, and her inability to take adult responsibility, namely for her neglected creativity. She is incapable of self-care because she does not believe that a woman’s responsibility extends to the self.8 But the fact remains that Barbie is a reactionary in an artifical negated negation “utopia.”
It is a total mess, replete with elections, activism, dirty tricks, etc. All the garbage of Grand Hotel Republican politics rooted in the mathematics of formal equality. Barbies manage to evade Kens’ mind control, against which they have had no defense, merely by acknowledging the mechanism of control: naming the split. It is a fact that women are crucified generation after generation upon the absolutely irreconcilable contradictions in their gender role, and so in this ideal fantasyland, they escape mind control by promoting, achieving, and catalyzing cognitive dissonance, by merely reflecting upon the contradictions. It is literally impossible to be a woman, and with the tiniest bit of logic they can get to any one of the numerous contradictions of being a woman, and thereby free themselves.
Is there an analog to such a method in ℝeality? Obviously not. We have more than 200 years of statements, and women are still caught on the horns of the very same dilemmas formalized and hidden in formal equality. Merely to physically survive and biologically reproduce in ℝeality, women must submit to dissociation and disavow their knowledge. Women must care without knowing, and men must know without caring, and this mutilation must be reproduced.9 There must then be methods of constant, interminable, incessant forgetting that allow the state to function.10 The state, the system of exploitation, is “a company literally made of women,” wrapped in an “immaculate, impeccable, seamless garment of logic,” the ideology of formal equality, embedded in Western mathematics and philosophy since Aristotle.
The question is how one ever gets inside a seamless garment. It is physically impossible to put on a seamless garment. The only way to end up inside a seamless garment is if it is woven around you. It can only be a surprise to find yourself inside a seamless garment if you forgot the day it was woven around your very own body.
The Man Problem
Yes, it is also impossible to be a man. Men are androids: robot slaves running someone else’s software, playing someone else’s game. Just like Ken. There is a heart beating under there somewhere, though…
Ken’s whole patriarchal reform program is madness: he is mad with rage at the injustice of Barbie’s betrayal. Barbie betrayed him by never loving him back. He wants revenge, and he is determined to layer another negation on top of their negated negation “utopia.” Sliding this real world problem into Barbieland makes it look like the Barbies (and the movie) are celebrating this real-world betrayal of men by women, and it is disgusting, sickening, heartwrenching. The movie shows nothing of the enslavement of men in ℝeality, and the Kens remain stupid and ignorant of the complexity of all that goes on in ℝeality. There is no advocate for male victims of patriarchy in the movie. The Kens are leftover puzzle pieces, remember, and they are not even economically exploited in Barbieland. Their only purpose is doe-eyed devotion to Barbie. So Ken, attempting to win the love of Barbie, looks ridiculous. The stakes are nonexistent.
However.
However.
However.
Boys are typically initiated into the straitjacket of masculinity between the ages of 4 and 7, according to Carol Gilligan’s review of Kohlberg’s research on the stages of moral development. This is when they begin to score highly on such ridiculous tests as the Heinz dilemma, in which a man is faced with the choice whether to steal some lifesaving medicine for his wife, knowing that it will save her life but that he will go to prison forever. Girls score lower on this test of moral development, because they question the entire frame, and believe that the whole situation is unjust. Preteen girls do not believe that the druggist—let’s be honest: there is no druggist, but rather Pfizer, Merck, Novartis, and the us government—has a right to charge money for lifesaving medicine. They believe, uncontroversially, that this is violence. Boys by that age have been indoctrinated into the axioms of formal equality, and let systematic violence slide, and dig right into the questions the male researcher is interested in: how to turn moral questions into math problems soluble with algorithms.
