The Movie Barbie And The Crisis Of Masculinity
In this video, we will see how the movie Barbie is the most masculine movie ever made. Forget James Bond, Rocky, and John McClane. And before you think that this is controversial, keep watching, and I’ll show you how Barbie showcases the psychopathology of the man-child and how this is responsible for the crisis of masculinity the world is facing. In other words, Barbie shows us the way forward by forcing us to look at ourselves in the mirror, gentlemen.
That opening scene of the movie says it all. Ken cannot exist without Barbie’s look. Without her approval and her reply. He hurts himself, and immediately he falls into her bosom like a wounded child needing attention.
We’re going to break the movie down into 4 categories and go into the details of the psychology and pathology of masculinity.
Before we deep dive, keep in mind that this video is not about feminism. That’s because despite Mattel having launched Barbie dolls with different body shapes to tackle the body shaming backlash, despite having launched doctor Barbie dolls to promote women’s equality in the STEM field, despite having launched a series of inspiring Barbie women, like Maya Angelou, Helen Keller and Frida Kahlo, I mean, imagine Frida Kahlo, who was a communist and an anti-capitalist to be alive and to see herself as a Barbie doll. Anyway, despite all that, the new Barbie movie manages to commodify the feminist narrative through Mattel’s corporate marketing, resulting in a diluted, superficial version of what the feminist movement represents. But we’re not talking about that today.
Actually, this video is not about Barbie at all. This video is all about Ken. The mindless male who thinks he’s a man.
Why Female Is Nature
To understand Ken’s relationship with Barbie, we have to travel back in the 50s. In the 1950’s the Swiss psychologist Marie-Louis von Franz, noticed a disturbing trend: many men who were in their adult years, remained psychologically premature in their maturation. They occupied the bodies of adults, but their mental development failed to keep pace.
That’s the theme we see throughout the movie and that’s what we’re discussing today. Ken is nothing without Barbie’s attention. He’s a nobody who doesn’t even have a house. He exists only and whenever Barbie lays eyes on him. And when she does not care about him anymore, he turns bitter, trying to grab her attention by embodying all the negative stereotypes of masculinity.
And that’s also what we see in nature. Well, not the negative masculinity stereotypes, but the need of males to capture the females' attention. Meet the Japanese puffer fish, he might seem small but he’s probably the greatest artist on earth. His need to be seen and selected by females, drives him to a very complex creative journey. With a mathematically creative mind we cannot comprehend, and his fins as brushes, he embarks on creating a masterpiece as a mating call. His determination is so strong that he needs to work 24 hours a day for 7 days straight to complete his masterpiece. Or the strong current will destroy it. And all this, only to be chosen by a female. He needs to show her his worth.
And that’s something we see throughout the animal kingdom. Male gorillas beating their chest to show their strength; male birds spreading their feathers to show how healthy they are; jumping spiders and their elaborate mating dance—every male tries so hard for the female’s attention. So this is what nature shows us. That the female is the one who selects. The female is the one who decides the course of future generations. Because if you really think about it, every rejection a male faces translates to the female’s decision that that male’s genes, are not worthy to pass on to the next generation. Make a pause here and deeply think about that. Think of all the existential crisis, self-doubt guilt-trips a female can inflict on a male by simply rejecting him.
And it’s that same pattern we see in the Barbie movie. Ken’s existence revolves around Barbie’s acknowledgement. He’s not even her proper boyfriend, and he follows her from Barbiland to the real world as she tries to understand her purpose in life. Along the way, she loses her interest in Ken, and Ken is facing the same dilemma all the generations of men have faced when rejected by a woman. And the dilemma is this: Do I turn inward to better myself and become the best man I can be, or do I turn bitter and resentful and become something that degrades masculinity to the lowest common denominator? Ken chooses the second path and we see him transform from Barbie’s needy admirer to a braggy, macho doofus as he throws himself into how he thinks a real man should behave.
This exact behaviour is what encapsulates the crisis of masculinity we are facing. And in contrast to the feminist narrative, that we need less masculinity to solve that issue, I will argue in the rest of this video that we actually need more true masculinity now more than ever. But we need more mature masculinity. The type that teaches us to be better men and at peace with our masculine power so that we don’t project our anxieties as dominating, disempowering behaviour onto other people. What we need is more “Man psychology”.
(Course promo)
Ok, real quick. If you're watching this video then you’re probably someone like me who sees that this crisis of masculinity is real. See the number one reason this crisis is here, as we’re going to see later in the video, is because of the way we relate to our fathers. From the very first childhood experiences we have with our fathers, we construct a perception about the world and how we as men relate to it. One of the recent revolutions in childhood psychology is the understanding of how children relate to their parents and how this relationship shapes the kids' perception and how this perception carries throughout life. So how we attach to our parents and how our parents interact with us, we develop the so called attachment styles. Your style might be secure, avoidant, dismissive, or fearful, and the majority of us pass on all the issues that our parents passed on to us to our kids. If you want to learn how to understand childhood psychology and raise securely attached children, or if you want to understand more about your own childhood and those inner worlds, I created an online program on understanding childhood psychology. In the 12 lessons of this course, we explain how children attach to their parents and how these attachment styles define all their relationships throughout life. We deep dive into how children develop their sense of self and identity and how their mind works, from stimulus to perception, all the way up to forming mental representations, and how these representations manifest into actual behavior. ******I’m not going to go in more details as I want to get back to our video, but if you feel understanding childhood psychology can help you in your journey, I’ll leave a link in the description below. Back to the video.
