After making $162 million at the domestic box office this weekend, Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” has certainly earned the world’s attention. And while that’s often translated to acclaim and admiration from audiences, the internet being what it is, that also meant the Margot Robbie-Ryan Gosling feature earned the ire of online critics — most recently and prominently, conservative U.K. news personality Piers Morgan.
One theme that many conservatives latched onto is the film’s satirical portrayal of men and American patriarchy through Ken’s journey to enlightenment. Ben Shapiro, for instance, had a nearly 45-minute takedown of the film posted to his YouTube channel on Saturday. And on Monday, Morgan weighed in with a full op-ed in the New York Post titled, “If I Made a Movie That Treated Women the Way Barbie Treats Men, Feminists Would Want Me Executed.”
The article does, indeed, state that feminists would want Morgan’s head if he were to make a “Barbie” for men.
“If I made a movie mocking women as useless dunderheads, constantly attacking ‘the matriarchy,’ and depicting all things feminist as toxic bulls–t, I wouldn’t just be canceled, I’d be executed,” Morgan wrote.
The newscaster most explicitly took issue with Ken’s journey, which (spoilers ahead) sees him traveling from Barbie Land to Los Angeles with Barbie, becoming witness to the various ways men hold an imbalance of power in contemporary society (which opposes his experience in Barbie Land’s matriarchy), then returning to Barbie Land and spreading his newfound knowledge to the rest of the Kens. Soon enough, Barbies are brainwashed and dream houses are turning into Ken-run mojo dojo casa houses.
Their patriarchy, however, is short lived.
“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?” Morgan wrote. “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 U.S. female soccer superstar Megan Rapinoe, who wants a world where women dominate absolutely everything — and men are reduced to dim-witted doormats barely capable of changing a light bulb.”
Elsewhere in the article, Morgan bemoaned Gosling’s Ken as a character “reduced to a weak, emasculated goon, an objectified and excluded member of the wrong sex who sings a lament to his own ‘blond fragility.’”
“The audience is left in little doubt that all that matters is the women are in charge,” he continued. “Of course, by reaching this dismally sexist denouement, the movie achieves exactly what it wanted to achieve and that is to 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.”
And don’t worry, Morgan didn’t step off his soapbox against “Barbie” before inexplicably tying in his thoughts against the trans community.
“The good news is that if the trans lobby has lost their way,” he wrote, “women will still be dominated by biological men going forward — they’ll just be identifying as women!”
