If the gaze of a woman is a necessary condition to your day being good, it’s time to introspect, reevaluate, and become ‘Kenough’ on your own.
A full two weeks after Barbie’s July 21 release, I’m entering the saturated commentary space.
Conservatives have roundly panned the film (exhibit A, exhibit B, exhibit C), with notable exceptions — do yourself a favor and read Jack Butler’s esoteric, heterodox interpretation, “Conservatives Are Getting Barbie Wrong.”
Luther Abel, in “Don’t Be a Barbie Downer,” defended the film on the grounds that it is “an undisciplined, goofy film for women (primarily).” Be that as it may, I would like to present the case for why Barbie is an important movie for young men.
That’s right: young men.
Despite the deluge of social-media posts of pink- and frilly-clothed women of all ages convening to watch Gerwig’s latest — occasionally with their Kens half-heartedly in tow — Barbie is worth the price of admission for Kens sans Barbies. Indeed, it is these Kens for whom the movie is most worth paying to watch.
Spoiler alert! You’ve been warned; don’t complain in the comments.
Barbie begins by showing the prelapsarian state of Barbieland: a pink-hued paradise in which Citizens United is improperly decided, the Supreme Court and all positions of institutional authority are monopolized by women, and every day is a perfect one for Barbie.
Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling) is less ecstatic about his life.
In fact, the narrator says that Ken only feels happy — or something to this effect; I respect IP laws and was not recording in the theater — when Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) acknowledges his existence with a glance.
Yikes.
Over the course of the movie, Beach Ken deals with this unrequited courtly love in increasingly desperate, toxic, and misogynistic ways. Ultimately, Beach Ken establishes “Kendom”: a kind of Playboy-mansion-turned-nation-state, complete with women in French maid outfits and lingerie (or otherwise scantily clad) who are submissive and home-bound.
But despite what Andrew Tate might say to impressionable young men, the relationship between the two sexes is not an antagonistic one; it is a symbiotic, complementary union properly predicated on mutual respect, metaphysical and legal equality, and, perhaps most important, independent self-esteem.
Beach Ken eventually realizes the error of his ways. Still, he’s at a loss as what to do without the love of Stereotypical Barbie: He laments to her, “It’s ‘Barbie and Ken’. . . There is no Ken without Barbie” (paraphrasing).
Barbie’s response is sagacious, true, and one every young man should take to heart: “Maybe ‘it’s Barbie and it’s Ken’. . . Ken is you.” Beach Ken has his breakthrough, exclaiming “Ken is me!” That is, Stereotypical Barbie is not essential to Beach Ken; Ken is himself prior to and independent of Barbie, based on his own passions, pursuits, vocation, and virtues.
Beach Ken is “Kenough” in his own right, and so must each young man be. (So must every individual, but this post is directed at those young men at risk of falling into the Andrew Tate trap.)
Deriving one’s self-esteem from the cultivation of one’s virtue is intrinsically better than basing it on the affection of others; it is also instrumentally preferable, as self-esteeming, happy, hopeful people are the kind with whom others fall and stay in love.
No man is an island; admittedly, much of our self-worth is derived from the sympathy other’s feel toward us, as Adam Smith identified so perfectly in The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759. But if the gaze of a woman is a necessary condition to your day being good, it’s time to introspect, reevaluate, and become “Kenough” on your own.