What Is Man Psychology?
Let’s go back to that swiss psychologist. Von Franz suspected that what she called "the problem of the Puer aeternus" -in mythology this is a child-god who is eternally young- would spread around the world and touch more and more people over the next few decades. The things that she said have turned out to be incredibly accurate, especially for men in the Western world. This is the idea Ken embodies. The man-child. Many young men are struggling today in many societies, and there’s lots of data pointing to a very grim future for men. Men are having huge problems in school, with their friends and social lives, with their faith and the loss of purpose, with money, and with their sexuality.
Men are becoming nonentities. And nonentities can amount to something only in relation to someone else. In this case, Ken can only amount to something if Barbie only loved him. He is defining himself through the eyes of someone else. He doesn’t have enough “man psychology”
But what exactly is man psychology? How can we define it? Throughout the centuries, manhood is something you earn, because you are good enough. Real manhood is different from physical maleness. It’s not about muscles and showing off. Manhood is not a natural state that happens when a boy's body matures, but rather an artificial state that boys must fight hard to achieve. The idea that being a man is hard to achieve can be found everywhere, from the primitive hunter-gathering societies to the most sophisticated city dwellers.
But why do most cultures think that men are made rather than born? Well, to understand this we need to examine what is perceived as the biggest threat to manhood across cultures: And that is, according to many psychoanalysts, the “psychological regression”.
What Is Psychological Regression And How It Fuels The Crisis Of Masculinity?
The concept of psychological regression in the Barbie movie can be understood only by this one sentence Gloria - America Ferrera- says in the movie:
You have to be their mommies but not remind them of their mommy
- Gloria
Now let’s break down what Psychological regression is.
The first years of a human's life are spent in a prolonged condition of dependency on the mother, in contrast to other animals who enter this world with some degree of autonomy. In the first year of life, the baby might be considered to be psychologically "in" the mother, as the closeness required for the infant to have a sense of attachment, is fully attuned to the mother’s touch, smell, and voice. From the infant's point of view, the mother appears as a metaphorical representation of the Great Mother; she is the child's universe and the giver of love, stability, warmth, protection, and above all, the all-nourishing breast.
The time when a child is expected to develop independence and a sense of self is when the baby starts to realize that it is different from its mother and can move around more. This is when the time of “seperation-individuation” starts, according to the psychiatrist Margaret Mahler.
Even though both girls and boys go through this stage of growth, it can be a bit harder for boys. That is because for a girl, her psychological identification with her mother can help her go deeper into her feminine identity. For a boy, though, things are quite different. Because if he wants to feel like a man, he has to stop identifying with his mother and the world of women in order to enter the world of men.
Click here to Understand Childhood Psychology and break the cycle of the crisis of masculinity.
In most ancient civilizations, but also nowadays in some of the world’s most isolated tribes, we always find rituals and ceremonies that were specifically designed to promote this process of separation-individuation. The concept is simple and universal. The boy must die to be born a man. And this process was always overseen by older males.
But in today’s societies, healthy male role models, are even more rare to find than healthy female role models. Men are entering adulthood without having emotionally and psychologically matured. They suffer from laziness, the need to escape reality, and the desire to always return to the mother’s womb, at least psychoanalytically. And by the way, returning to the womb simply means always looking for ways to be taken care of instead of being the one who confidently takes care of someone or something. This happens because boys are never taught to embrace conflict and become self-reliant, which is the ticket for the world of men across cultures. These men-children have given in to what Carl Jung called "the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious."
And now you might say yes but why can’t girls embrace conflict and become self-reliant? Why does it have to be only for men? But that is not the point here. Of course, girls need to know how to embrace conflict, and of course they need to know how to be self-reliant, but this is something that, without it, men can never be the men women need.
And if men give in to this spirit of regression, Carl Jung warned us, they will always live in ways that are against manhood.
