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July 26, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:17:40
Movie Review Barbie (Take 1 - Better!)
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Hey there, it's Steph.
Just in case you're confused about why you're getting two Barbie movie reviews, this is one I did first, but the audio was messed up.
Somebody from the community very kindly and competently restored it, so I'm releasing this.
I think it's a better review than the second one.
If you have a choice, I'd listen to this one.
It's more in-depth and rich, so yes, here's the take one of the Barbie movie review.
So, let's talk about Barbie.
Very interesting film.
Chaotic. Entertaining.
Appalling. Wild.
And full of so many self-contradictions that it's like looking at a...
The disco matrix of a fly's eye looking at a schizophrenic.
So let's get into it and what's going on.
So, of course, as you probably know, the movie starts with a narrator talking about how there used to be just all of these bland, dull dolls which were babies.
And all of these girls would only be able to play with the babies and so on.
And then what comes along is sexy Barbie, right?
And Barbie was... The first doll that had breasts that was really quite shocking at the time and so on.
And Barbie comes along.
It's a take-off or rip-off of the, or parody I guess, of the obelisk, ape-smashing scene of 2001's Space Odyssey.
So sexy Barbie comes along and all the little girls Look at Barbie in wonder.
She's tall, statuesque, skyscraper legs, busty and gorgeous.
And they then turn and smash their babies.
Smash their babies into the ground, into pieces.
And this really, obviously, it's somewhat disturbing.
But this is one of the fundamental things Forks or paths for girls, right?
So one of the forks of paths for girls, and there's stuff for men too, which we'll talk about in a sec, just to sort of put it in context, but one of the big forks of paths for girls is, do I want to use my sexiness to land a man and become a mother, which is really the purpose of sexiness, that's why it exists and all of that.
Do I want to use it for life?
Or do I want to use it for myself?
Do I want to use it for life?
Or do I want to use it for myself?
Now, the Barbie question is...
Is attractiveness for your advantage, or is it for the continuation of your life?
For, like, kids and motherhood and, you know, the great cycle of life, four billion years of evolution from the single-celled orchidism onwards.
So, yeah, what's my sex in this for?
Is it for me to make money by Pretending to lick ice cream on TikTok.
Is it for me to get dates?
Is it for me to get attention?
Is it for me to get clout? Is it for me to get envy?
Is it for me to be admired?
Is that what my sexiness is for?
Or is it for getting the highest quality man, being a great mom, raising the next generation, and all of that?
What's my sexiness for?
For me or for life?
I mean, I don't think I need to go into my particular perspectives, because we're just talking about the movie, but I'm sure that's really clear.
And in the same way, for men.
Right? What is it if you're a high-value man?
And, you know, if you listen to this show, whether you like it or not, you are.
If you're a high-value man, is my attractiveness to get the best bride and mother for my children?
Or is it to get a lot of sexual conquest and enjoy all that our selected bride?
What is my attractiveness for?
What are my resources for? Right, so for women, what is my sexiness for?
For life, for me, for money.
And for men, it's what is my capacity to provide resources?
What is it for? Is it for another gaming monitor, a better graphics card, and so on, or travel?
Or, you know, other things that don't really add exactly to your cycle of life stuff.
My capacity to provide resources isn't for...
Wife and children, or is it for me?
Is it just for me?
So that's really the fundamental question.
So all the girls were playing with dolls, which was them training themselves to be good mothers and cycle of life, and your sexiness is for the children to come, which of course is, you know, again, that's within line, in line with evolution and so on.
And just because it is in line with evolution doesn't mean it's not really right or anything, but that's sort of a fundamental thing.
Sexy Barbie comes along and it's like, oh wait, my sexiness is not for babies.
My sexiness is for me.
That's really a pretty devilish bargain, really.
Are all of the instincts, capacities, lusts, and abilities designed for the furtherance of life or for the acquisition of resources?
Furtherance of life per acquisition of resources.
If it's for the acquisition of resources, then you're selling life and companionship and child raising and motherhood and family and comfort in your old age.
You're selling all of those wonderful, warm, beautiful human connections for a tax-skinned-down paycheck and usually a corner office under fluorescent lights wrestling with spreadsheets until the day you die.
It's a devilish bargain.
It's a devilish bargain.
Now, one of the reasons why these kinds of movies tend to get made is because the woman who co-wrote and directed it obviously is a woman of extraordinary high ability and organization and passion and drive, verbal abilities, visual abilities, you name it, right?
I mean, leadership abilities.
This is an extraordinary woman, without a doubt, right?
One in a million, probably.
Now, for a woman who has this level of ability, I think it's wonderful, it's great, but a woman who has this level of ability, when she looks at motherhood, she says, it's kind of tall, isn't it?
Compared to, you know, making a $150 million movie and all of that.
That's kind of dull.
And listen, I can absolutely get where she's coming from.
So what she does is she says, well, I would be bored by motherhood.
And she might well be. It's not for everyone, right?
She might well be. So she looks at motherhood and she says, well, that would be boring for me.
And therefore, motherhood is boring.
Ah, you see? You see?
That's the difference.
So you take your own abilities and you project it onto the world as a whole.
So this woman can co-write and direct an amazing movie.
And it is. It's a wild movie.
It's very creative, very inventive, very challenging.
To make, and in some cases to consume.
So she can do this amazing thing.
And so she says, well, motherhood would be, motherhood's boring, it's not for me.
And then what she does is, because it's not for her, she tries to give it to other women, it's not for them.
But, you know, the fact of the matter is, how many women will co-write and direct a hundred million dollar plus movie?
I mean, that's like one in What do you say, one in ten million?
I mean, it's extraordinarily rare.
And so, taking her abilities and then projecting them onto everyone else and saying, well, I would be bored and understimulated by motherhood, and she might be, and therefore everyone else would be bored and understimulated by motherhood, that is sort of fundamental error.
That happens. It's a lack of empathy.
So she can go and create this wild movie, and yeah, good for her.
She can go and create this wild movie.
And then she says, well, other women should also be these amazing, creative, wonderful forces of artistic and legal and literary excellence.
And it's like, yeah, but they can't.
So you're taking away from them, in a sense.
You're taking away babies, which is their greatest chance for creativity, for joy.
They can't make movies, but they can make babies.
Now, she can make movies, therefore making babies is probably less of a priority for her.
But other women, they can't make movies.
And so you're taking away their babies, and they don't get the movies.
That's the frustrating thing about all of this.
And that's the sort of cold-hearted thing about all of this.
It's really terrible.
And it's incredibly seductive, because it appeals to people's vanity, right?
It appeals to people's vanity.
You, too, can argue legal briefs in front of the Supreme Court.
It's like, no, you can't. I mean, almost certainly you can't.
I couldn't. It's almost certainly that you can't.
Because you won't have that level of drive.
You won't have that level of intelligence.
You won't have that level of OCD obsessiveness.
You won't be that much of a workaholic.
You won't have that much, perhaps, raw brilliance.
I mean, any number of things.
So it's kind of a devilish.
It's a really devilish bargain.
