The Integrity of ‘Women Talking,’ the Flaws of ‘Barbie,’ & the Power of Second Wave Feminism
Women Talking earned Sarah Polley an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2023 as well as a Best Director nomination. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie has also been a darling of awards season, nominated for Best Picture (Musical or Comedy), Best Director, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Screenplay and more at the Golden Globes and nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
These two films form a natural conversation with one another, but it’s a conversation that hasn’t been fully explored yet. In the run-up to the 2024 Academy Awards, this seems like a fitting time to take a few steps in that direction and think about what these films highlight about one another and what they say about the viewing public.
The most obvious point here is that these are feminist films. The popularity and critical acclaim that these two films have garnered reflects a cultural moment that sees real value in articulations of a feminist ethos. But these films are not exactly cut from the same cloth.
Yes, both Women Talking and Barbie fit squarely into the category of feminist films. But they offer two quite different — even divergent — manifestations of feminist philosophy and feminist art.
Different Kinds of Feminist Films
Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, based on the novel of the same name by Miriam Toews, offers an integral illustration of women-centered film making, artistic expression, and aesthetic sensibility in a story that encapsulates various modes of female identity. Directly confronting the complexities that arise when feminism is animated by a diverse set of attitudes around femininity, gender, and womanhood, Women Talking manages the very difficult feat of dramatizing the strains of a self-conscious and self-critical social-politics. This emphasis on the value of differing feminist perspectives makes Women Talking a film of its time, artfully reflecting the powerful and sometimes thorny state of Third Wave Feminism.
As a work of art, Barbie is arguably less artistic in its intentions than Women Talking, less dedicated to expression, nuance, subtlety, and ideas. Yet Barbie is emphatically feminist.
From the outset of Gerwig’s Barbie, the script suggests the polemical aims of the film. Buzzwords abound, drawn from contemporary feminist discourse and popular critical theory. But the repetition of terms like “patriarchy” and “agency” become ironic false flags when seen in light of the film’s message.
The box office success and critical acclaim of Gerwig’s film overwhelmingly demonstrate that Barbie is doing something that the public enjoys and admires. Like Women Talking, Barbie is telling women’s stories through a female perspective in ways that resonate and feel true. But Barbie offers something quite different than Women Talking.
Interestingly, it’s the disconnect between Barbie’s gestural social politics and its actual content that offer the most compelling and constructive applications of feminist ideas that the film has to offer. By reading Barbie and its apparent contradictions through a feminist lens, we open up a critical hall of mirrors that highlights both the importance of the feminist ethos in the 21st century and the difficulties inherent in commoditizing or packaging feminist critique for a mainstream audience.
And in that context, we might also see the enduring value of Second Wave Feminism as a focused social-political movement, one that endures perhaps exactly because its action-orientation has yet to be effectively re-defined by the theory-inflected critical discourse of Third Wave Feminism.
Let’s consider the possibility that Barbie’s feminist message has been embraced and celebrated because that message is closely tied to 20th century feminism. Women Talking has been embraced for its integral depiction of a more contemporary feminist sensibility, yet it too takes up the mantle of political action that distinguishes 21st century feminism from the feminisms of the previous century.
Barbie’s lapses and Women Talking’s strengths may form a dialogue that proves this point.
A Feminist Filmic Conversation Between ‘Women Talking’ and ‘Barbie’
Point 1: The realism in Women Talking stands in stark contrast to the fantastical qualities of Barbie.
Women Talking sets its story at a distance from the world its audience lives in while Barbie sets its main story in the “Real World” of its audience — the here and now. Yet, between the two films Women Talking seems to embody a more contemporary mode of feminism than Barbie.
This is true because Women Talking adopts a filmmaking style that may be allegorical but which is decidedly not fantastical. Its story and its politics are gritty and painful.
In Women Talking, men are depicted as a cabal of violent oppressors. The violence they represent is real, depicted through physical spousal abuse in a pattern of sexual abuse that functions as the impetus for the film’s central conclave: a group of women are selected to decide whether or not the women of the village should leave their cloistered, male-dominated colony after a pattern of drugging and rape has been brought to light.
In this storyworld, men are a real danger. Patriarchy is not a term from cultural studies — it’s a regime that immediately affects the lives and the lived experiences of the women in the story. Reckoning with the fact of a very concrete, violent patriarchy is the essential task of the film. But this doesn’t lead to a simplified or a simple conclusion. Instead, it leads to a complex set of questions about choice, about definitions of womanhood, and about how to structure society.