“If this situation is dramatized…then there appears before you on the psychological stage a man living regressively, seeking his childhood and his mother, fleeing from a cold, cruel world which denies him understanding. Often a mother appears beside him who apparently shows not the slightest concern that her little son should become a man, but who, with tireless and self-immolating effort, neglects nothing that might hinder him from growing up and marrying. You behold the secret conspiracy between mother and son, and how each helps the other to betray life.” -Carl Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
So, giving in to this spirit of regression, makes us always live in the mother’s womb and makes us unable to navigate the world without being taken care of. And if we do not manage to find someone who will take care of us in a maternal way, or if we do not manage to break free from this pathological state, then we end up embodying what Rollo May called “the Myth of Males in the 20th century” :
“...The myth of males is the life pattern of a man characterized by two desires. One desire is to be admired by women, and the other desire is to be taken care of by the same women. The first desire leads to machismo behavior: a braggart, he swaggers and is grandiose. But all of this apparent power is in the service of pleasing the woman, the figurative Queen, in order that the second desire be satisfied. These two desires are contradictory. The woman is the one who holds the final judgment and, correspondingly, the power over him. No matter how much he appears to be the swaggering master with his various women, he is in reality a slave serving the Queen. His self-esteem and his self-image depend upon her smile, her approval.” -Rollo May, The Cry for Myth
How Fatherlessness Destroys Masculinity
To figure out how not having a father affects the way weak men grow up, we need to learn more about parenting and initiation. Mothers and fathers play different roles in a child's life, and the loss of one can leave a vacuum that affects the child's growth into adulthood.
Mothers have historically been the primary caretakers. They give their children comfort, care, and emotional support. This close connection makes for a strong emotional bond, which is sometimes called a "mother complex."
Fathers, on the other hand, have a different job. They have always been seen as providers, guardians, and guides. Their job is to help the child stop being dependent on the mother and grow up to be a self-sufficient, useful adult.
Throughout history, many societies have understood that a boy needs to grow up and be independent from his mother. Rite of passage ceremonies were popular and were usually led by older men, or "cultural fathers."
In these ceremonies, there was a symbolic death and return that marked the end of childhood and the start of adulthood. Young men were taught to be wise and independent, and then they were sent into the unknown to prove themselves.
But in the modern West, we don't have these kinds of rituals of passage. We depend on our fathers to show us how to become adults, but not all dads are ready to do this.
For dads to be good guides for their kids, they need to be strong, independent, and emotionally present. They need to show, by example, that there is more to life than the comforts of childhood. And many fathers nowadays simply do not know how to do that. They do not know how to show their boys that there’s something worth fighting for.
Because they themselves have been victims of this psychological regression, we spoke about earlier. Combine that with a society that is obsessed with victimizing manhood, a society obsessed with labelling all masculinity as toxic and promoting that the only way for a female to be independent is to be anti-male, and you have the perfect recipe for the emergence of Ken.
When society fails to provide the necessary guidance for boys to become men, we risk the development of weak men who struggle with maturity, independence, and purpose in life. This is a reminder that the role of fathers is essential in shaping the future of our men.
“The strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison, is that they were raised by a single parent”. - C.C. Harper and S.S. McLanahan
Growing up without a father could permanently alter the structure of the brain, and produce more children who are more aggressive and angry. -Dr. Gabriella Gobbi
60% of rapists
63% of all youth suicides,
70% of all teen pregnancies,
71% of all adolescent chemical/substance abusers
72% of juvenile murderers
80% of all prison inmates, and
90% of all homeless and runaway children, came from single mother homes.
That’s what fatherlessness does to our society. I’ll out the links of all the research in the comments below for those of you who want to dig deeper.
“Sons also need to watch their father in the world. They need him to show them how to be in the world, how to work, how to bounce back from adversity…They need the activation of their inherent masculinity both by outer modeling and by direct affirmation.” (James Hollis, Under Saturn’s Shadow)
Many people are going through a lot of pain because we live in the age of the absent father. We expect young men to leave the pleasures of home, get over their mother complex, and make a life worth living without the emotional support of a father. And don’t get me wrong here, many men manage to overcome this - at a great cost, of course—but the majority of men facing this issue do not do that well in life. I mean, look at Ken! He is our protagonist here! Look at Ken and ask yourself this: If you’re a man, would you like to be like Ken? And if you’re a woman, would you like a man like Ken next to you?
Conclusion
That’s what the movie Barbie highlights for me. It’s not about woke culture extremities; it’s not about the distorted version of feminism the movie portrays; it’s not even about the caricatural patriarchal meta-commentary of the movie with Matterl’s male dominated board of directors, who are to blame for everything Barbie is facing. For me, this movie highlights the crisis of masculinity we are facing these days. We see Ken seeking approval and attention, and when he doesn’t get it, he demands it. But is this the model of masculinity we want to follow? So now the question becomes, what do we do about it? If you want me to make another video with ideas on how to overcome the crisis of masculinity, subscribe to my channel and leave a comment below. Leave a comment on what you think about the crisis of masculinity. Or what you think about the movie. Please try to be respectful and understanding of other people’s views. In this channel, I’d like to promote healthy debate and the exchange of ideas without extremism. If we hit 100 comments on this, I’ll make that other video on how we can overcome that psychological regression and the crisis of masculinity. Till next time, try to always question everything, especially your thoughts, and ask: “What makes me do the things I do”.