Friend -
What The!? … I never wanted to live in a Barbie World. Until now.
💘I did not expect to love the Barbie movie. But I did. I do. And not just because Republicans hate it. I mean, it helps, and it did get me to buy a ticket, and I may never have been so grateful for the prodding of a collective GOP whine-a-thon in all my life. Barbie is brilliant and perhaps the best (& most gorgeous) story I’ve ever heard about the made up world we all live in.
👚First, A Barbie Memory: When I was 9, there was gift exchange at school before the holiday break. Participation was required unless you were Jehovah’s Witnesses, & then you were put into a separate room where what they did in there to this day remains a mystery. The instructions for the holiday party were simple: bring a gift that matched your gender. This kind of restriction, so prevalent then, caused me panic & anxiety. It’s very likely I tried to stay home from school that day, but let the record show that on that day in history I brought gender neutral gifts to a very binary party. Yeah, I was not afraid to Try That In A Small Town.
🚙What I didn’t see coming was that even though I chose wisely, nobody else thought twice about the gender directive. So when the time came for me to unwrap my gift (of course it was long & lean & wrapped with a pink bow), I started getting that out-of-body experience that has never stopped happening when people try to categorize my gender likes & wants. White noise floods my ears, my vision shrinks — everything gets a bit wobbly & I think I might pass out. Same thing happens when I walk into a church. Anyways, I unwrapped my gift, under all the watchful eyes of those in the classroom. And there she was. Barbie. The thing I never asked for, the thing I never wanted. I tried to smile, I wanted to be polite, but all I could do was cry. I remember my teacher, a man, told me to just play with it like I do my other toys. I was like, Mr. Bro, my other toys go into my holster or up & down ramps. I left her on my school desk. Refused to take her home. I have no idea where she ended up.
👧👦Decades later, I still remember how upset I was that I just didn’t get a matchbox car. If someone told me in March 2020 that the movie that would finally get me back to an actual theater would be a movie about Barbie, I would have laughed in their face. Probably, a mean laugh. Why? Because patriarchy tricks us all. The binary is cruel. Even for a little girl who wanted to be a boy, I still had to choose one or the other. I loved cars, cap guns (ikr), cowboy hats, baseball cards, all the “boy” stuff. Sadly, if there were ever a time I might have wanted to play with something more “girly,” I would have been teased mercilessly, even while being told that I’d outgrow “whatever this was” and my wedding gown longings & maternal instincts would kick in. They didn’t. They still haven’t. Inexplicably, even by defying gender roles, I was still forced to choose one or the other even though I’ve always been in between. I had to choose boy or girl even though my choice meant their disdain, & their choice caused me pain. That is the toxicity of forcing gender-specific roles onto anyone. We lose so many parts of who we are. We lose something far more important than this or that. We lose the knowledge that we are perfect just the way we are — that the more we explore the multitudes of our likes & wants, even as they shift & change, we evolve into something limitless, expansive, transformed.
📈So, yeah. Barbie today? Well, she’s come a long way. Or maybe I have. Even though the patriarchy still wants to force their idea of Barbie on us. They want that very binary, very unobtainable femininity that they yell is god’s plan — & the only reason they shout it out, try to drown anything else out, is because it doesn’t exist. If something doesn’t exist, but you’re required to gain it, well, you’ll just stay right where you are, won’t you. If it’s unobtainable, yet a mandatory standard, then women will always be wasting time digging for gold in a kettle of beans. If they’d had their way with Little Me, back then, they’d have sent my 7-year-old ass off to Barbie Camp with a pink Barbie Bible and an enforced requirement to wear dresses and serve Ken. I literally would not have survived.
🥰Yet, somehow this kid who hated dolls because of what I thought they represented, loves the Barbie movie — because it said, hey Little Dc, you were perfect then & you’re perfect today. From now on when someone says, what would you tell your child self, I’d say, hold tight — Barbie is coming.
From Barbie Land,
Dc Lozano, not a Barbie, not a Ken, just a Dc.