I mean, it's the same devilish bargain that, you know, six foot three...
Guys with huge jaws and great hair just go and talk to other guys and say, well, you just got to be confident.
You know, it's just mistaking your own abilities for a universal absolute.
So, of course, from the girls smashing their babies, and if that doesn't disturb you, I don't even know what to say.
Like, the girls smashing their babies...
Spoilers here, of course. I'm not going to go in a linear fashion because I'm following themes, not plot.
So later we see a pregnant Barbie, but it turns out she's been discontinued.
So this, again, is selling to women the delusion of massive achievement at the expense of their children.
And what will happen to almost all of these women is they will end up With no children, like the women who follow this, the girls who follow this, they will end up with no children and without massive achievement.
And even some of the women who have this massive achievement end up bitterly regretting it.
That's a famous story of this mystery writer who wrote these whodunit stories and received every award known to man and was childless and would sit in her room sobbing, looking at her awards.
They mean nothing because she's alone, right?
So, yeah, the fact that pregnant Barbie is discontinued, the fact that girls are smashing their babies, is really tempting.
It's really devilishly and seductively tempting.
Like the temptation of sexual variety for men.
So yeah, that's a really important theme.
The story as a whole is childhood to adulthood.
And that's a sweeter part of the movie as a whole.
So when Barbie starts, she only enjoys hanging out with girls.
She's completely indifferent to boys.
She has empty, shallow, dumb...
Parties and pretends to eat and lives in this fantasy world of childhood.
There's nothing wrong with the fantasy world of childhood.
That's where she's at.
And then when she goes through the arc of the story, and she ends up growing up, and she ends up...
I mean, the sort of last line of the movie, which is quite funny, is the sort of jokes are made throughout the movie that Ken and Barbie don't have genitalia, and then...
At the end of the movie, she has an appointment with a gynecologist, so she clearly has come into the real world and develops a vagina or develops a sexual identity in someone.
And so this sort of childhood to adulthood arc, because, you know, when girls are little, they hang out with other girls, and they have a lot of fantasy play, which is great and wonderful, and they're indifferent to boys, or maybe even vaguely negative to boys, and the boys' interest in them is, like, incomprehensible in a way, and so on.
And so there is this childhood...
To the arc of adulthood, from a non-sexual creature to a sexual creature, which is the adulthood side of things.
And in the Barbie world, of course, that she lives in at the very beginning, it's unreal.
She pretends to shower, she pretends to eat, and then at one point she's at a dance, and I sort of think of those girl sleepovers where they're sort of singing in their hairdressers and talking about, I don't know, poison makeup or whatever.
And she then says, do you ever think about death?
And of course there's that really overused cliche of the music scratch.
Music scratch and everyone's shocked.
And everyone's shocked and appalled, right?
But of course that's part of growing up, right?
A childhood, you never really think about death as a child, unless you witness it or whatever, right?
Directly. You don't really think about your own death that much as a child.
When puberty comes along, of course you start to think about death, because the only reason for puberty is to make new people, and the only reason you need new people is the existing ones are going to die, right?
It's part of the sort of cycle of life.
As I sort of mentioned before, it shows when my daughter It got better than me at things.
It was a bit bone-chilling, right?
It was great. I'm sort of happy and enthusiastic for it, but it's also a bit bone-chilling because she has replaced me and I was here to replace my parents.
So yeah, when you hit puberty, you start to think about death because that's sort of part of The whole thing.
And then, of course, when she starts to think about death, she starts to get signs of aging.
Things no longer work in her fantasy world.
And this is part of growing up, too, right?
So when you're a kid, just things come to you on a conveyor belt, right?
You don't really think about where the food comes from.
You don't think about where the house or the shelter or any of that comes from.
Just stuff comes to you on a conveyor belt, like magic.
And, of course, everything that happens in Barbie's world is magical.
I mean, literally, magical.
I mean, they make this sort of very clear.
She showers with no water and she only pretends to drink.
She doesn't actually drink. So just stuff comes to her without her thinking about it.
And then as she starts to think about death and she's going through puberty, then what happens is she starts to Wonder where things actually come from.
Things don't work. She starts to get a sense of this cause and effect.
And so, yeah, in the Barbie world, there's no kids, right?
And the girls have these sort of wild...
Ambitions, right? So her fellow Barbies, right?
She's called a conventional Barbie.
No, stereotypical Barbie.
She's a stereotypical Barbie.
And then there's a Barbie who, I think, is a lawyer and argues cases at the Supreme Court or something.
And there's a girl who's an astronaut.
There's a girl who's a famous writer who wins a Pulitzer Prize or something like that.
And again, that's demonic temptation.
It's absolutely demonic temptation.
It's...
because almost nobody is going to achieve that.
It's kind of a funny thing, right?
Because, I mean, with regards to the sort of Barbies, it's an unrealistic body image.
Unrealistic body image, tall and skinny.
First of all, it takes an enormous amount of narcissism to think that Barbie's body image, or the body image of Barbie, or the image that Barbie projects, ideal body, but that's wildly unrealistic.
But Ken, nobody ever sits there and says, well, what about the body image for Ken?
They say, ah, well, but, you see, boys don't play with Ken in general, right?
It's like, yeah, but... But it's arguably, and I think a very strong argument can be made, that the body image of Ken is more important for girls than the body image of Barbie.
Because that's what they look at, right?
They play with Ken a lot, and that's what they look at men, and that's what I expect men to look like.
Like tall, impossibly slender, and Ken has very thick blonde hair, and blonde hair is usually thinner, and I think blonde men are more...
Susceptible to balding.
So yeah, he's got this giant square jaw and possibly slender and not an ounce of fat and a perfect butt.
And that, of course, is conditioning what the girls are looking for in men.
But nobody ever really talks about that, of course.
That's pretty wild.
So I just sort of wanted to mention that.
And here's the thing, too.
How many females can remain slender versus how many females can win a Pulitzer Prize for their writing?
So this is the funny thing, right?
Is that you take a perfectly potential body situation, right?
The tall, okay, that's obviously more rare.
The naturally slender, a little bit more rare.
But women... Can be slender.
I've seen them. Women can be slender.
And so Barbie's body image is, you know, be slender before you have kids, right?
Be slender. And it's achievable for almost all women, right?
Almost all women can be slender.
But only one in...
30 million women can get a Pulitzer Prize or one in, I don't know what, I guess it's only one a year?
I don't know how many there are, probably in different categories.
But it's like saying that it's unrealistic, it's wildly unrealistic to have a body image called Stace Lender, but it's totally realistic to have a body image, say, called, or to have a career image called, be an astronaut, be a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, be a A lawyer who argues briefs the Supreme Court or cases in the Supreme Court.
I mean, come on. All women can stay slender.
But not one in tens of millions of women can be an astronaut or argue in front of the Supreme Court or get Pulitzer Prizes.
So it's wild to me.
They say, well, it's unrealistic body image.
It's like, no. Perfectly realistic body image if what you get out of it has just stayed relatively slender, at least before having kids.
