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PIERS MORGAN
Barbie wants us to think men are evil oppressors – but much of the movie is also based on a demonstrable lie
WHAT is the patriarchy?
I bet most people reading this haven’t a clue.
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Even I don’t really understand it, and according to radical feminists, I’m supposed to be the very personification of what it supposedly represents.
Yet it’s a word that is said so relentlessly in the smash-hit new Barbie movie, that it’s worth knowing exactly what it means.
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The literal translation, derived from the ancient Greek word ‘patriarkhēs,’ is ‘rule of the father’ and denoted the reality at the time that men were the titular heads of most families and organisations.
But in recent times, the concept of ‘the patriarchy’ has been hijacked and corrupted by feminazis to suggest that every aspect of life and society is dominated by powerful privileged males over subjugated under-privileged females.
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In short: men are evil oppressors, women are unimpeachably perfect victims, and anyone who dares challenge this notion is a disgusting misogynist.
Barbie does nothing to dissuade anyone from this view.
The movie’s clear message is that the only solution to this dreadful patriarchal state of affairs is for women to rule the world, and preferably do so on their own without horrible men to ruin both the planet and them.
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It’s a ridiculously misandrist message that is now being rammed down the throats of literally tens of millions of people as Barbie smashes box office records around the world with a $300 million opening weekend – even eclipsing Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s much-vaunted blockbuster about the man who invented the atomic bomb.
And forgive me if I don’t join in the widespread exclamations of unbridled joy at its unexpected success.
What passes for a plot in the film basically boils down this: Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, exists in Barbie-land with myriad other Barbies who tick every possible woke virtue-signalling box – there’s a trans Barbie, a wheelchair-bound Barbie, and President Barbie is a black woman.
This is a feminist Utopia where the Barbies are all-powerful and the Kens, led by Ryan Gosling, are a bunch of second-class, useless halfwits.
Then Barbie and Ken are transported to the supposed ‘real world’ where, predictably, they discover that it’s all great for men and terrible for women.
Ken quickly embraces the despicable ‘patriarchy’ with breathless bro enthusiasm and becomes an entitled, arrogant, macho doofus.
Poor Barbie, meanwhile, instantly becomes an objectified, imperilled, vulnerable victim of men who leer at her and treat her with horrible disrespect.
We’re told: ‘Everything exists to expand and elevate the presence of men.’
Really?
I don’t think the real world is like that at all.
The real world I occupy is chock full of confident, high-achieving women who would laugh at such a derisory mischaracterisation of their status in life.
And the truth about the patriarchy-riddled ‘real world’ is that for all the grotesque man-bashing caricatures it propagates, all it really does is afford agency and voice to men when compared with their Dystopian nightmare in Barbie-land where men are downtrodden chattels of their women.
Yet we’re supposed to think this is disgusting!
Newly empowered patriarchal monster Ken returns to Barbie-land where he and his fellow Kens turn it onto their own personal ‘Kendom’ and brainwash the remaining Barbies into becoming subservient.
But head Barbie rides to the rescue by seizing back control and driving the hapless Kens back to being subservient saps to the women again.
To which my response is why?
I thought the whole point of feminism is that women wanted equality with men, not a complete reversal of the perceived unequal social power structure.
I don’t know any woman other than perhaps US female football superstar Megan Rapinoe who want a world where women dominate absolutely everything - and men are reduced to dim-witted doormats barely capable of changing a light bulb.
Much of the movie is also based on a demonstrable lie.
As conservative commentator Ben Shapiro revealed in his gloriously excoriating takedown of the film, the scenes where ultimate Alpha male Will Ferrell leads a bunch of suited men in the supposed all-male Mattel boardroom are a ludicrous misrepresentation of a toy company that was run for 30 years by Ruth Handler, the woman who created Barbie, and whose current 12-person board includes five women.
But the woke world rarely lets facts get in the way of a good whine.
The longer Barbie goes on, the more preachy and irritating it gets.
A low point comes near the end when a depressive, and depressing, Mattel doll designer played by America Ferrera launches into a lengthy monologue on how miserable it is to be a woman.
By the end, I felt miserable just thinking about being a woman.
The biggest irony of the film is that Margot Robbie, who is my favourite female movie star, a very talented actress, and, judging by the one time I met and chatted to her at a Hollywood party several years ago, is also as delightfully warm and funny as she is in the movie, only landed this role because she’s exceptionally beautiful.
You couldn’t have an aesthetically challenged woman play head Barbie, however much the Matriarchy would like to think that could happen, because nobody would go and watch it and the undeniably brilliant marketing campaign for the movie has focused heavily on Robbie’s radiantly glamorous appearance.
So, Hollywood took the prettiest woman in its whole town and cast her in a movie supposedly intended to prove women don’t have to rely on things like their looks or sex appeal to men to succeed.
They don’t, obviously, but this movie proves it massively helps.
Just ask Ms Robbie’s bank manager.
At the end, Barbie makes it crystal clear to Ken that she doesn’t fancy him and certainly doesn’t need him to conquer the world.
In fact, she has a much better chance of doing so by channelling her inner feminist power free from his stupid, controlling clutches.
Ken is thus reduced to a weak emasculated goon, an objectified and excluded member of the wrong sex who sings a lament to his own ‘blond fragility.’
It’s true he and the other Kens are promised a more equal world going forward, but we see no actual evidence this happens.
It all smacks of George Orwell’s ‘All animals are equal but some are more equal than others…’
The audience is left in little doubt that all that matters is the women are in charge.
Of course, by reaching this dismally sexist denouement, the movie achieves exactly what it wanted to achieve and that’s establish the matriarchy as the perfect antidote to the patriarchy when in fact it’s just the same concept that they asked us all to detest in the first place.
To give you some idea of the movie’s immediate impact, singer Lily Allen tweeted: ‘I saw Barbie and Oppenheimer this weekend and my takeaway is that if Oppenheimer was a woman, Hiroshima might not have happened.’
That’s the precisely the kind of ludicrously crass and stupid conclusion the film wants you to make.
And that’s why I think its core message stinks.
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The bottom line is this: if I made a movie mocking women as useless dunderheads, constantly attacking ‘the matriarchy,’ and depicting all things feminist as toxic bullsh*t, I wouldn’t just be cancelled, I’d be executed.
But the good news is that if the trans lobby have their way, women will still be dominated by biological men going forward – they’ll just be identifying as women!
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