The leader of the group of women, Ona, gives voice to these philosophical concerns in the story, saying, “When we have liberated ourselves, we will have to ask ourselves who we are.” The kind of interrogation being discussed here is not solely — or even mainly — a question of defining the women’s relationship to men. It’s a question of how the women in Women Talking see themselves.
It’s in this context that Women Talking grapples with gender bias coming from women, as the character of Melvin, a trans man who faces discrimination from women who insist on traditional definitions of gender and womanhood. And Polley’s film carefully refrains from universalizing the male gender as well and thus avoids the sort of oversimplifications that can undermine the particular kind of challenging message that this film wants to bring.
The problems at the heart of Women Talking are complex and they are addressed with complexity. They are treated with realism. And they map directly onto the landscape of contemporary feminist discourse.
Barbie opts for a different approach. Ironically, the language of Barbie utilizes the terminology of contemporary feminism and critical theory, but the film refuses to engage with the complexities and diversities embodied in that terminology.
Candace Wuehl comments on this in “Notes Toward a Critical Barbie Theory”: “At exactly the point that the mainstream adopts an ideology, that ideology becomes consumable. The very belief you upheld to resist fill-in-the-blank [misogyny, capital-P Patriarchy, capitalism] will be repackaged and sold back to you as supportive of your own belief systems. Barbies, it isn’t that the revolution will not be televised (if they can put ad placements and commercials or an anchor’s commentary in the revolution, it will 100% be on Hulu), it’s that it’s not a revolution if it is televised.”
Wuehl raises the question about whether or not Barbie has co-opted contemporary feminist language and commodified the message that language is usually meant to convey.
Point 2: In its story and its characters, Barbie offers a simplified set of problems, which is arguably justified by the film’s genre and its figurative mode.
Instead of depicting the men in power as villains who maintain an oppressive system of the patriarchy or as figures of violence, the film chooses instead to infantilize the men. This leads to an ironic (and potentially self-defeating) turn at the close of the film.
The political revolution in Barbie Land that installs a patriarchy is led by Ken — and his cohort, the other Kens. These figures are idiots, bent on ego, vanity, and childish demands for attention. The corporate figures depicted in the film (Mr. Mattel and his board) are equally unevolved.
This creates two potential problems for Barbie and its message. The first is that by painting the patriarchy to be a conspiracy of self-interested idiots (overthrown by a simple play on their vanity), Barbie suggests that the “patriarchy” it wants so desperately to decry is not actually an insidious ideology. It’s not a historically embedded set of values and perspectives that need to be revealed and defeated to achieve the goals of feminism. The patriarchy is not maintained by threats of physical violence, sexual insecurity, or legal programs that handicap women’s rights. It’s just Ken. Just stupid Ken and his ego.
That oversimplification tends to undermine the big speeches at the heart of the film, which also oversimplify things but at least articulate a strong sensibility relating to why women feel that feminism is an essential politics in our own, real world.
What’s the problem if Barbie simplifies its message in order to maintain the power of that message? The vision portrayed in the Barbie revolt against the patriarchy implies that women only need to be slightly more mature than men to undo a systemic and historic phallocentric ideology. That is not helpful.
Is it also a problem that this revolt is conducted on the level of a high-school-movie-gossip, let’s-hatch-a-plot, reductive mode of girl power? Maybe. But the larger problem seems to be that the film wants to articulate both a legitimate critique of women’s oppression within a patriarchal society and to say that the patriarchy is no big deal.
Ladies, we just need to be ourselves and recognize our own power. That’s not an anti-feminist message. But does it seem consistent with an actual social–political statement on feminism in the 21st century?
Point 3: Another potential problem with the choice to depict the men behind the patriarchy as vain children is that the structure of Barbie is very clearly situating the men in Barbie Land as a stand-in for women in the real world.
Gerwig’s Barbie is structured as a metaphor. Ken is subject to the oppression of the Barbie Land matriarchy. He is made to feel unimportant. He’s defined by the expectation that he is meant to support women, not to lead them or even arrive at a determination of his own identity.
An argument can be made that the infantilization of Ken is an illustration of the consequences of internalizing an oppressive ideology, of coming to believe the limiting things that society has told him about himself. Sure.
The film’s conclusion does let Ken eventually define himself as separate from Barbie. He says, “I’m Ken,” again and again as he goes down a plastic slide with a fatuous grin on his face, his lack of intelligence on full display, putting an exclamation point on the film’s secondary message: Men aren’t necessarily bad, they’re just children.