Perfectly realistic. But nobody ever talks about the wildly unrealistic career expectations that are projected onto these barbers, right?
And it's a funny thing, too.
I kind of understand where people are coming from with regards to this.
And it's a really big divide.
It's a really big and interesting divide.
And it's just a wild lack of compassion between those who have children and those who don't have children.
It's pretty wild.
So, the co-writer and director, she had a kid in 2019, and she just had another kid in February of the year of Elord 2023.
She has been diagnosed with ADHD, which I guess shows up definitely in The movie, and she's 39, so she obviously had kids pretty late, and I guess good for her that she had it.
I don't know how having a child goes with making this movie and promoting this movie and so on.
There, of course, usually no particular answer about these kinds of things, but it is pretty wild to see how that goes, right?
So she started writing the book with her partner during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 to 2021 and you know she's got a kid at home and I guess that that can work in all of that but then I guess they worked on making the movie and that's pretty wild that you have a new kid and you're writing and making this I don't know 50 or whatever it is million dollar movie I kind of think that's going to come at some expense of the kids, the first kid and second kid and so on.
But if you don't have kids, and of course for most of her life this woman didn't have kids.
I guess she had her first kid when she was 36 or 37.
And so if you don't have kids...
And you don't devote yourself to your children, which is really what parents are supposed to do, is you put aside your ego, because your ego's going to go anyway, right?
Your ego's going to die with you, but in a sense your life force or your...
Your culture or your philosophy will live forever in your children, unless they pass it down to their own children as well.
Devoting yourself to your children is an act of ego humility, whereas grabbing every resource for yourself is an act of ego domination.
So, if she is, obviously, I assume she's a workaholic, makes this movie, and she's been in a bunch of stuff before, so, you know, she's a workaholic, and she didn't have children until her mid-to-late 30s.
It's fine. I'm just pointing that out, right?
So, if you don't have children, or, and or, you know, if you don't have children, or you don't devote yourself to your children, then...
It's kind of incomprehensible why women don't achieve as much economic or professional success as men.
The stuff in the 80s is sort of very common.
You can have it all. You can be a lawyer and a great mom and bake cookies for your school and do charity work.
And it's like, no, you can't.
This is the basic thing, isn't it?
No, you can't. I mean, it's just a contradiction.
It's only a certain number of hours of the day.
And you just can't do these.
When you're at work, you're not being a mother.
When you're being a mother, you're not at work.
I mean, this basic thing.
It's literally like saying to a man, you can be monogamous and have all of the affairs that you want.
It's like, no, these things are kind of contradictions.
So if you are a workaholic and you don't have kids and you're going to probably, as a woman, you're going to achieve a fair, assuming intelligence and all that, you're going to achieve a lot of success.
Good for you. Fantastic, right?
But then you'll look around and say, gee, you know, why is it women are doing so badly?
I mean, it's crazy, right? And it's like, well, Probably because they either don't have the right intelligence or talent, they don't have the workaholism, and so on.
But also because they're having and raising children.
I think the people in the art world and so on, they don't hang around much with Women who are raising three, four, five, six kids, they just don't hang around with those people.
They don't understand their lives.
They don't know what they're doing. But of course, if you have three, four, five, six kids or whatever, then by definition, you're spending all your time raising your kids.
Particularly, of course, also some of the families that I know, three, four, five, six plus kids and homeschooling.
So if you're raising half a dozen kids and you're homeschooling, then guess what?
You're not making 100 million dollar movies.
Just basic fact, right?
Just basic fact. Can't do much about that.
That's just a basic fact of life, a fact of reality.
But if you don't know these women, then you don't understand it.
And of course, I'm sure that what you would say is that, well, you know, you're sacrificing yourself to your children.
What are you creating? It's like, well, I don't know.
The basic thing is...
Is creating life better than making money?
Well, I've made life, I've made some money, and making life is better.
When you're younger, making money seems better, and when you're older, making life is better.
That's just sort of the way of things.
Yeah, so if you don't have kids, you don't want to have kids, you don't want to take care of your kids directly, you want to farm them out to daycares and nannies or whatever, right?
So if you don't want to raise children, right?
And you can give birth to kids and you can go to work and you can have them in daycare and you can spend an hour or two with them a night, but it's not raising children, right?
It's just visiting children from your cubicle.
So if you don't want to raise children...
Then your life is just wildly different.
Like your life perspective is just wildly different.
Why can't men and women be equal in their income?
Because they exist.
And they exist because their mothers raised them.
And because their mothers raised them, their mothers could make less money.
And if they want to have and raise children, having kids is one thing, raising kids is another.
If they want to raise kids, guess what?
They are going to be making less money.
Or rather, they're going to be making...
Actually, they'll make more money, but the money will come in through the husband, right?
Through the husband working harder and so on, because he's providing for a family.
Alright, so, in the Barbie world, everything's plastic and nothing needs to be maintained.
Like, there's a fantasy ecosystem of infrastructure, right?
It's a pretend shower, like Barbie's shower, it's a pretend, it doesn't have real water.
It's a pretend toaster, it's a pretend coffee maker or whatever, right?
So, it's the tea party stuff, like you pour a tea party.
In a tea party, you pour the tea, there's no tea, right?
In the Barbie world, everyone can be a construction worker because nobody needs to actually make anything.
It's not dirty, everything's made of plastic, it's durable, even the ocean is made of plastic and so on, right?
So when Barbie goes to the real world, all the construction workers are men.
You see, the movie undermines itself despite itself, which is really interesting, right?
So only in the fantasy world are construction workers women.
So half of men work infrastructure jobs, like plumbing, electrical, sewage, roads, building.
Half of men work construction jobs.
The number of women who work construction jobs, like on-site, 3.9%.
Of the trades as a whole, only 3% are women.
And it would be interesting to know, of those 3%, how many were just sort of raised to do it with their dad or something like that.
But yeah, I mean, it's ridiculous, right?
So half of all male jobs are in the infrastructure, and almost no women work in infrastructure.
And that partly is, of course, infrastructure.
You tend to work with things, and women as a whole prefer to work with people, which is fine.
It's great, actually. It's how we've evolved.
And it's also a physical strength.
I had a friend of mine's wife build my studio, the white room, and she worked very hard to build the studio.
And she then ended up not being able to move her arms for like a month because it just was very hard on her tendons and all of that to do all of that building.
So yeah, it's still just some limits, some limits.
So, the Ken's very interesting, too.
It's funny. All the Barbies are called Barbie, and all the Ken's are called Ken, which is funny, right?
They're unindividuated. And this is, of course, Barbie is stunningly pretty.
Like this idea that Margot Robbie, well, she was hired because she's not too attractive to threaten women.
No, come on. Guys, get sane.
Get sane. Margot Robbie is absolutely stunning.
Like almost beyond words, right?
She's like this platonic perfection carved face of vigor.
She is. And what an actress, too.
Like the quality of acting. Ryan Gosling is a great actor.
I didn't really get him as an actor because he was so bland and dull.
For the most part, but he really lets loose and have some fun in this movie.
