Full disclosure: I haven’t seen the movie Barbie. Reading the plot synopsis on Wikipedia has ensured that I’m not going to willingly do that. That said, a defense of it has occurred to me which is kind of interesting. (If you haven’t, Barbie (the movie) rejects the idea that the sexes are complementary and meant to work with each other; Barbieland is an idyllic place where women rule and men are subjugated, and the film involves various things where the sexes are antagonistic towards each other, with an uprising of the Kens and their eventual re-subjugation.)

Barbieland is a young girl’s idea of playing with barbies before she’s old enough to know what boys are for.

I mean, even really young children get that to make new children you need a mommy and a daddy, but there is stage in development—frequently around 7 or 8 years old—where children start to figure out sex differences and it’s more than they can handle so they tend to oversimplify to make it manageable. This is an aspect of the classic “girls are annoying/boys are icky” phase.

The Barbie movie’s setting and plot does make a certain sort of sense if it’s meant to be a representation of this childish beginning-of-understanding of the world. It’s not, in general, good to represent childish mistakes in art without at least pointing to what the correction of that mistake is. And it’s a bit concerning that (apparently) many adult women found that this childish misunderstanding of the world resonated with them. That said, I’m not going to draw any conclusions because I haven’t seen the movie or talked in depth with anyone who actually liked it. (The one adult I’ve talked with who watched it said that the first half was very funny and it fell apart in the second half, which isn’t the kind of reaction I would find concerning, if the summary is accurate to the movie.)

Anyway, it’s just a stray thought that occurred to me; I offer it as a possible explanation because it makes the world seem a little less bleak.