This message is problematic if the men in the film are intended to be an analogue for women in Barbie’s central metaphor. We can quickly connect the dots and see the film saying that women, in this metaphor, are ego-driven, childish creatures of vanity who lack both imagination and agency. That isn’t what the film wants to say. But that is what the film says.
This irony is highlighted by the film’s climactic musical number where the Kens sing and dance for many long minutes while the Barbies perform a political coup almost entirely off-screen. Ken becomes the focus of the film. Men take center stage. Literally. The women’s revolution gives them power, but it also sidelines them in relation to the story. The film becomes the story of Ken, the men. The revolution succeeds, not because the women are smart and strong, but because Ken is stupid and self-interested.
If the Kens in Barbie Land represent women in the real world, this seems like a problematic statement. And if the actions of the Barbies in the film represent the triumphant realization of the goals of feminism, it seems like the women should be central to the climax of the story. Instead, they are made over into stilted pundits, reduced to political caricatures with only wooden lines of dialogue and empty self-help advice.
Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie seems to double-down on this ethos. The central Barbie does not come to accept herself — in all her glam and shine — as a valid representation of a female in society. She doesn’t embrace the stereotype that defines her, though that is what critics and fans expected from Barbie.
In the great build-up around Barbie, there was anticipation that the doll’s body-positive “bimbo feminism” would be a part of the film’s message:
The movie marks the mainstream arrival of ideologies that have long bubbled up on social media. On TikTok, many women are in the midst of a “bimbo” renaissance, in which the hyperfeminine is embraced. As “Barbie” debuts, the movie appears to fit perfectly into that cultural moment with its feminist tones, toy fantasy world and plethora of pink products. (Rosenblatt & Tolentino)
While Barbie is undeniably pink, it does not end up fitting “that cultural moment” and embracing a philosophy of femininity that champions diversity and choice, where identifying as a bimbo is justified by a philosophy of empowerment linked to personal preference. Instead Barbie offers a vision of a political unity that tends to wash out difference and diversity, joining women in a singular identity and a narrowly defined, political femininity.
Stereotypical Barbie’s arc leads her to transform from a bimbo stereotype into an agent for social change. She rejects the version of female identity that she occupies at the beginning of the film. She becomes a conscious political agent. She takes on the role of activist as she helps to instigate the coup that reinstates female control over Barbie Land.
In short, Barbie turns away from 21st century feminism in order to better align its message with the power of 20th century feminisms where universalizing femininity was accepted (or overlooked) under the auspices of political action.
As a result, Barbie secured audience approval and, at the same time, allowed films like Women Talking to maintain ownership of the more critically-informed and critically-oriented feminisms of recent times.
Different Kinds of Feminism & Different Filmmaking Modes in ‘Barbie’ & ‘Women Talking’
Feminism is not a monolithic political philosophy. It’s not purely political. It’s not purely social. And it is not a static, historically fixed movement. Feminism is a living conversation, a set of beliefs, a discourse that seeks to center women in a critical discussion and use that discussion to bring about a world where gender bias has been dismantled and gender equality has been achieved.
But there are various perspectives on how to achieve this. And disagreement on what some of these terms really mean. For instance, people can disagree on the meaning of the essential term of the discussion: What does it mean to be a feminist?
As a way to track the evolution of feminism as a political movement and as a socio-cultural ethos, a few categorical terms have been developed that help to describe and simplify some of the different perspectives that exist within feminism — First Wave Feminism, Second Wave Feminism, Third Wave Feminism and Fourth Wave Feminism. These categories can be helpful also as a way to frame the conversation between Women Talking and Barbie as films that may be seen to represent different modes of feminism.
In defining these waves, Emmaline Soken-Huberty characterizes First Wave Feminism as the political movement to attain essential rights for women. The right to vote. The right to work. The right to be seen in the eyes of the law, not as property, but as self-determining individuals.
In the 1960s, women’s liberation movements took on the banner of Second Wave Feminism and pursued ideas punctuated by thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir.
Writing for Vox, Caroline Grady notes that this era of feminism “had a unifying goal, too: not just political equality, which the first-wavers had fought for, but social equality.” Second Wave Feminism directly aimed to combat “the systemic sexism that taught women that their place was in the home and that if they were unhappy as housewives, it was only because they were broken and perverse” (Grady). This vision of feminism held sway for decades (even while new visions emerged within academic and artistic circles).