So, Ryan Gosling is a great actor and Margot Robbie is a really, really good actress.
Of course, physically stunning and all of that.
And so, yeah, it's kind of funny.
But if you're that beautiful, then a lot of men look the same to you because the men are all just trying to conform to what you want, right?
So the fact that she's that beautiful And all of the men are the same.
They're all called Ken. Is funny, right?
And it's the experience of a beautiful woman that men kind of look the same.
They all seem kind of pathetic and desperate and needy and simpy and all of that.
And there is that, of course, aspect going on.
So the Kens are oppressed at the beginning, right?
They have no role in society.
I guess they cheerlead.
They're empty-headed sort of cheerleaders.
And there's this job.
It's actually a pretty funny speech in a subtle way.
Ken says, my job is beach.
It's just my job is beach and people don't understand.
It's a good job. It's a tough job.
Beach. Lifeguard?
No, no, no. Beach. And it's funny, right?
But so the Kens have no role.
They're completely useless.
They're completely useless. And that's really interesting.
So for girls, like for little girls, what is the role of the males?
Well, the little girls don't understand the infrastructure stuff.
How could they? And the boys are just kind of loud and obnoxious a little bit and probably a bit too aggressive or overbearing and kind of incomprehensible and they're just kind of intrusions, right?
And so the fact that in this sort of little girl world of Barbie, the Kens are in the background and they're just there to cheerlead and they don't really have any identity and they don't have any purpose and they don't have any jobs or goals or anything like that.
Well, they're an underclass.
And when the girls have a party, the boys are not invited.
In fact, she kicks Ken out.
Ken wants to stay, and he's just kicked out.
So, yeah, the Kens are oppressed.
And then, I mean, it's a very interesting sequence, right?
And again, it's quite deep in a way, right?
So Ken, from being the Kens, right?
But we're just talking about Ken, like the Ryan Gosling guy.
Ken goes into the real world with Barbie and ends up learning about the patriarchy.
And so then he thinks that men just run things and men just rule because there's a patriarchy.
And then he tries to get a job in the real world saying, well, I'm basically a white male.
Just give me a job. And of course, everyone is saying, well, no, you can't You can't be a lawyer because you're not qualified.
You can't be a doctor because you're not qualified.
You can't be a lifeguard because you're not qualified.
So that's really interesting.
That's really interesting. So in the Barbie world, everyone has these fake, imaginary, weird achievements that don't exist, right?
You never actually see any of this stuff happening.
And that's exactly what it'd be.
You get lawyer Barbie, and she's like, oh, am I going in front of the Supreme Court?
Yay! But there's nothing real.
It's like you're writing actual legal briefs or anything, just making things up.
And so the patriarchy, in terms of the matriarchy, is just fantasy made up stuff.
The matriarchy in the Barbie world is just fantasy made up achievements.
But in the patriarchy, in the real world, you actually have to be good at stuff.
You actually have to be qualified.
You actually have to be trained. You actually have to learn and show competence and excellence and skill.
So in this movie, I'm not taking anything except what's in the movie.
I'm not layering anything on my own.
This is directly in the movie.
But the matriarchy It's empty-headed.
You know, I was thinking of the dance shows, and you see, of course, these nurses during COVID doing all of these dances, and now they're doing it for climate change and so on.
So you just see this sort of dancing half-child stuff that goes on, even amongst sort of female professionals in some circumstances.
And there were some men in there, too. So, in the movie, The matriarchy is made-up achievements that don't mean anything and don't work and don't need to work, like the water doesn't need to come out of the shower.
So, yeah, when you don't need the water to come out of the shower, women can be construction workers.
I'm not layering things.
I'm trying to be neutral here and talk about what the movie says.
But in the real world, patriarchal world, what's called the patriarchal world, well, that is a meritocracy.
So in the female world, Everything's made up, nothing needs to work, and you can be whatever you want without having to do anything.
There's no schools there, there's no libraries, nobody gets trained, there's no...
Right? So you can just make yourself...
You can make it up, right? I'm Pulitzer Prize winning writer Barbie!
Okay! Right?
But in the real world, in what's called the patriarchy, there's actually meritocracy.
You actually have to build things that work.
You actually have to show competence and skill.
So, matriarchy...
Made-up achievements that never have to work.
But in the patriarchy, there's a real hierarchy of competence, and you damn well better know what you're doing.
Or nobody's gonna hire you.
So, it is actually a complete lie about the patriarchy, right?
Also, so Barbie then goes up to a girl in school and introduces herself as Barbie, and the girl gets really angry and says, you know, you're a fascist, you're a capitalist, apologist, and a booster of consumerism, and blah blah blah.
We haven't played with Barbie since we were five.
You know, really kind of vicious, right?
Now, that's really interesting, too, because this girl...
Is the daughter of a single mother.
Now, there's a dad floating around there somewhere.
He's, you know, the usual idiot white guy who doesn't even know Spanish, man.
And so she grew up with a single mom.
Her single mom is bitter and negative and doesn't like, enjoy and embrace being a woman at all.
And she has the speech, which we'll get to in a second, about how hard it is to be a woman.
And so this girl has some severe emotional problems.
Her mother is bitter and absent and a working girl and all of that.
And so she takes all of her emotional personal problems out on Barbie.
On Barbie. And the fact that she's got these emotional problems and she just lashes out at somebody, you know, I guess taller and prettier and nicer.
She's nicer, right? So she takes somebody who's better than her.
The little girl takes... Oh, she's not little.
She's 13 or 14 or whatever.
She takes her emotional problems out on somebody who's nicer and better than she is and calls that person a fascist.
That's really interesting because that's kind of anti-cancel culture, right?
Because she has no reason to call me.
Barbie obviously isn't a fascist, but she calls this person a fascist because she's angry and bitter at the world because of her own emotional problems, and Barbie is nice and positive.
And so this idea that you just use these terms to lash out at innocent people who are probably better than you because of your own emotional problems, really, really interesting.
Very, very subversive regarding cancel culture.
And also she says that, you know, Barbie is...
The writer criticizes Barbie's rampant consumerism, and of course the Barbie movie has been relentlessly promoted by marketers in just about every conceivable way that you could imagine, right?
Krispy Kreme donuts, ruggable rubs, OPI nail polish and GAT t-shirts and toothbrushes and luggage and pool floats and ice cream and frozen yogurt and makeup and cars and blankets and hairbrushes and heels.
Her greenhouse is on Airbnb.
Every publicist pushing sunglasses or sex toys has retooled their strategy around Barbiecore for the summer.
I've never won so much pink in my life.
This is from someone who wrote on the internet.
So, yeah, I mean, oh, it's rampant consumerism and capitalism, and it's like, but the movie has been pushed in that way.
So it's just one of these kind of boring things that's kind of predictable, right, that the movie criticizes exactly what the movie makers do in order to succeed, right?
So yeah, the dory lashes out at Barbie, not her real problems, right?
The teenager is named Sasha, the woman who plays her as Ariana Greenblatt.
And yeah, sexualized capitalism.
