becoming a woman: Barbie and the Last Unicorn
It may shock you to learn this about me, but I have a complex relationship with womanhood. I identify as nonbinary, and I know I look like a woman, but I don’t feel like one. (Whether this makes me a woman, or makes me not a woman, is left as an exercise to the reader. No no, don’t tell me – I already know what you think.)
I am blessed to have, in the categorical tools of my subconscious mind, a particular story that helps me understand the world. That story is The Last Unicorn. I do not need to answer the question of whether I am a woman or not. I recommend you watch the movie – though the book is quite short and has some extras, I personally enjoy the movie more. And the music is nice (for the most part).
In the Last Unicorn, the main character, mostly just called the Unicorn, accidentally learns that she is the last of her kind. She does not believe this – after all, unicorns are immortal, and can only be killed if they leave their forests, so what could have happened to all of them? But when the rumor is confirmed by a traveling butterfly, who tells her they were pursued by the Red Bull, the Unicorn grows distressed and sets out to find out what happened to them.
She soon learns that it’s true. The world has changed while she, ageless and unchanging, remained in her forest. Men can no longer recognize unicorns. Despite this, she does find allies, and makes her way to the castle of King Haggard, whom the Red Bull apparently serves. When she first encounters the Bull, however, she is incapable of fighting him off – he attempts to drive her into the sea and she, defeated, begins to go. Her friend and ally, Shmendrick the Magician, performs a spell on her and she finds herself transformed into a human woman, bewildered, angry – and of no interest to the Bull.
In King Haggard’s castle, the Unicorn begins to forget she is a unicorn. She no longer desires to find the other unicorns, or even to remember the grief of being ageless. She falls in love with the king’s son, Prince Lear, and declares she will remain with him. He, and her allies, recognize the tragedy in this – and when the Red Bull sees her for what she is, Shmendrick changes her back into her true form despite her protestations.
The film never explains what happens next, not explicitly, so you’ll just have to take my interpretation as law. A unicorn is incapable of fighting the Red Bull – it is simply in her nature to flow like water, and the Red Bull tilts the stage to his liking. But when Prince Lear steps in front of the Red Bull to deflect him away from the unicorn, she remembers being human. She ceases to completely be a unicorn in that moment – she is one, and she isn’t one, because she understands loss and regret and change and, more importantly, refusal. She refuses to see Lear hurt. She fights back against the Bull, drives him into the sea, and releases all of the other unicorns from their captivity.
In the end, the Unicorn remains a unicorn, and Lear accepts that he will never see her again – but that she will remember loving him “when men are fairy tales in stories written by rabbits,” which is to say, the world will change in ways we cannot imagine, but the Unicorn will remain. And of all the unicorns, she is the only one who, having been human, will understand the sadness – and the beauty – of mortality.
Okay, so. She becomes a woman. It changes her irrevocably, and this is tragic. But it also gives her the strength to do the impossible.
As a child, I was terrified of what lay beyond the threshold of adulthood. I was horrified by the concept that I would have to leave the lush, green realm of my imagination and become a person who lived in the real world. Stories like Narnia reinforced that this fear was valid: once you grow up, you forget Narnia, you become a boring woman who is interested in lipstick and social parties. Many, many stories drive this point home, from banal Christmas movies to B-list cartoons. The magic of childhood is painted as something perfect and pure and which one should be ashamed of “letting go” – the good ones keep believing in Santa, or fairies, or magic, or whatever.
The Last Unicorn said something very different. The Last Unicorn said: growing up is a sacrifice, yes – but a worthy one.
This weekend, I saw the highly anticipated Barbie movie starring Margot Robbie. It was a blast! I had a really great time, and laughed very loudly, especially when Barbie conceded to Ken, “It doesn’t have to be girl’s night every night,” and someone in my theater went, “NO!” (They’re right and they should say it: it is girl’s night, every night forever.)
Now, the Barbie movie is many things, but it is, first and foremost, an advertisement for a product – and I understand it may seem, well, silly to interrogate its deeper meanings and values, but I’m going to do that anyway. Here is the question I am interested in exploring: how does Barbie, as a text, understand the concept of becoming a woman? Is leaving girlhood a tragedy, or a triumph?
Well, it’s complicated, and imperfect – and no, I don’t just mean becoming a woman is complicated and imperfect. I mean that for all of Greta Gerwig’s tongue-in-cheek winking at the audience through the text and meta-text of the film (“Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make this point,” hahahaha shut up) I don’t think the film is fully allowed to explore its own thesis, and that’s a loss in my book.
