Barbie Vs. The Patriarchs

Barbie vs. The Patriarchs

Barbie’s latest move has set women back 50 years. Women established themselves in the workplace for the past decades, and we did well proving that we are not out to replace men. The original Barbie helped little girls explore career possibilities. But the Barbie movie puts our parallel cultural progress in jeopardy while providing an entertaining gender-version of critical race theory. 

Barbie paints a picture of an ideal world that has no room for men’s offerings, and a “real world” that has no room for women’s accomplishments. In the real world, men rule. Patriarchy, a word used frequently in a negative context throughout the movie, provides a term for the structure and ideology identified as the highest enemy.

I attended Barbie with three of my daughters. My husband of 32 years, resigned to living in a girl’s world, attended with us too. He wore a salmon-colored polo shirt, not pink. We laughed heartily at the clever humor in the movie.  But even if we hadn’t been warned that there was some dark and adult-themed humor, we could have quickly identified the message of this movie: men are completely unnecessary and are, in fact, detrimental to the maintenance of a civilized society. 

The Barbie movie wasn’t the original media that paints men as boorish cads, though, the book of Genesis was. Thousands of years ago, a surprisingly forward-thinking author exposed imperfections and idiosyncrasies of the original Patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Abraham’s conduct toward Sarah displayed disregard for her safety in more than one instance. He sent his baby-momma and her rejected son into the desert without enough provisions for their survival. Isaac makes mistakes similar to his father. In one scene, we see him waiting for a big plate of roasted game fixed to his liking. Later, Jacob struggled not only with God, but with how to handle his wife’s infertility—among many other relational and fatherhood issues. And yet, it was in these imperfect and, ahem—manly—men that we possess a model of faith, stability, progress, and hope.

Because these men were able to admit their weaknesses, they grew in strength and wisdom as they depended on and submitted to someone higher than themselves. The women who lived with the Patriarchs willingly put confidence in them because of the strength these sojourners conveyed through their obedience to God. Women were able to relate to God directly and walk in cooperation with men as an expression of their trust in God. Patriarchy in its purest sense offered protection. 

In my denomination, a debate is percolating regarding whether women should be able to carry the title of “Pastor” within our churches. One of the many reasons that thousands of messengers at the recent Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting voted to clarify that women should not hold a pastor title is because of the lingering and—until now—indistinct fear that women might see the title as license to replace men as the heads of our local churches.

Many women in the SBC recognize that we are capable of leadership and innovation within the church aside from the role of leading a church. We enthusiastically participate in our churches with the understanding that we add significantly to the richness of church life. We do not see the pastor title as an avenue to supplant the leadership structure we’ve embraced and do not see women’s use of the title as a change to that structure. But now Barbie has confirmed the worst suspicions surrounding this issue. Of all the professions Barbie claims, priest or pastor hasn’t been one of them, but the secret is out: if women are in, men are irrelevant. Best keep that Barbie in the box.

As we left the feature, I commented that many of the aspects of the film reflect a fifty-year-old woman’s viewpoints in the most humorous way. I worried aloud that young men and women would not realize the nuances of the message they hear preached—yes, the movie preaches. Barbie redefined patriarchy in a distorted way, laced with half-truths (where have we seen that before?). 

In this time of confused identities and longhouse intimidation, there’s no more important time for men and women to understand their roles and how they can contribute to one another and to society through cooperation and unity. Genders have strengths and weaknesses that can be caricatured and parodied, but among those stereotypical and not-so-typical characteristics, we find unique tools to help one another succeed.