If you think a two-hour Mattel commercial is where the feminist discourse is right now, then feminism is off in the wilderness.
Then again, women are still overwhelmingly the largest consumer spending group and the CEO of Mattel is still a man.
Referencing the Barbie movie wrt feminism is about as laughable as the people who think Star Trek is some post-racial utopia -- even though the bad guys are still mostly dark-skinned and virtually every alien race is a monoculture.
Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Jem'Hadar, Ferengi, The Kazon, maybe the Hirogen.
All of these _villain races_ (which already is a wow conceptually) are portrayed as being dark-skinned.
The list of other prominent villian species is quite small, especially when you have to exclude the Borg, Changelings, Tholians, the Breen.
And I'm not making this argument out of nothing. People have been big-upping the show for being racially aware and talking about that context of the show for decades now.
Appeared in eight of 79 episodes of TOS, and weren't, as a group, “bad guys” (heck, even though they were antagonistic to the Federation , they weren't even the bad guys in some of the episodes thet were in in TOS) in later (in setting) series.
As a series, they are a little more dense in Enterprise, and in Discovery, deapite being setup in the pilot as the main adversary, they end up not being that even in the seasons set pre-TOS (the first season prime adversary is... the alternate Universe Terran Empire.)
> Romulans,
The Romulans are, like Vulcans, predominatly white; exclusively so on screen in TOS, though later shows had occasional non-White Vulcans and Romulans.
> Ferengi, The Kazon, maybe the Hirogen.
Not particularly dark skinned.
If you actually look at who the bad guys in episodes (not who the Federation or United Earth’s astropolitical opponents are) if there is one where skin color is even a concept (often there either isn’t one, or its not a being where skin color is an issue), they are usually White.
> And I'm not making this argument out of nothing. People have been big-upping the show for being racially aware and talking about that context of the show for decades now.
A bad argument made for decades doesn't become better for it.
Vulcans and Romulans have basically the same look (in TOS they were distinguished largely by the Romulans distinctive garb and the fact that Ronulans were only encountered on Romulan ships, in TNG and later shows the Romulans often had ridges, but not all individuals did.)
That they looked identical (except for the ridged Romulans) because of their shared origin was a quite important point from their introduction.
Some of them do. But mostly they look like aliens and any attempt to contextual is it as a race thing is about as poorly warranted as the Heredity link that you were (reasonably) shitting on.
And yet the bias towards an end of the spectrum in skintones for the villains is still overwhelmingly there in the choices made by the costuming and makeup departments.
> And yet the bias towards an end of the spectrum in skintones for the villains is still overwhelmingly there in the choices made by the costuming and makeup departments.
The range and distribution of coloration for races that are mostly antagonistic vs those that are mostly found aligned to the protagonists, at least geo... well, astropolitically, doesn't seem that great, well, except maybe for a bias in the use of blue specifically for Federation aligned races.
I don't know how contrarian I am but I thought the movie was about an upside-down world where the women held all the power and the men were oppressed, and when the men tried to change things, the women reasserted their oppression as the rightful thing to do. To me, it's quite a tongue-in-cheek interpretation of feminism actually.
I felt they had to dumb down the ending for audiences and gave it an unnecessary homage to the creator.
My read was similar to yours. At least on the film I felt they actually wanted to make and instead only got to hint at. While the primary storyline is there about a woman’s struggle to promote feminism only to be told she’s disparaging the cause of women; I think the second story is more pessimistic. The scene where the men ask for a share of the political power and are explicitly denied is jarring and frankly outrageously unattended to in the end of the film.
The Ken’s are a metaphor for women and the feminist movement. The Barbies are the men. Which kind of fucking brilliant imo. But they decided to water it down and make the ending about Barbie’s individuality and a joke about her vagina.
On the most abstract level, trashing your moment in the sun to ditch your actual plan and instead make a joke about your pussy is pretty meta feminist though. /s?
Everyone who saw it and has basic comprehension abilities can hopefully understand the basic premise which is awkwardly explicitly stated: that bickering around the right and wrong way to do feminism is bullshit, harmful discourse.
Accusing a movie‘s portrayal of women of being sexist, especially a movie written by the person behind a billion dollar film about a woman trying to empower women who gets accused of being an icon of sexism, is well within the current dialogue of feminism.
It is in fact, a humorously ironically relevant argument.
Only if you're in that middle-class, ultra-consumerist "girl-boss" demographic that the movie is marketed/trying to appeal to. That message is largely lost at the margins, as is typical in "pretty, white feminism". You're ignoring the elephant in the room -- any empowerment message takes a back seat to the goals of selling tickets and "buy our shit".
It’s kind of crazy how many cliches you’re spouting that are directly addressed by the movie almost verbatim as if to imply that the movie was trying to pretend didn’t exist
It is incredibly relevant, because the specific criticism you had about the conflict of using Barbie as a consumerist symbol for feminism from a company run by men was a central part of the film.
Once upon a time, a woman accidentally pricked her finger over some fresh snow. Observing the sight, she thought, "how gruesome! But Snow White seems like a nice name, nevermind this completely irrelevant scene of blood on snow..."
