In the Barbie movie, there is a huge reflection on what it is like to be a woman. Always worried about others, always worried about how you look or if you’re overreacting. Getting to see the gendered social phenomenon that is expected of women being represented in a movie was a huge and emotional moment for many people who went and saw the movie. One of my favorite moments in the movie was America Ferrera, Gloria in the movie, doing her monologue on how it is almost impossible to be a woman. Gloria said in Barbie, “I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself in knots so that people will like us.” In my opinion, the Barbie movie is exactly how our society is built to think like. It’s built on the underlying expectations that are everywhere you look when it comes to being a woman.
The Barbie movie shows the stereotypical Barbie who has a perfect life and basically the perfect everything. From the outside looking in, no one would ever guess that a woman who’s so perfect could not be the happiest person. That is also a huge aspect of the Barbie movie, everyone around Barbie doesn’t understand why she is suddenly not okay. Because in our society, with misogyny and gender issues, women are stereotyped to be strong but also be sensitive to others. Barbie represents so many women that have to keep up this perfect façade and imagine just to make it in what the structure of our society has expected of women.
The host of the Golden Globes, Jo Koy, obviously did not watch or care to look at the Barbie movie as a moment for women to be appreciated. To me, Koy’s monologue as a whole was unassuming but where he went completely wrong was proving the whole point of what the movie was about. Koy said, “The key moment in Barbie is when she goes from perfect beauty to bad breath, cellulite, and flat feet. Or what our casting directors call character actors.” In those few “jokes” that Koy made about the Barbie movie was a very telling moment for many people watching. Although Barbie was not entirely about this issue at hand, anyone who watched the movie did sense the presence of that issue being spoken about. It is almost like a slap in the face for women everywhere to diminish the Barbie movie to, as Koy says, “Barbie is based on a girl with big plastic boobs.” The misogyny and double standard of being a woman that was in the movie was blatantly transferred in real world at the Golden Globes that night.