Let me add the trolley problem. It wasn’t until 2023 that the systems of exploitation had degenerated sufficiently to bring this regularly into ℝeality. The trolley problem is having real-world trial runs in castebound India, and on June 3, 2023, in Balasore, Odisha, India, “[m]ore than 280 people were killed and over 1,000 injured in a three-way crash involving two passenger trains and a freight train in eastern Odisha state on Friday, officials said.” The basic problem behind these train crashes is irresponsible cannabalistic management that drives physical plant into the ground, leading to loss of communication signals along the cable network, which means the loss of automatic cybernetic knowledge of the condition of the train network. “The railways minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has previously said the accident had occurred ‘due to a change in electronic interlocking.’” This reveals the incompetence of the android train operators, who apparently cannot make decisions without automatic cybernetic knowledge. Of course, “an investigation would show ‘who was responsible’ for that.”
“Various government figures have vowed to hold anyone found negligible to account. ‘This incident is very serious for the government… Whoever is found guilty will be punished severely,’ [Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi] said.”11
Back to Ken. Upon returning from ℝeality, it is again the spirit of Justice that animates this useless appendage, this sexless automaton, and it is the preeminent accomplishment of the movie that even this low creature is invigorated by it, dancing a real world dance while in its possession. It is artistically miraculous that the creators of this film were sensitive to this, and let it happen. This is the dance of “Stack” Lee Shelton, Edmond, Eldridge Cleaver, James Carr, Tariq Nasheed, William “D-Fens” Foster, Ted Bundy, and hundreds of millions of men to different degrees and in different phases of their lives.
It is a gang war! A prison riot! Beat It! I’m Bad!
Ken sings, “I want to know what it’s like to love, to be the real thing.” He wants to love with all his heart. He wants to escape his gender role. “Is it a crime?” Yes, Ken, it is a crime against the state. You have drapetomania. “Am I not hot when I’m in my feelings?” No, Ken, you are not hot when you are in your feelings, despite what “female empowerment” ideology has sold to both you and Barbie. Women in the grip of their feminine gender roles don’t like you in your feelings, because they no longer know what to expect. They made a bad bargain, but at least they knew what the bargain was.
They get scared and run away, just when you need them. Just when you’re reaching inside yourself, to be able to reach across to them, to love them. You will be betrayed by the object of your love, at the most critical moment, the penultimate moment of your triumph over yourself. By which I mean your triumph over the gender role that you have been living.
“Is my moment finally here, or am I dreaming?”
Most men never find out. The pain of the betrayal pushes them once and for all over the edge, either into outlawry, or back into gender and behavioral conformity. The love they were reaching to experience, to give, becomes for them an illusion. The emotional trapdoor in the hearts and minds of women, split in half by patriarchy, does them in once and for all, destroying them.
That’s how it usually happens, as the penitentiaries and criminal subcultures attest.
But wait! It may very well be possible for Ken to love without Barbie!
This alternative has a long and storied, often glorious tradition. This is the aestheticization of masculinity.12 I speak of the West’s artsy homosexual subculture. It can never quite distinguish itself from aestheticized misogyny, however much it protests. Yes, I get it. I really do get it. But you get it. This homosexual subculture is an institution, a long-lived tradition, which means that it serves a social function. And it isn’t serving a social function in any old culture from anywhere, but in the Grand Hotel Republic, philosophically founded by boy-loving men who violated the most fundamental tenet of dialectics—respect for contradiction—to hide unequal exchange under the axioms of formal equality. “Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The altar, as in prehistory, is anywhere you kneel.”13 It is a compensation for unfreedom, an individually attainable antidote to android life.
The Kens therefore kiss in a battle turned dance.
The whole scene from gang war to homoerotic dance is absolutely stunning. Truly.
“It is your destiny. To see the man behind the tan, and fight for me.”
Which requires… what? A truly dialectical solution, old stuff returned at a higher level: what he had at the very beginning, before he discovered his oppression and enslavement, before he became a runaway slave: simple guileless devotion.
One More Symptom
The challenge Barbie poses to Ken at the end is more symptomatic weakness. Ken does not need to find out who he is without Barbie. This is projection, or symptomatic mismatch in the inversion that is Barbieland, or both. Real women say similar things from time to time.