Second Wave Feminism is still what many people think of when they hear the terms “feminism” or “feminist.” Perhaps this is true because some of the key issues around social equality remain items of headline news: the gender pay gap, discrepancies in hiring and promotion in the workplace, domestic roles for women and expectations on women that amount to what many see as a double-standard.
When Gretta Gerwig takes the viewer to Barbie Land, she offers us a vision where these problems do not exist (at least not for women). Barbie Land is a perfect inversion of patriarchy where women run things. The Supreme Court is all women. The president is a woman. The surgeon general is a woman. All power belongs to women. The systems that produce power — social and political — are dominated by women.
When Barbie leaves Barbie Land for the real world, she encounters the objectification that is also a main target of Second Wave Feminism. Martha Nussbaum describes the characteristics of objectification here in ways that might explain why a film about a sexualized doll would naturally raise its flag on this particular pole of Second Wave Feminism:
- instrumentality: the treatment of a person as a tool for the objectifier’s purposes;
- denial of autonomy: the treatment of a person as lacking in autonomy and self-determination;
- inertness: the treatment of a person as lacking in agency, and perhaps also in activity;
- fungibility: the treatment of a person as interchangeable with other objects;
- violability: the treatment of a person as lacking in boundary-integrity;
- ownership: the treatment of a person as something that is owned by another (can be bought or sold);
- denial of subjectivity: the treatment of a person as something whose experiences and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account.
The consequences of objectification are many. In particular, the internalization of a cultural view of women as sexual objects creates a host of complex challenges and limiting attitudes in both women and men.
Barbie’s polemic is rooted in these ideas very specifically, as the much-talked-about speech from America Ferrara shows:
It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.
You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. 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 be 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 a 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 and 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.
I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.
The argument here is that Barbie can be seen as an expression of Second Wave Feminism in the film’s most overt arguments, in its use of the Barbie doll as a metaphor for the continuing objectification of women, and in its vision of female empowerment as the outcome of a social-political revolution.
Just as the Barbie film offers a bluntly polemical story and a notably wooden script, the film’s feminism retains the bluntness of Second Wave Feminism, which is also certainly a source of the power of the film (and of the endurance of Second Wave Feminism in the public imagination).
Yet, despite its power, Second Wave Feminism has been criticized for being too blunt, too narrow in its definitions of femininity, forcing women to agree with an agenda that focused on completely undoing certain specific stereotypes around women regardless of whether or not some of those “stereotypes” might be seen — by women — to have value or to describe personal values that are truly held.
This argument hinges on a disagreement on the feminine — what valid forms of femininity are available for women within a social movement that seeks full social equality and what forms are not. Racial identity played a large role in the reaction against Second Wave Feminism, as the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s was seen as exclusionary in its vision, leaving many women out.
More recently, this perspective on Second Wave Feminism expanded to demand more accommodation for a variety of other kinds of femininities: sexual identity, expressions of sexuality, the embrace of domesticity. People did not want to be limited to what they saw as the overly defined femininity of Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique) and Gloria Steinem.
In Third Wave Feminism, Emmaline Soken-Huberty notes, “Many women more freely expressed their sexuality in how they spoke, dressed, and acted. This sometimes bewildered 2nd-wave feminists, many of whom had resisted traditional femininity. While many ideas and mini-movements swirled around in this time, the one ‘rule’ was that there weren’t rules. A woman should choose how she lived her life.”
Such a critique might be said to define Third Wave Feminism, which emphasizes a looser set of definitions of femininity and takes that ethos of choice as one of the aims of feminism. Interestingly, this line of criticism can be applied to Barbie, showing the film to be in dialogue with the tenets of Second Wave Feminism and also playing into the lapses of Second Wave Feminism as some people see them.
Turning back to Women Talking: In conversation with Barbie, we can take special note of the ways that Women Talking achieves resonance with Third Wave Feminism in some of the exact areas where Barbie seems to fall short.
The argument at the heart of Women Talking is an argument between women and about women. The story concerns a set of questions about what it means to be a woman, how much choice the group (or society) has to decide that meaning, and how much choice is necessarily left up to the individual.
This question is openly debated as the women carry on a prolonged and nuanced conversation in the loft of a barn. Perspectives are articulated that suggest a variety of relationships to tradition, to religion, to men, to children, to motherhood, and to sexual identity. There is disagreement, even while the group gropes toward an accord that will allow for a unified decision about whether or not the women should leave the community.
