The Man Behind the Tan

Barbie and the Struggle for Recognition

Barbie, 2023

Now let me be clear up front that I am not the first person to consider any of this, and I don’t want to leave out prior contributions to this urgently needed dialogue. It’s my fault that I’ve delayed writing this for months and missed the height of the demand for the much sought-after Fukuyamist interpretation of Barbie.

While Ken’s position in the Barbieland hierarchy serves as a mirror of sexism in our society—it also functions as a model of how political communities create universal citizenship through the inevitable struggle for recognition on the part of those denied that equality.

Ken at the beginning of the film is at the beginning of what Hegel would term “consciousness,” in that his inner life is functionally non-existent. He only has a “great day”—as our narrator helpfully informs us—if Barbie is looking at him. His self-consciousness is mediated solely through his relationship with Barbie, and for all intents and purposes, something that can be called Ken does not exist except through his reflection in being perceived by Barbie.

It is essentially the inverse of what Simone de Beauvoir once wrote in The Second Sex wherein women were socially conditioned into roles that deny them the ability to act independently in the world.

Ken is reduced to the role of Hegel’s Bondsman in being denied true political citizenship and the self-consciousness that comes with the recognition by his political community as a true equal.

Barbie is similarly put in the position of Hegel’s Lord with the accompanying lack of satisfaction derived from the genuine recognition she receives from the social structure of Barbieland.

She, as Hegel would say, exists for herself. In other words, her status is derived through an artificial recognition that’s not freely given through her relationship with the Kens.

As the semi-ironic Lizzo song that opens the film notes, a Barbie is someone who is never sad. There’s no space here to go too much into her position in the Barbie world, but there’s probably something to be written here on the existential character of Barbie and the fundamental lack of meaning she has in the context of her inevitable death.

Suffice it to say, however, her lack of a meaningful existence alongside Ken’s oppressed status cannot be seen as two distinct and separable conditions. Both characters lack a mutual recognition of the other as fellow humans with a self-consciousness that exists for itself.

Ken’s attainment of the sense of self-identity that has been denied to him comes through his ironic exposure in the real world to the patriarchy. He sees reflected in the images of the patriarchy a mutual recognition of other men who are living as fully realized members of a community.

Ken, of course, returns to Barbieland to establish the “Kenland,” which in his mind is mostly about guys on horses. I’d argue that the Kenvolution is essentially justified in its proximate cause—the Kens are a social class that is being ruthlessly denied political enfranchisement after all. I mean they don’t even have homes. The French Revolution was fought for less.

However, in practice, he just replicates the same social structure in which the Kens take over the positions of the Lords in Barbieland while reducing the Barbies to the status of Bondsmen.

Don’t get me wrong though, the mojo dojo casa house rocks, and I’m not hearing anything otherwise from anyone on this.

As we see from Ken’s internal inability to attain the recognition he seeks from Barbie as being seen mutually, his newfound Lordship doesn’t accomplish what he thinks it will. It is unsurprising that creating a social order in which the Barbies—like the Kens before them—exist solely to provide an artificial false recognition to the Kens.

The entire point of the scene where the Kens all sit on the beach covering Matchbox Twenty reinforces this central point. The recognition they seek from the Barbies is essentially a replication of the same enforced recognition the Barbies previously received from the Kens whose job was just beach.

While the Barbies are giving the Kens their dream come true, it’s merely a performance of what the Kens want done. In other words, it is a demand for recognition being made by the Kens without consideration for the Barbies as independent in themselves.

Ryan Gosling does a great Matchbox Twenty cover though.

The Kens of course devolve into a civil war once this is denied to them, in the fact that the artificiality of their social order was merely a recoiling at the realization that they had never been receiving true mutual recognition in the first place.

The point here is that merely trading back and forth a superior position in a political order doesn’t create the sort of self-consciousness that people are seeking to attain. We do not find satisfaction in wielding power over others solely because it was once wielded over us.

As the film rather plainly states, Kenland contains in itself the seeds of its own destruction. You could phrase this differently by saying there will always be an endless cycle of various groups struggling towards the exploitation of others in a given political community as long as there is no genuine equal citizenship.

Being Kenough only comes with the complete reordering of the political community of Barbieland itself. Ken sees in himself a full and independent consciousness when he mutually recognizes in Barbie the same.

While this doesn’t resolve the structural inequalities in their new political community, the mutual recognition that’s achieved between them allows the possibility for a different sort of struggle to occur. Struggle within a liberal democracy comes through the progression between mutually recognized others to bring about a realization of what their equal status as citizens entails.

The idea that a Ken could one day be a member of the Supreme Court isn’t entirely trivial in that the End of History for Barbieland has essentially arrived. While they only manage to obtain a judgeship on a lower circuit court, they’ve attained full political rights. It’s no longer a question of if they’ll see themselves on the Supreme Court, it’s merely a question of how long it will take.

Once all members of a community arrive at the fundamental realization that all other members of a community are also fully realized consciousnesses that exist for their own sake, the sorting out of other inequalities is a matter only of the interaction of the members of that community over time.

If you can see your fellow citizens as fully human in and of themselves, any inequalities become completely irreconcilable with their fellow humanness.

This at the end of the day is why reactionary movements that seek to roll back citizenship will always fail. They don’t understand what it means to have achieved citizenship in the first place.