No, men in their feelings understand exactly what and who they are. They understand that if they cannot love, nothing is worth anything. They may as well continue being impoverished androids working for the state, which is why post-betrayal re-conformity is the most common choice. The work doesn’t matter, because it never really did. They won’t get to express themselves anyway. Any work will do, as long as it is mindless and doesn’t require much effort. Then they drink and drug and work themselves till death.
But if he can love, well, then, the whole world will open up and he can experience Barbie in her fullness, and perhaps even help her in her journey. He has been “finding himself” the entire time. He has been struggling to free himself from his gender role and thereby to love, just as Barbie and Gloria have been struggling to free themselves from the masters of exploitation.
The Ending
It is well stated that Barbie has no ending. Women are actual infinity. Every woman is Eve. But Barbie, to re-enter the web of ℝeality, has to die in spirit, to be born again as a real human woman. Gloria is again the privileged vessel of this birth, and Ruth, the inventor, guides Barbie through the canal, dripping honeyed words of real-world wisdom to guide her in her new mortal life.
The Blackest Sabbath on the Darkest Altar
Barbieland had been a reactionary fantasy, though riven with deep spiritual forces that grow only stronger throughout the life of the girl child becoming woman. Girls becoming women drop Barbie when they learn of the bargain they face. Later, after they accept the bargain, they may forget fondly upon her. They may forget too fondly, and re-enter the reactionary fantasyland in a desperate attempt to resolve their dissociation. They may call upon their long-demobilized childhood spirits, performing black magic rituals to turn those once innocent spirits finally full force against the now-grown woman, to preserve the reactionary fantasy, to assist her in conformity, and finally even to offer themselves as a sacrifices upon one of the many altars to patriarchy. Barbie herself cannot tell good from evil because she was blackmailed into the mission in the first place, and therefore has grown no discernment throughout her adventures in ℝeality.
Gloria has gone insane. Gloria called upon the spirits to save her reactionary fantasy, and she ended by delivering resurrected Barbie directly into the hands of the mutilators of the medical establishment. And not just any branch of medicine, but that witch-hunting branch founded explicitly on the exclusion of women from the ancient traditions of female wisdom: the gynecologist. Sic transit Gloria, secret agent of the state. Barbie will be spiritually circumcised, and she will become a peacable resident of the Grand Hotel Republic. Closer to fine.
Most certainly, Sasha, the real daughter, will forget the trip over the rainbow and come to disavow knowledge of her mother’s utter dissolution. Surely, Sasha, being a beautiful young girl, will become highly sought after by many men, and will surely give in to one. She will have disavowed the knowledge she gained on her own and that she built with her friends, even before her mother’s catastrophic self-betrayal. She, too, will be closer to fine, and she will have no need to get to the bottom of anything, be possessed of no burning desire to understand the dynamics of the world, let alone those of the spirit world. She will come to believe that ℝeality will never be right, and that that’s OK.
Pro-Choice, In A Human Voice
To have flushed the entire reactionary fantasyland would have been better.
Carol Gilligan’s article “In A Different Voice” is based on a series of interviews she did with a variety of women from a variety of backgrounds shortly after Roe v. Wade was passed. What had been a realm of passivity for women, forcing them into their gender role, was turned suddenly into a realm of choice, in which every pregnancy was now a controversy of responsibility and conflicting interests. There were choices they never had to make before, between self and other, between such feminine identities as selfless caregiver and selfish Jezebel. Should I care for him? Or the baby? Do I want the respect of the church? My family? Do I want the child? Can I take care of the child? Who will take care of me? Can he take care of me? What if he refuses to take responsibility? Do I owe a debt to…something, because I enjoyed sexual pleasure?
The world has never been the same.
The problem with forgetting is that nothing has been forgotten. Freud discovered with hysteric Fräulein Elizabeth (treated in 1892–95) that nothing had been forgotten. She knew everything with respect to her symptoms, but didn’t know that she knew it. Rather, she disavowed knowledge of it. Because she was caught on the horns of a dilemma in which a piece of her very identity was at stake: her gender identity. This is literally an epistemological problem, as we have been discovering. Gender literally limits knowledge, functions as the border of our episteme, because gender is literally a dissociative identity disorder. It is the edge of this universe, this ℝeality built on formal equality.