She's a tool of sexualized capitalism and set the feminist movement back years.
And, of course, the fact that Margot Robbie shows off her figure throughout the entire movie.
I mean, and Margot Robbie has, she's 33 or whatever, a fantastic figure, and sort of, again, these guys scrape her legs and so on.
Radiant smile, and again, a great actress.
She's really, I mean, it's important not to under, she's, of course, she's a pretty face and a great figure, but what an actress, just really, really...
Amazing at what she does, because, you know, to have you feel for a doll is really something, and it shouldn't be, it's not easy, and it's often overlooked.
So, the idea that, you know, Barbie represents sexualized capitalism, and sexualized capitalism is a bad thing, but, you know, the viral sort of marketing videos for Barbie are all, like, Rock-abbed Ken looking sexy and Barbie rollerblading in spandex shorts, right? So sexualized capitalism is bad, but of course that's the whole movie.
That's the whole marketing strategy of the movie.
And it's interesting to me, I guess Mattel allowed them to sort of poke fun at Mattel, and Will Ferrell plays the head of Mattel, and all of the guys in charge of Mattel, they're all men, right?
It's patriarchy, right? But the founder, so Ruth Handler, was the woman who first made Barbie, and in fact, her kids are Kenneth and Barbara, right?
So Kenneth and Barbie. And sort of long story short, she noticed that her daughter was playing with cut-outs of adult girls rather than just her dolls, so she ended up designing and making this doll Barbie, and It was a huge sensation right away, because, you know, there was a whole bunch of priming for it, which is be a career girl, don't be a mother kind of thing.
And she ended up, in the 1970s, she ended up pleading guilty to some fairly significant financial fraud and received one of the largest, at least community service punishments that had ever been handed down.
It was like 5,000 hours.
It was just crazy, right?
And she said, well, I had breast cancer, so I lost track of the company and so on.
So it's interesting that men run Mattel, but the actual woman who founded it and was, I guess, one of the directors or maybe very high up, of course, in the company, maybe at the top, she had to leave.
I guess she was forced out or left voluntarily because there was some fairly significant financial fraud going on.
So... You know, that's not really...
That's mentioned a little bit.
So, Rhea Perlman plays this founder, Ruth Handler, and talks about her problems with taxes and all of that.
All right, so...
What have we got here?
We've got President Barbie, right?
So, girls, you should not have children because you can be president, right?
It's like that line from the old song.
What is it? There's a young man at the gas station wearing a rock and roll t-shirt.
He's got greasy hair, greasy smile.
He says, Lord, this must be my destination.
When I was younger, they said, boy, you're going to be president.
But just like everything else, those old crazy dreams just kind of came and went, right?
And so, yeah, don't have kids because you'll be president, right?
Don't have kids because you'll be a famous and celebrated writer.
Don't have kids because you'll be a famous and celebrated lawyer.
Or a mermaid. Dua Lipa shows up as a mermaid.
That's just John Cena shows up as a merman.
And so, yeah.
What are the odds, right?
What are the odds? Of course, president, only one.
Doctors are 0.6% of workers.
A writer who wins a big prize, just a handful.
Lawyers arguing the very highest level, very few.
So yeah, just he's insanely unrealistic.
Career expectations.
Here's the thing too, of course.
It's kind of funny, right?
As a man, right? As a man.
And I know that the writer, the director, she wrote this with a partner.
It doesn't seem like he put much input in from the man's side.
But from the man's side, watching women complain about Barbie's unrealistic body expectations while drooling over Ryan Gosling's physique is absolutely hilarious.
I mean, it's such a lack of self-knowledge and solipsistic, narcissistic self-pity that it just is almost, almost true, like it almost knocks you over with the gale force of its own hypocrisy, right?
I mean, Ryan Gosling has one of the most perfect male physiques since Michelangelo's David.
I mean, there's a movie I saw where he just looks incredible.
It's just perfect physique.
And the woman says, my God, it's like you're photoshopped.
And it's like, yeah, he's got an absolutely gorgeous physique.
So women complaining about unrealistic body standards while drooling over Ryan Gosling as Ken is absolutely hilarious.
It's literally as boring and one-dimensional as women complaining that men have unrealistic expectations of slenderness while 80% of women want a guy at 6'2", 6'3", or above.
At least women can do something about their weight.
Men really can't do anything about their height.
So, I just think that is hilarious.
And there are no fat Kens.
So, yeah, it's just, it's pretty wild, right?
So, and it's interesting, too, because when Barbie throws a party, boys are excluded.
But when Ken later throws a party, the girls are welcome.
So, men are more inclusive than girls, right?
That's pretty, it's pretty wild, right?
And, oh gosh, this is another thing, too.
So, The actress, America Ferrara, I think her name is, who plays the single mom, she has this speech, and it's kind of a...
It's a well-known speech. At this point, a lot of people haven't talked about it.
It's like the recent speech from the Gone Girl show.
And I'll read the speech.
It's very interesting. I know she acts.
She's a very good actress.
Very passionate. I think she was a pretty baddie.
Not a show I ever really watched or got into, but she has this Speech about, gosh, just female contradictions, right?
So she says, you have to be thin, but not too thin.
And you could never say you want to be thin.
You have to say you want to be healthy, but you also have to be thin.
You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crust.
You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean.
You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas.
You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time.
You have to be a career woman, but also always looking out for other people.
You have to answer for men's bad behavior, which is insane.
But if you point that out, you're accused of complaining.
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 part of the sisterhood.
But always stand out and always be grateful.
But never forget that the system is rigged.
So find a way to acknowledge that.
But also, always be grateful.
You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line.
It's too hard. It's too contradictory.
Nobody gives you a medal or says thank you.
And it turns out, in fact, that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.
Sorry, I don't mean to laugh.
I don't mean to laugh because it's not like this is not true and women don't face contradictions.
I mean, honestly, I mean, pushing 57 years old, I can't even tell you the number of times I've heard that women have it so hard.
Women have to live with contradiction speech.
I can't. I can't.
I can't even with these people.
Because, you know, the idea that Women have it so hard, you can't complain.
Literally, the whole movie is complaining about the challenge of a burned face.
But you see, it's impossible for women.
There's no place for them to complain.
There's no place for them to complain.
You just can't complain. I totally love, but it's just, again, it's just such an unbelievable lack of self-awareness.
Or maybe it's just clever marketing.
I don't know. But it's just wild at every conceivable level to hear in a movie that spends well over two hours complaining about what it is to be a woman to say that you can't ever complain.
I mean, it's wild. And the other thing, too, is that have you ever heard a speech from a man about how challenging it is to be a man?
No! No, of course not.
See, all you hear is women complaining that they never get to complain.
And they never, ever ask men, what's hard about being a man?
I mean, just, you know, I think it's worth asking, isn't it?
A reasonable question to ask.
Hey, you know, are there any things that you find tough about being a man?
I had a curiosity.
Anything? Any contradictions?
