by JOSEPH FAHIM
A number of states including Kuwait, Lebanon and Algeria have banned the film about the iconic Mattel doll
Here’s a little backstory about my history with Barbie. I grew up in the late 1980s with an older sister and several female cousins who did not share my short-lived passion for superheroes.
The US was the most dominant cultural force in our lives, and so it was no surprise that Barbie was a ubiquitous presence in our childhood.
A shy and lonely five-year-old, I found it easier to join a girl clan than forge friendship with other boys. There were no action figures, cars or toy guns in our world. Instead, the sole boyish toy I found in this realm was Ken.
Eager to remain in the fold, I made the best use of the uncoolest toy imaginable, thrusting him into imaginary unrequited love stories, in which I cast him as the broken but noble heterosexual hero who finds love with the brunette Kira, whom I found to be more attractive than Barbie, who, for what it is worth, rejected Ken.
The scenarios I fashioned for Ken were influenced by classic Egyptian films whose subversive gender politics went over my young head.
Playing with these dolls was my first means of storytelling: a means by which the younger me could actively pass on part of his identity to another object and play out primeval aspects of my personality I was not conscious of at the time.
I never asked my sisters what Barbie meant to them, but the way I saw it was that she meant different things to every one of them.
The doll always has been a manifestation of capitalism and the hegemony of American culture, but the element of make-believe is what intrigued me the most – an element that stayed with me as I found myself swiftly dragged into the violent orbit of entitled machismo that informed the culture of the all-boys Irish Catholic school I was educated in.
Those childhood memories came to mind amid the hullabaloo surrounding the Arab release of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, the year’s highest grossing film which enchanted viewers the world over and enraged plenty of men – white, Asian and, unsurprisingly, Arab.
I watched the film during its first week of release in Berlin and naively did not expect it to face censorship in my home region. This is, after all, a PG-13 picture sanctioned by its parent toy company Mattel, and has also been criticised by some in queer quarters for leaning “hard on heteronormativity”.
The feminist discourse at the heart of the film is not groundbreaking; its criticism of patriarchy is coated with a big pink cushion that distances the story from reality.
And there has been no shortage of what some right-wings pundits call “angry feminist films” produced by Hollywood in the past three decades: from Thelma & Louise (1991) to Promising Young Woman (2020) and last year’s Don’t Worry Darling (2022).
Arab mainstream cinema is not deficient in works wearing their unabashed feminism on their sleeves either, whether it is the 80s revenge sagas of Nadia El Gendy in Egypt, the sensitive dramas of Moufida Tlatli in Tunisia, or the bittersweet comedies of Nadine Labaki in Lebanon.
Conservative pushback
But none of these films came with the grandstanding hype that Barbie has been riding, and none were aimed at a general audience that included children and families. And while these movies offered a staunch condemnation of the patriarchy, few were as disparaging and belittling of men as Barbie.
For entitled Arab politicians and male critics alike, this was a step too far: a direct threat to their core existence and a jab at their fragile egos.
What the Barbie debacle has revealed is that despite considerable improvements in women’s conditions in the Arab world, patriarchy still rules with an iron fist. And as American culture continues to seize the hearts and minds of Arabs, a stern conservative pushback against the progressive ethos of artists like Gerwig and her ilk is gaining momentum by the day.
By now, everyone is familiar with the Barbie story. Margot Robbie plays the titular doll: an initially indistinguishable resident of Barbieland, an otherworldly realm entirely populated by genital-less Barbies and Kens of every colour and race.
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