As victims of sexual assault, these women are collectively subject to the traumas of male dominance and exploitation. Their experience of patriarchy is painfully real.
Yet, there is no polemic, no soap-box declarations of objectification or a need for agency. Instead, there is a profound dramatization of the dark side of subjugation and oppression and a frank discussion about both how that situation came to be and how to dismantle it.
The characters differ and disagree in ways that align the film with the values of Third Wave Feminism, rejecting a single mode of femininity and complicating definitions of progress. This embrace of complexity and diversity makes Women Talking a fitting representation of the ethos of 21st century feminism.
So, yes, Women Talking manages to dramatize the main ideas of Third Wave Feminism, becoming an example of 21st century feminist filmmaking. But, it’s worth noting, to achieve this Polley’s film situates its story in conditions that make the film something of an allegory.
All the men in the village where the story takes place have departed, with a single exception. The revolutionary act that the film builds to is guaranteed to occur. The only question is what form it will take.
These conditions allow the film to maintain a women-centered narrative from start to finish and also create the opportunity to directly address the complexities of feminism with an emphasis on a diversity of perspectives and definitions of femininity. The vision of feminism as an argument is clearly communicated. And, satisfyingly, the argument leads to action.
The collective political action that ends Women Talking can be seen as a way to highlight the power and necessity of the political aims of Second Wave Feminism.
On the surface, Barbie is also interested in the diversity of femininities that characterizes Third Wave Feminism. But this veneer is only that — a surface level interest. Barbie features a diverse cast, but the characters, action and content of the story subscribe to the same insistence on uniformity that many women feel see as a significant flaw in Second Wave Feminism.
Where Women Talking features a trans character who faces discrimination within the group of women and ultimately gains acceptance, Barbie depicts only cis-heterosexual characters. Maybe this choice shouldn’t be seen as a flaw in the film — it’s just a choice — though it is a somewhat surprising choice, especially given the presence of the openly gay actor Kate McKinnon playing “Weird Barbie.” It’s just one of the details in the film that seems to invite criticism from a contemporary feminist angle.
Barbie is set in a fantastical fictional world. It is pink. It is very pink. It is cartoonish. But the film wants to keep a foot in the very real world that the audience lives in, which is demonstrated by the critical studies language employed in the script, the topical references in the film, and the contemporary qualities of the “Real World” that the film depicts. Yet, despite the diverse cast and the up-to-date feel of the film, the feminism of Barbie seems to be a 20th century feminism.
The storyworld that Barbie adopts shapes the film into a simple metaphor instead of a nuanced allegory. Gerwig’s Barbie doesn’t allow for debate between women about definitions of feminism or femininity. And the film’s structure doesn’t maintain a women-centered narrative. Yet Barbie has been embraced as a powerful feminist cri de coeur. We might ask why that is.
Why has Barbie been so lauded for its feminism when it so clearly opens itself up to significant critique from contemporary modes of feminism?
Do Audiences Want a Concrete Message More Than Complex Critical Ideas? ‘Barbie’ Says, Yes.
After exploring these ideas, one conclusion becomes hard to avoid: The concrete social-political aims of Second Wave Feminism remain powerful. It is exactly those goals that Barbie ultimately wants to align itself with. And audiences responded to that.
Women Talking also tells a story about women with a very specific social-political motivation. While the narrative conveys a self-critical view of its political ideas, it reaches past that critical orientation into definitive action. On that level, Women Talking also aligns itself with the legible and highly delineated political aims of 20th century feminism.
In short, both films resonate with 21st century audiences — not despite their affiliation with the ethos of Second Wave Feminism — but because of that affiliation.
We might also say that the failures of integrity in Barbie when seen through a contemporary feminist lens should be set side–by-side with a recognition that Gerwig’s Barbie is effective in its messaging around the unifying modus operandi of Second Wave Feminism, even if that mode tends to notionally universalize the feminine in ways that erase difference, choice, and diversity.
Further questions begin to crowd in when we consider what makes political art powerful and what makes it popular. Are subtle statements likely to be as resonant with a broad audience as more simplified statements? Is a banner more effective than a book, so to speak?
Also, these films lead to questions about how Third Wave Feminism might find ways to utilize some elements of 20th century feminism. How can the critical orientation of feminism today be galvanized by a unifying set of well-defined goals without losing its own power and insistence on diversity and choice?
