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If you think a two-hour Mattel commercial is where the feminist discourse is right now, then feminism is off in the wilderness. Then again, women are still ove
by busterarm 3y ago
If you think a two-hour Mattel commercial is where the feminist discourse is right now, then feminism is off in the wilderness.
Then again, women are still overwhelmingly the largest consumer spending group and the CEO of Mattel is still a man.
Referencing the Barbie movie wrt feminism is about as laughable as the people who think Star Trek is some post-racial utopia -- even though the bad guys are still mostly dark-skinned and virtually every alien race is a monoculture.
- saagarjha 3y agoDid you watch the movie?
- busterarm 3y agoSo is everyone who saw the movie supposed to have the same interpretation of it? That sounds vaguely sexist. It's Gerwig who claimed the movie is a feminist film and the critical reactions to the movie with regard to feminism are very mixed.
- saagarjha 3y agoDid you watch the movie?
- busterarm 3y agoYes. Totally not relevant to the discussion.
- saagarjha 3y agoIt is incredibly relevant, because the specific criticism you had about the conflict of using Barbie as a consumerist symbol for feminism from a company run by men was a central part of the film.
- jncfhnb 3y agoIt was an awkward and distracting part of the film imo. The messaging there was weird.
- jncfhnb 3y agoEveryone who saw it and has basic comprehension abilities can hopefully understand the basic premise which is awkwardly explicitly stated: that bickering around the right and wrong way to do feminism is bullshit, harmful discourse.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- busterarm 3y agoI didn't say anything about feminism when you responded to my comment. This is an argument that you put in my mouth. I just said that the comments from the production-side of the movie were braindead and sexist. This is all a conversation that _you_ wanted to have.
- jncfhnb 3y agoAccusing a movie‘s portrayal of women of being sexist, especially a movie written by the person behind a billion dollar film about a woman trying to empower women who gets accused of being an icon of sexism, is well within the current dialogue of feminism. It is in fact, a humorously ironically relevant argument.
- busterarm 3y ago> about a woman trying to empower women Only if you're in that middle-class, ultra-consumerist "girl-boss" demographic that the movie is marketed/trying to appeal to. That message is largely lost at the margins, as is typical in "pretty, white feminism". You're ignoring the elephant in the room -- any empowerment message takes a back seat to the goals of selling tickets and "buy our shit".
- jncfhnb 3y agoIt’s kind of crazy how many cliches you’re spouting that are directly addressed by the movie almost verbatim as if to imply that the movie was trying to pretend didn’t exist
- shard 3y agoI don't know how contrarian I am but I thought the movie was about an upside-down world where the women held all the power and the men were oppressed, and when the men tried to change things, the women reasserted their oppression as the rightful thing to do. To me, it's quite a tongue-in-cheek interpretation of feminism actually.
- jncfhnb 3y agoI felt they had to dumb down the ending for audiences and gave it an unnecessary homage to the creator. My read was similar to yours. At least on the film I felt they actually wanted to make and instead only got to hint at. While the primary storyline is there about a woman’s struggle to promote feminism only to be told she’s disparaging the cause of women; I think the second story is more pessimistic. The scene where the men ask for a share of the political power and are explicitly denied is jarring and frankly outrageously unattended to in the end of the film. The Ken’s are a metaphor for women and the feminist movement. The Barbies are the men. Which kind of fucking brilliant imo. But they decided to water it down and make the ending about Barbie’s individuality and a joke about her vagina. On the most abstract level, trashing your moment in the sun to ditch your actual plan and instead make a joke about your pussy is pretty meta feminist though. /s?
- dragonwriter 3y ago> the people who think Star Trek is some post-racial utopia -- even though the bad guys are still mostly dark-skinned That’s... not true of the franchise as a whole, or even any of the individual series. So, this is hardly creating confidence in your reading of the other works under discussion.
- busterarm 3y agoAre you kidding me? Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Jem'Hadar, Ferengi, The Kazon, maybe the Hirogen. All of these _villain races_ (which already is a wow conceptually) are portrayed as being dark-skinned. The list of other prominent villian species is quite small, especially when you have to exclude the Borg, Changelings, Tholians, the Breen. And I'm not making this argument out of nothing. People have been big-upping the show for being racially aware and talking about that context of the show for decades now.
- jncfhnb 3y ago> Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Jem'Hadar, Ferengi, The Kazon, maybe the Hirogen. These all look “dark skinned” to you?
- busterarm 3y agoThey look fair-skinned to you? (No, only Vulcans and Bajorans got that treatment...)
- jncfhnb 3y agoSome of them do. But mostly they look like aliens and any attempt to contextual is it as a race thing is about as poorly warranted as the Heredity link that you were (reasonably) shitting on.
- busterarm 3y agoAnd yet the bias towards an end of the spectrum in skintones for the villains is still overwhelmingly there in the choices made by the costuming and makeup departments.