You know, men do kill themselves a lot more than women, and men get a lot more workplace injuries, and men suffer from, you know, mental health issues too, and men have a tough time figuring out their place in society, and men leave men in marriages a lot more than men leave women, and so on, right?
So, you know, are there no tough things about being a man?
No, right? Because the movie is training women to have no empathy for men, which again is just brutal and horrible and robbed women of love, which is Love is their only happiness in many ways, as the song goes.
It's taking away love.
And you're taking away love, and what are you giving in return?
Fantasies about becoming present.
Please. Unrealistic body expectations are don't eat too much, but totally realistic career expectations as you will be a Supreme Court lawyer, astronaut, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer all at the same time.
I mean, come on. Oh, come on.
I mean, it's just wild.
Of course, if men were to ever be asked, I'm not going to sort of rip this one out of my chest yet, but it'd be interesting to see your comments below, right?
So, do men have it tough in the world?
Yeah, for sure, of course. Because women expect them to be...
Tough. But also sensitive.
To be strong and out there getting resources and kicking ass and winning things.
But also be emotionally available and be sensitive.
So be a warrior outside the whole home and a nanny inside.
I also want you to make a lot of money and be very fit.
You make a lot of money and be very fit.
Of course, the average man who makes a lot of money does so by spending a lot of time in an office, which is not exactly conducive to rock-hard Ryan Gosling-style ads.
So, yeah, have a lot of money, make a lot of money, but also have a lot of time for me.
But again, making money tends to require working very hard.
If you work very hard, you have less time for your family.
So make a lot of money, but also be super available to your family.
And it's like, no, that's not a thing.
I want you to be sensitive, but I'm going to turn Fifty Shades of Grey into the best-selling book in human history.
It's, yeah, of course, I want you to be assertive, but I don't want you to bully me.
You can have needs that I will choose whether I satisfy them or not, but when I have needs, you have to satisfy them.
I mean, come on, we could go on about this all day, but the idea that there's nothing complicated about being a man...
I mean, come on, it's...
Oh, I'm so exhausted by this double standard, and there's never any...
There's never any, even the remotest curiosity about any of the double standards that men have to live with, right?
Because women are also like, well, I want you to be the top tier, like mid-attractive women, right?
Mids. They say to men, I want you to be the top tier of attractiveness, but I want you to only devote yourself to me.
In other words, I want you...
To be so attractive that you have an almost infinite number of options, but I want you only to choose me because magic.
I want men to be beneficial to my life, but I don't want to work hard to be beneficial to a man's life.
But I still want him to choose me, even though he could choose anyone.
So yeah, it's pretty wild, right?
So basically what I want to say is this.
This is me, right? This is me.
Again, it's worth watching the movie, it's worth watching it, being alert and all that, but this is what I really want to say.
Look, we men and women, we evolved out of the bare necessities of survival.
If there was a better way for men and women to evolve, it would have been picked by evolution.
We faced Constant threats of starvation.
Predation. Terrible weather.
Lack of shelter. Illness.
Ugh. Death and childbirth.
War. Think thievery, right?
We face all of these incredible challenges and human beings often hung by a very splendid threat of the abyss of death.
And at one point, during the last Ice Age, humanity was down to like 10,000 people.
Like, we barely made it.
And the only way that we did make it was by men and women evolving to cooperate.
Men and women ruthlessly evolved to cooperate together for the having and raising and education of children.
There was no better way to do it.
There was no faster way to do it.
There was no more efficient way to do it.
We evolved. To be helpers to each other, each with our different strengths, each with our different weaknesses, to fit together, and perfectly physically, as a key goes into a line, and emotionally too, spiritually.
Men and women are evolved to love, to treasure, and to help each other in the challenging, death-defying, and sometimes murderous task Now, when those pressures are released, and we have, of course, over the last 100, 200 years, we have released many of those pressures.
We have enough food, we have shelter, healthcare, everything else, you name it.
So we've released those pressures.
Now, the differences between men and women were forged in this incredibly violent and harsh furnace of survival.
Over hundreds of thousands or millions of years, depending on how far back you want to go.
And we were perfect for each other.
And we know that because we ended up as the apex predators in charge of the planet.
We were perfect for each other. We evolved to be perfectly compatible, perfectly conciliatory, perfectly helpful towards each other.
That's how we won. Now, once we win, we get these weird egalitarian impulses that everyone has to be the same.
And it's like, no, no. If it was more efficient for men and women to be the same, then that's what would have happened.
We get four billion years of evolution.
If we could have survived by men and women being the same, we would have.
And certainly if we could have survived better.
If we could have survived better, with men and women being the same, we would have done that.
Or, to put it another way, the evolutionary crushes would have ended up with the men and women being the same tribe, dominating everyone else.
We divided our labors.
We divided our specialties.
We divided our strengths and weaknesses.
Why? Patriarchy?
No. That's ridiculous.
And for people who are usually atheists, to deny evolution in this kind of way is truly jaw-dropping and staggering.
Why are men and women different?
So we didn't die.
So we survived. There was no other choice.
No other option. No other possibility.
Because again, over four billion years, if nature had figured out a way to survive better by making men and women the same, it would have.
And of course, when you sort of think about single-celled organisms and so on, but there's really no male and female, and you've got mitosis and meiosis and all this kind of crap, men and women, males and females, reproduction, we did start out the same as generic blobs.
And then we ended up different.
Compatible, perfectly compatible, helpful, helpmates.
We ended up different because the alternative was not existing at all.
Men and women are different, so we didn't die.
Men and women are different because of nature, not because of patriarchy, not because of sexism.
We evolved to be different because of harshness.
Now, we don't have that harshness, and that difference is like, whoa, that's like weird.
Why are we so different? We shouldn't be different.
We should just be like psychotic blobs of oneness.
Okay, so you withdraw the pressure, the evolutionary pressure, the harsh necessities of nature and survival.
Okay, then you can start dabbling and say, well, these differences are not really necessary, right?
Fine, I mean, I guess you can make, but you can do that, you can Start off that nonsense.
But it's like, you know what it's like?
It's like somebody who grows up bitterly poor and has to like literally watch every penny.
Like literally watch every penny.
I can't have a coffee out.
I have no money. Just got very survival, right?
And then that person at the age of 25 or whatever, that person inherits 10 million dollars.
And then they say, well, saving is stupid.
Why would you ever save?
It's like, what are you talking about?
I mean, you saved because the alternative would be to be homeless or starved to death or whatever, right?
Sort of throughout our evolutionary history.
So, yeah, we've now inherited all of this wealth.
And now we can start to dabble and say, well, things are unfair and there's difference.
But that's all nonsense.
I mean, we can talk about these things, for sure.
And, you know, could things be tweaked in society?
Absolutely. Always, for sure.
Should we evaluate our view of the genders and the sex?
Absolutely fantastic. Wonderful.
Let's have those conversations. But let's not pretend that men are different from women, and women are different from men because of some satanic plot by men to rule.
Come on! Well, of course, and the other thing, too, is that men are as women chose them to be.
I mean, there are times in history when multiple women reproduced for every single man.
Multiple women reproduced for every single man.