Fräulein Elizabeth’s hysteria was a result of the dilemma between her feminine identity and her desire for empowerment, specifically the power she associated with masculinity. Real libidinal love, powered by real female desire, separated her from her knowledge of her problem. This is isomorphic to Du Bois’s double consciousness, and that ought to make it easier for blacks to understand: the first double consciousness is that produced by the gendered division of labor, made formal, “seamless,” impenetrable, logical, quite literally mathematical, in the founding of the Grand Hotel Republic. We are taught to hold part of our experience outside ourselves. Men must know and not care, and women must care but not know.
“Women’s issues” are the very origin of psychoanalysis. The method is listening, activated by an ethics of care. That care is rooted in Kohlberg’s “third stage” of moral development: integration of self into the circle of responsibility, where the moral imperative is something equivalent to nonviolence. This means no exploitation.
But ℝeality is precisely exploitation and extortion. Women must disavow their knowledge of the world they knew before they grew curves. They must be split by late puberty, and they may only speak in voices of self-negation or angelicity. Their mature libido signs the contract, so to speak: actual women sexually desire actual men, and they also desire to succeed and thrive socially. This makes them close their minds to what they know.
In this state of dissociation, women function as secret agents of the state, performing wet work to control the men to ensure that exploitation continues.
Women are the ultimate reproductive laborers, after all.
But no garment is seamless.
Jesus and Stuff
It is no accident that Jesus came when he did. His message is entirely about how to survive within the Grand Hotel Republic. He made himself the body of the church, an alternative assembly—not a republic, but a new ekklēsia. Specifically not the body of woman, but the body of a sacrificial man. He took on the feminine in order to expose the issue. He made explicit criticism of Law, Justice, and Wrath, and thereby all the masculinist methods of formal equality, just then being set in stone, carved into the facade of the Hotel. He explicitly promoted the ethic of care for all humanity. It’s all so simple, and so obviously gender play. He has been up there on the cross for all to see the whole time.
See Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976).
Please see utilitarianism and the miraculous The Good Place, streaming on Netflix.
Sigmund Freud, Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905), about his short, 11-week treatment of Ida Bauer in 1900. The Wikipedia article is very good.
This is another symptomatic inversion, of which there are many in the movie. To be redpilled, in common parlance, derived from gamer and “cyber” culture, means to be awakened to the virtues of misogyny. At this point in the movie, we are led to believe that it means to “understand the universe,” which we presume to be good. But this is a reactionary fantasyland, so redpilling should actually be bad, like it is in ℝeality. Right?
Freud overstepped his bounds, and tried to tell Dora what her problem was. She was not ready to accept his explanation, but he tried to make her accept it, and so she ceased therapy. Freud knew he had made a tragic mistake, and the concept of “transference” arose out of this very clinical experience. It is interesting that Freud’s mistake in this case forms the basis for the almost universal rejection by feminists of his work and the entire project of psychoanalysis, a field founded specifically out of concern for women’s freedom! The abuse of knowledge is a common problem among men animated by the spirit of Justice. “The resolution of such dilemmas, however, lies not in the self-deception of rationalized violence—‘I was’, said Gandhi, ‘a cruelly kind husband. I regarded myself as her teacher and so harassed her out of my blind love for her’—but rather in the replacement of the underlying antagonism with a mutuality of respect and care,” Carol Gilligan, “In A Different Voice: Women’s Conceptions of Self and of Morality,” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 47, no. 4, November 1977, p. 514.
