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So, I went to see Barbie despite knowing that I would hate it, my mom really wanted to go see it and she feels weird going to the theatre alone, so I went with her. I did, in fact, hate it. It's a film full of politics and eyeroll moments, Ben Shapiro's review of it is essentially right. Yet, I did get something out of it, it showed me the difference between the archetypal story that appeals to males and the female equivalent, and how much just hitting that archetypal story is enough to make a movie enjoyable for either men or women.
The plot of the basic male story is "Man is weak. Man works hard with clear goal. Man becomes strong". I think men feel this basic archetypal story much more strongly than women, so that even an otherwise horrible story can be entertaining if it hits that particular chord well enough, if the man is weak enough at the beginning, or the work especially hard. I'm not exactly clear what the equivalent story is for women, but it's something like "Woman thinks she's not good enough, but she needs to realise that she is already perfect". And the Barbie movie really hits on that note, which is why I think women (including my mom) seemed to enjoy it.
You can really see the mutual blindness men and women have with respect to each other in this domain. Throughout the movie, Ken is basically subservient to Barbie, defining himself only in the relation to her, and the big emotional payoff at the end is supposed to be that Ken "finds himself", saying "I am Ken!". But this whole "finding yourself" business is a fundamentally feminine instinct, the male instinct is to decide who you want to be and then work hard towards that, building yourself up. The movie's female authors and director are completely blind to this difference, and essentially write every character with female motivations.
But this is simply a reflection of evolutionary reality. It's not the case that women gravitate to these sorts of stories because they're like, stupid or anything.
A man's future is always, within certain limits, radically open. His sexual marketplace value (SMV) can drastically rise or drastically fall depending on the actions he takes. If he puts in enough work, he can lift weights and bulk up, accomplish more things, gain more status, and be rewarded accordingly. The hero's journey.
A woman's SMV is primarily determined by the physical appearance that was gifted to her by genetics, and past a certain critical window, it slowly but steadily declines due to ageing. Due to a confluence of biological and social factors, a woman cannot expect to bring about an order of magnitude increase in her SMV through her own actions. We do have plastic surgery today, but its effects are limited, particularly in their ability to counteract the effects of ageing, and it wouldn't have been an option at all deep in our evolutionary history, when these mythic structures first became ingrained in the collective unconscious. In a very practical sense, the best thing a woman can do at any given time is to learn to make the best of what she's got. This is reflected in the stories they tell about themselves, to themselves.
Again, hardly atypical. Plenty of men define themselves solely in terms of women, in terms of their success with women. Probably the majority.
Great point about the relationship to SMV increase possibility, really obvious in retrospect. Though I didn't mean to suggest that the women's myth was stupid, just that I didn't resonate with it the way that women don't resonate with what I like.
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