The ‘Barbie’ movie is not as feminist as you think it is

In Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster film Barbie, Mattel’s doll, incarnated by Margot Robbie, is awoken from the mindless contentments of life in Barbieland by troubling existential thoughts. Barbie climbs into her pink convertible and, after adventuring into the “Real World,” learns not only how women are controlled by the patriarchy, but also their potential to grow.

Barbie has been acclaimed for its feminist politics. The film critiques patriarchal thinking and understands that Barbie is a source of empowerment for girls, often reflecting their career ambitions — think of Surgeon Barbie, Naval Officer Barbie, Astronaut Barbie, and President Barbie. At the same time, Gerwig (who directed and cowrote the film) pokes fun at the doll’s exalted and idealized femininity.

Of course, Mattel can safely accommodate such criticism; it does nothing to damage the megacorporation’s public image. As of Aug. 6, the film has grossed more than $1 billion in global box office ticket sales. Market analysts forecast that Barbie should generate about $100 million in revenue for Mattel this year, which also includes toy sales and product licensing.

My concern is that Gerwig’s feminism is morally compromised when her art serves to enhance Mattel’s profitability. The women whose welfare I have in mind are not those afflicted by Barbie-induced body dysmorphia, but workers who have had to subject their bodies to meeting Mattel’s production quotas on Barbie doll assembly lines in Guangdong Province, China.

Poverty drives women from rural provinces in China to work and live within the factories Mattel and other large toy companies use to subcontract production. According to China Labor Watch, these factories either lack a union or unions exist but are inoperative, and protective labor laws can be ignored.

Gerwig’s edgy jokes about gender norms are irrelevant to women condemned to the mass production of Barbie dolls, where the din of machinery is unrelenting, eyes and skin are exposed to harmful chemicals, and sexual harassment is routine.

Confined to a workstation, the women perform the same manual task (operating a plastic mold injection machine, or sewing clothing, or attaching body parts to each doll) for 10 hours a day, six days a week. This is exhausting, brain-numbing work, which they must accept under blunt economic compulsion when the alternative is often going hungry. Barbie’s motto from a 1985 ad campaign, “We girls can do anything,” does not apply to these women. Poverty entraps them as exploitable labor.

To its ethical and financial credit, Mattel has, over the years, enlarged its product line in the name of inclusivity. Hence the wide range of Barbie doll skin colors, not to mention Wheelchair Barbie, a Brave Barbie who is undergoing chemotherapy, a Barbie with a hearing aid, and a Barbie with Down syndrome.

But one Barbie we can be sure will never be produced is Guangdong Factory Barbie, whom I imagine outfitted in filthy overalls and masked against inhaling toxic chemicals. Perhaps her box could be gray rather than pink, to suggest the factory ambiance.

As I have observed elsewhere, Robbie has been paid $12.5 million for her lead part in the film and stands to earn millions more as a producer. According to a 2020 investigation by China Labor Watch, workers for Changan Mattel in Guangdong Province are paid $2 an hour. To earn Robbie’s salary, each worker would have to toil for 6,250,000 hours. Given their 10-hour shifts six days a week, this amounts to over 2,000 years of alienating labor.

The pink-saturated mise-en-scène in the Barbie film performs the same function as packaging Barbie in a pink box: It severs the commodity from the dark origins of its production.

Moreover, the film ignores the company’s record of plastic pollution. With around 60 million Barbies sold annually, the Yale Environment Review estimates that this production contributes emissions equivalent to burning 381 million gallons of gasoline. And perhaps we should look beyond Barbieland to Barbie Landfill: How many millions of dolls with missing limbs and hair have ended up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

So in spite of its satirical takedown of Barbie culture, the film speaks safely within a narrow spectrum of dissent. Formerly, Gerwig was renowned as an independent filmmaker. Making Barbie required her acquiescence to corporate power. This compromised the film’s feminist politics.

Maybe Gerwig didn’t know about Mattel’s history of exploiting female workers — under the circumstances, a shameful gap in her knowledge — or else she knew but didn’t care enough to refuse to work with a tainted product.

Paul Maltby is professor emeritus of English and cultural studies at West Chester University. His books include “Christian Fundamentalism and the Culture of Disenchantment,” “The Visionary Moment,” and “Dissident Postmodernists.” pmaltby@wcupa.edu