Sometimes it's four to one, sometimes it's six to one, sometimes it's even less.
So, that means that women were choosing the men.
Women were choosing the men.
And so why do men have the characteristics that men have?
Because women chose them to have those characteristics.
With regards to reproduction for significant chunks of human history, yeah, total matriarchy.
Total gynocentric matriarchy.
So men, like our nature, our characteristics, our strength, our brains, our hormones, our minds, everything, we are simply the shadow cast by the choices of women throughout our evolutionary history.
I mean, talk about blaming the victim.
More men wanted to reproduce than did reproduce, and the bottleneck was women's choices.
So we are, as women, chose us to be.
We had less free will in mating than women did throughout almost all of human history.
And this is why monogamy was such a step forward in many ways.
It created the middle class and the stability that we enjoy in the modern world, to some degree.
So the idea that men are just these bullies and bosses who are in charge, I don't know if that's some weird Fifty Shades of Grey sexual fantasy to be dominated by a man.
But it's just wildly not true.
Women dominated. Reproductive choice throughout almost all of human history.
And women chose men to be exactly who we are.
We are the shadow cast by the reproductive choices of women for hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
Not millions when you talk about males and females as a whole.
Like those birds that do those crazy dances to attract the female birds.
Why do they do those dances? Why?
Because that's what the females want.
Why are men? Why are we who we are?
Why do we have the natures that we have?
Why do we have the size and strength that we have?
Why do we have the hormones and aggression and testosterone?
Why do we have these things? Why?
It didn't start off that way. We have these things because women wanted them.
Women prefer them. Women were turned on by them.
Women pursue or accept the pursuit of men with these characteristics.
It's not to blame women.
Women were trying to survive, too.
It's not a blame situation.
Everything to do with evolutionary pressures is a survival situation, not a blame situation.
It's like blaming someone for eating a forbidden food by their religion or custom.
Eating a forbidden food when they are stuck in the wilderness because of a plane crash, right?
Blame for survival, right?
The cannibalism that happened when the The Peruvian soccer team crashed in the Andes or something like that.
Alive was the book I read as a kid.
They ate other human beings because that was the only way to survive.
We don't blame them. Survival, right?
So I'm all about survival. And it's just, it's really, oh, I can't tell you.
It breaks my heart.
It really, really breaks my heart.
But there's this really devilish sowing the seeds of resentment.
It's so hard to be a woman.
Well, first of all, it's infinitely easier to be a woman now than at any other point in history, and that's to some degree to do with the male infrastructure that's been built and maintained almost exclusively by then.
There's no thanks for that. Women never get any thanks or appreciation.
Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?
Where's the thanks and appreciation for men for...
Building the...plumbing the electrical grid, the roads, hospitals, developing most of the medicines.
Well, women were excluded from those things.
It's like, no. It was survival, and women had to be making babies, and women don't have the physical strength or stamina, for the most part, to do this kind of work.
I think it's no one's fault.
The idea that we would blame people for evolution is just...
Evolution produces different characteristics.
To make that a moral thing?
It's literally, I mean, it's dicking up and castigating the victims of a natural disaster for not being careful enough.
Crazy! And the amount of blame, hatred, fear, suspicion, self-pity, victimhood, alienation, hostility, It's wild.
And, of course, the other thing that's interesting, too, is that a lot of what the woman complains about in that speech about how hard it is to be a woman, what that woman complains about is coming from where?
Is it coming from men?
Ah, nope. Nope.
Is it coming from men's personal preferences or imposed bullying?
Nope. So you have to be thin, but not too thin.
Sure. Well, that's coming from evolution, really.
Because slenderness...
I mean, the exception is generally considered attractive when food was scarce.
Slightly overweight women or overweight women was considered the most attractive, now food is plentiful.
We're looking for self-control, we're looking for intelligence, right?
And obesity is often inversely correlated to IQ, right?
So, yeah, looking for that. And you can never say you want to be thin.
Of course you can. This happens all the time.
This is a saying among women.
You can never be too thin or too pretty.
Or once on the lips, forever on the hips.
Or nothing tastes as good as thin feels.
Yeah, of course you can. You have to say you want to be healthy, but you also have to be thin.
I don't understand this one.
You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass.
What does that mean? You have to have...
Oh, does that mean you have to have money, but you can't ask for money?
Does that mean, like, negotiating for raises or whatever?
Because that's cross. Men don't impose that.
You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean.
Oh, really? You ever tried being the boss of women?
You can be mean to your male employees, but it's very tough.
It's almost impossible to be mean to your female employees, so that's women's let.
You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas.
Oh, you can. Among men.
It happens all the time. You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time.
That's not imposed by men.
You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other women.
You have to answer for men's bad behavior, which is insane.
But if you point that out, you're accused of complaining.
What do you mean you have to answer for men's bad behavior?
What does that mean?
We don't even recognize women's bad behavior.
Women kill their children significantly, multiple times more than men do.
Women beat, attack, assault, their children verbally abuse their children far more than men do.
We don't even talk about that. So this is all sisterhood stuff, right?
This is all enforced by...
And nobody gives a medal or says thank you.
Wild. I never forget that the system is rigged.
We men, we rigged the system so that we'd die younger.
That we'd get the vast majority of workplace injuries and deaths.
That we'd kill ourselves more.
We just rigged all of this.
We rigged the system so that men who are responsible have to pay for women who are irresponsible and have children out of wedlock or without a provider.
We just rigged the system that way.
We just rigged the system so that We can't get dates, can't get married, can't settle down.
Yeah, we just rig the system.
That's just how good we are at oppression.
Oppression is that we just rig the system that robs us blind.
We rig the system so that fundamentally males pay the significant majority of taxes and women receive the significant majority of benefits.
Yeah, that's what we do. Yeah, we just set up this whole system so that we benefit.
Of course, oftentimes we don't, but we're just not very good at being oppressors.
There are two places in the movie where there is no male presence, really.
I mean, the first, of course, is the Barbie Land, which is insane, right?
I mean, if you saw a woman pretending to shower and pretending to drink, thinking she was showering and really drinking, she'd be psychotic and insane, right?
So, where there's no male presence, really, the women are all insane.
I mean, it's a psych ward, right?
The early part of Barbie is a psych ward.
I mean, let's be straight up, right?
It's a psych ward. Women believe they have all these achievements when they don't.
Women believe that they're eating when they're not.
They believe that they're showering when they're not.
They believe that they can jump from a second or third story window and float down to the ground.
I mean, it's a psych ward.
And Ken is like a therapist, too.
He's trying to break into the unreality of this psych ward.
So, yeah, women are insane.
Like, men go crazy without women, and women go crazy without men, because we've offloaded our sanity to each other.
So, men are there to remind women about reality, and women are there to remind men to care.
Facts and meaning. Survival and purpose.
These are offloaded. Women offload their reality processing to some degree to men, and then offload their emotional processing to women to some degree.
And so without each other we go crazy.
We do. We go absolutely crazy without each other.
And so where there's no males, the women are in a psych ward.