See Carol Gilligan’s study of pre-teen girls, Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School (1990). The quote is from Francine Prose’s review of the book, “Confident at 11, Confused at 16,” New York Times Magazine, January 7, 1990. It continues: “But as they get older the girls seem to undergo a kind of crisis in response to adolescence and to the strictures and demands of the culture which, in Gilligan’s view, sends a particular message to women: ‘Keep quiet and notice the absence of women and say nothing.’ Or as a graduate student, Elizabeth Debold, says: ‘Girls don’t see themselves being what the culture is about. And that has to give them some kind of double vision.’ ‘And by 15 or 16,’ says Gilligan, ‘that resistance has gone underground. They start saying, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.’ They start not knowing what they had known.’” In a New Center for Psychoanalysis conference I attended on November 4, 2023, Gilligan elaborated on this disavowal of their own knowledge as the key mechanism of forcing dissociation, and thereby soliciting cooperation from women in their own oppression. They refuse to draw their own conclusions even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Of course the desire to know and to conclude—to seize responsibility—is aided by the existence of a political movement, but how can such movements get started other than by individual women claiming their knowledge in responsibility and care?
There was quite a vigorous and vitriolic discussion of bacha bāzī (male child sex slavery in Afghanistan and Pakistan) on various feminist usenet bulletin boards around the time of Operation Enduring Freedom, after the September 11, 2001, destruction of the World Trade centers in New York City, the upshot of which was often, “hell no, they’re going to grow up to be men, so fuck ’em.” I’d just like to speak for solidarity here, and remind readers that one doesn’t have to dehumanize enslaved children to (1) defend the distinction between powerless men and powerless women, and (2) keep the door open to our cooperation in crafting a global ethic of love (care and responsibility), which is our only hope.
She is caught in the transition from the second to the third stage of Kohlberg’s schema of moral development. Carol Gilligan explains: “[W]hen the conventions of feminine goodness legitimize only others as the recipients of moral care, the logical inequality between self and other and the psychological violence that it engenders create the disequilibrium that initiates the second transition. The relationship between self and others is then reconsidered in an effort to sort out the confusion between conformity and care inherent in the conventional definition of feminine goodness and to establish a new equilibrium, which dissipates the tension between selfishness and responsibility.” Carol Gilligan, “In A Different Voice: Women’s Conceptions of Self and of Morality,” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 47, no. 4, November 1977, p. 492.
Carol Gilligan, New Center for Psychoanalysis, November 4, 2023.
Carol Gilligan, passim. In all of her work that I have read, she emphasizes the manner in which the girl child enjoys herself and her voice, which is usually identified as a “feminine voice,” a “female voice,” until puberty, when she begins to encounter the male world as a person becoming a woman. She learns to repress her voice, replace it with a “cover voice,” and this is a struggle that lasts until late puberty, when the dissociation is complete. But this struggle has many phases. Competition, refusal, inversion, political awareness. ℝeality is an exploitation scheme for the men and an extortion racket for the women. The women must accept the bargain. This is a social problem, and without a movement to sustain individuals, the preadolescent political resistance that individual Sashas demonstrate is usually replaced by an internal psychological resistance: disavowal and dissociation. In 2023, Carol Gilligan has gone a step further and come back around to declare that the prepubescent girl voice is emphatically not a female or feminine voice, but rather a universal, liberatory human voice that men and women can share when they adopt it to speak an ethics of care and responsibility. See Carol Gilligan, In A Human Voice (2023).
No, neither the high-caste exploiters nor their proud technicians have fixed the problem because they are incapable of doing so. They are both technically incompetent and philosophically unable to come to the correct conclusions, and that is why it happened again a couple months later, in Andhra Pradesh, India, on October 30, 2023, because maintenance of the overhead lines was so poor as to cause the driver of the Visakhapatnam-Rayagada passenger train to stop on the tracks. The trailing train, the Visakhapatnam-Palasa Express, thereby lost cybernetic knowledge of the leading train, and general prevailing incompetence did the rest, crashing into the stopped train, killing 13 passengers and injuring 39.
Camille Paglia explores this well in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1991). Run right out and read it immediately.
Camille Paglia, “Homosexuality at the Fin de Siècle,” Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992).