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The movie is primarily aimed at nostalgic millennials, not the young girls the toys are made for. It markets to people who grew up with the toys, but is more interested in using the toy brand to sell a film, not the other way around. Movies made to sell toys look like the ones on this list this list. They are animated, have child-friendly ratings, feature the toys center stage, and have a point of view that is neither critical nor deconstructive of the product featured, unlike the 2023 film.
To say the themes of the movie are only there due to the director just making the motions downplays the intent and artistry of the director, Greta Gerwig. Gerwig is known as a feminist director and earned a fair amount of buzz for Ladybird back in 2017. Regardless of how you feel about her work, looking at the three major films that she wrote and directed shows she has a point of view. The themes of her movies are not incidental or accidental, regardless of whether or not they're attached to a Mattel product.
Barbie is especially interesting due to the casting of Ryan Gosling, a masculine icon of problematic young men, as Ken. This has led to the film having a crossover appeal to both women and the incel and sigma subcultures of young men, who are attempting (successfully IMO) to co-opt the film's themes into their own thing with all the Ken memes. There's a lot to see here, and dismissing the movie as a Mattel commercial is reductive. People are not wrong or misguided to analyze a cultural product like this.
To add complications, the 30 something millennial woman is the target audience Mattel was missing when selling Barbies, because they might refuse to buy Barbies for their daughter.
Turning Barbie into a vaguely feminist hobby horse, and neutralizing the old knocks on her, helps sell the dolls to parents who want to buy them for their kids. Barbie was in danger of becoming low status.
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Slightly different take on where exactly the line is... is this recent drop via MR.
Are women liberal because they’re unmarried, or are they unmarried because they’re liberal?
I would expect a “traditional” “family-oriented” woman to be both more conservative and more willing to settle.
Having participated in the modern dating market, it's pretty staggering how different your reception is 'on the apps' with moderate in your bio versus left-wing. Changing that one detail literally 4x'd my response rate.
Which one did better?
Left wing by far
This is something I'm having a hard time with.
Up until about, say, the time of the pandemic, I was a fairly apolitical person. As a result I could, and did, date all kinds of girls. Since then, I've become honestly, genuinely conservative. But I still have a blue tribe-y background. I feel like I'm caught in an uncanny valley, where left-wing girls won't like me because I don't agree with them about virtually anything; but conservative girls don't like me because I came to it relatively late in life and am not a genuine, lifelong red-triber. Feels like all I can do is simply continue trying to become more attractive.
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