They're insane. And then when there are males with no female input, like on the Ken side, the men.
The men go crazy. Violent, aggressive, and so on, right?
And it's also wild, too, that why does Ken want Barbie?
He has no genitals and they can't have children.
Like, why would he want them?
So this is uncoupling lust and love and desire and sex and bonding and all of that from actual having children, which means sex is recreational, which means sex is largely selfish, right?
So, that reality is pretty profound, I think.
The other place where there's no male authority is in the mother-daughter family, like the single mom and her kid family, that are the sort of fellow travelers on Bobby's adventures, right?
And so, without a male, and again, I know there's this dude floating around, but he's not in any of the baby pictures or the youth pictures or anything like that, and he's just got no presence in the movie.
He's about as relevant to that family as Ken is to Barbie in her insane asylum with the other delusion of Barbies.
So, in that family, there's no men by the door.
So it should be perfect, right?
Because, you know, no men.
Women are wonderful, girls are perfect.
Men are patriarchal corruptors and lustrous and destroyers and violent, right?
So, and this is why the movie is really interesting in the undermining of its own thesis, right?
So in this family, where it's a mother-daughter, no males, what's going on?
Well, they're miserable and they hate each other.
And the daughter is a vicious verbal abuser who reduces the adult Barbie to tears by calling her a fascist.
And an exploiter and a tool of sexualized capitalism and mindless planet-destroying consumerism, right?
Like, that's verbal abuse.
At a truly savage level.
And really, it's applied against children, right?
Because Barbie is childlike, right?
Because she's got no real experience.
She's new to the world. So Barbie is childlike.
So what you're seeing is a woman who grew up, a girl who grew up without a father, who has no capacity to control her own vicious aggression.
And, you know, dads are pretty good at helping children manage their aggression.
Why? Because one of the things that men do In particular, manage their own aggression.
Turn it on, turn it off.
Be tough in the outside world and sensitive at home.
So we know how to manage your own aggression.
I mean, it's one of the sort of fundamental defining characteristics of manhood masculinity.
Manage your own aggression.
And so this little witch, I mean, just verbally tears into Barbie.
She just met her. Barbie's nice.
She's sweet. And she can see that she's hurting Barbie.
She just continues to pour in the acid into the wounds she's inflicting with her tongue.
So, how's that life without the patriarchy going there, ladies?
Vicious, unlikable, dark, sinister, malevolent.
That's life.
Without men. And the movie portrays that very clearly.
Blindingly. Clearly.
And where does Barbie end up?
Where does Barbie end up? So she's got this psych ward of deranged matriarchy.
So one of the reasons why women go crazy when they don't have men is that women constantly prop up and reinforce each other.
As females have turned more to validation from females than males, you get increased ugliness, increased obesity, increased ill health outcomes, increased mental illness, increased use of antidepressants, increased levels of anxiety, increased levels of misery.
Right, so... I mean, women, do I look fat?
No, gorgeous, queen, sleigh, blah, blah, you've been past me, pretty, so pretty, right?
They're just positively to reinforce each other against all sanity and reality.
Which means that you don't get the checks and balances that keep you sane.
Right? As opposed to the old meme where a guy goes to his friend and says, hey, am I fat?
And he's like, bro, I know five fat people and you're four of them.
Right? You know, women get together and Trade fake compliments men get together and trade fake insults.
And this is why in the movie, the male-dominated world, what she calls the patriarchy, is a relentless meritocracy where you have to prove your value.
Whereas in the gynocracy, in the mental asylum of women reinforcing women, women are just, for whatever reason, right?
So women sort of Positivity and enthusiasm is fine when you're trying to encourage little kids to learn how to walk and brush their teeth and, yay, good job, right?
You don't criticize any of that, so there's sort of boosterism.
Enthusiasm and positivity that women have is designed for babies and toddlers and little children.
It's not designed for actual adult females, right?
But it's kind of adapted to that, right?
So this mindless...
It's to some degree mindless with regards to adults.
Boosterism and enthusiasm and, you know...
Like, how many women say to other women, yeah, I'm afraid you've put on a few pounds, you might need to look into that, right?
Nope. Women won't say anything.
And this is one of the reasons why these obesity and diabetes...
It doesn't help, right? It's not positive.
Men are like, well, no, we have to deal with facts.
Mindless enthusiasm doesn't really work for us.
We actually have to... Win the war or spear the deer or raise the crops and return home with something.
If a guy throws a spear badly and misses, the other guys don't go, yay, good job, we'll give you the spear back.
Try again. Now, you want to do that with a kid learning how to walk or learning how to catch a ball.
Yay, good job, try again.
But men can't afford to do that because we actually have to produce real things in the real world, evolutionarily speaking.
So, yeah, the fact that these women are all like, yay, good job, boosterism, positivity, and so on, yeah, they end up in a psych ward.
It's a complete unreality.
And complete unreality.
It's just wild. And then, sorry, last thing I'll say, at the very end, There's a speech that goes back and forth, and the ending of the movie could be quite moving.
There's a little bit of cheesy stuff with the mother and the daughter and stuff like that.
The fact that there are no sons is kind of disturbing, but anyway, it's a mushfest.
It's a hallmark card of sentimental paper cuts.
Barbie gives a message to Ken that he shouldn't just try to be what she wants, but he should be himself.
Again, this is another one of the contradictions that men face, which is women say, be yourself and also cater to me.
Please me. Be yourself.
Please me. So we have to walk that simplified to some degree, right?
A lot of us. Which is, please the woman, but be yourself.
If you're too much yourself, you displease the woman.
If you try to please the woman too much, you don't have a spine and you're unattractive, right?
So, again, for a lot of men, this is kind of like a line that you have to walk.
And I don't have any problems with it.
Life is a glorious, beautiful, amazing, incredible gift.
And the fact that there's some tight ropes involved only makes it all the more better, rich, deeper, and more exciting.
But she does say to Ken, stop simping.
And Lord above, that is a message that men need to hear.
Because women will say, please me.
But if all you do is try to please them, you get friend-zoned and then you get abandoned for a guy who explicitly does not want to please women, but instead is more himself.
Can't live on sugar. And if you try to live on sugar, you'll drive yourself towards sometimes a deadly spice.
So, that is a great message.
You have to be yourself in life and see who wants to come along for the ride.
If you try to bend yourself to please others, you will end up pleasing neither themselves nor yourself.
And you will waste this precious aggregation of star stuff known as the glory of human life.
Be yourself, be enthusiastic about what you're doing and who you are, and see who wants to come along for the ride.
And see whose ride you want to go along with.
Don't bend yourself into origami nothingness to try to please someone.
You simply end up disappearing, and you're saying, the moment you try to please others excessively...
Pleasing others is fine. Excessively is an Aristotelian mean in this.
The moment you try to please others excessively, You are saying, who I am is unpleasing.
Who I am is unattractive.
I need to be someone else, something else, say something else, be someone else, not offended, not upset, not...
And if a woman demands affirmation, say, well, that's why God gave you girlfriends.
I'm here to bring you the truth.
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