Margot Robbie’s Barbie chooses at the end of the film to do the hard thing – to walk away from plastic perfection and embrace crusty, dirty, difficult reality. The final shot of the film, of “Barbara Handler” (aka human Barbie) smiling breathlessly as she announces, “I’m here to see my gynecologist!” loudly informs us that this woman has done it. She’s crossed over! She’s here. She’s here to see her gynecologist, arguably the least fun aspect of womanhood, and she’s excited about it because it’s hers, and it’s real, and she gets to do it.
Now, okay, I am not a trans woman who has gotten bottom surgery, but I suspect that this could be both very reductive, but perhaps also very relatable, to someone who is and who has, depending on the woman, depending on the day, so I don’t necessarily see this joke as transphobic despite it, sort of, you know, boiling “becoming a woman” down to “getting a vagina.” Look, when life gives you a vagina, congratulations, you know? Enjoy it, and take care of it, and do see a gynecologist. And, it’s funny, plastic Barbie’s don’t have genitals.
I just wish I’d also gotten to see Barbie explore any aspect of being a real person that wasn’t ham-fistedly about sex. Is that asking too much?
Maybe the answer is yes, but it’s a disservice to the film. And my problem with it is this: by reducing womanhood to mere comparison with manhood, you rob it of its deep, human, essence. Womanhood and manhood are more alike than they are different, because being a human person is really fucking hard. You have to, like, accept who you are and come to terms with the parts of yourself you can’t change, something Ken arguably has to grapple with much more explicitly than Barbie. Real women, real men – real human people – experience loss and heartache and love, and in giving up the plastic veneer, Barbie shouldn’t just get to go to the gynecologist. She should get to experience any and all of those things, too, or we aren’t really addressing what it means to be a person at all.
Now I feel the need to caveat: I didn’t really play with barbies as a child. I found them, well, boring, like all of the fun parts had already been done for me: figuring out where the character lives, who they are, what they’re up to. Sure, I went through the motions at daycare because the other girls loved it, but I always made things weird and they didn’t much like that. “How about Barbie gets pregnant,” I’d say, and I’d find something to put up her dress to give her a belly, and the other girls would look at me like I was an alien. Or, “How about Barbie has to fight a dragon, I’ll be the dragon,” and they would say, “We’re playing Barbie, not dragons,” and you can imagine how I felt about that.
(One of my best friends growing up actually loved Barbie; but he was a boy, and embraced concepts like, “Barbie has to poop,” so that made it okay somehow.)
Despite the fact that they were never my preferred toy, I do think that Barbie as a concept is innately tied to girlhood and I want to talk about that. Girlhood, of course, is a common predecessor to womanhood – though I would argue it’s neither required, nor inevitable, that the one follow the other. I identify strongly with girlhood, less so with womanhood; I know several women who didn’t get to have a girlhood at all, or who felt robbed of it prematurely.
Girlhood can exist without Barbie, but Barbie cannot and will not ever exist without girlhood. And, at least for modern Western girlhood, the girlhood I had and which many, many people around me had, girlhood doesn’t exist without Barbie; because Barbie is ever present, even when your mom tries to keep her out of your life. She’s just fucking everywhere.
For me, Barbie is emblematic of the things I didn’t know how to relate to. I didn’t want to care about dresses and shoes, I didn’t want to care about being pretty. And yet I did, I did care about those things, even as I couldn’t keep my dresses free of stains because I kept climbing trees in them. I did want the sparkly, pretty, pink, princess perfection that other girls declared their desire for so overtly. I just kept my desire for those things under a veneer of tomboyishness. I believed that not wanting those things made me deep, made me better than them, and the world reinforced that belief many times over.
This, to me, is what the ideal Barbieland girlhood really is: a world in which that tension does not have to be a contradiction – because the girl creating it is in total control.
Look, in my imagination – as in a painting, or a story, or a film – a girl can wear a sparkling dress and fight a dragon and not get that dress stained, and she can do that while being emotionally and intellectually capable. She can do all of it. It’s fine. It’s honestly not a big deal.
And in Barbieland, as in one’s girlhood imagination – as, you might say, in Eden – everything is perfect. So for Barbie to leave Barbieland, for her to, at the end of the film, become a woman, Barbie must come to terms with the difference between girlhood and womanhood.
For Barbie 2023, that gap contains a few very specific things: first and foremost, it contains the concept of death, which is the thing that first alerts Barbie that she has entered a crisis. Although this isn’t deeply explored, I believe that Greta has left us a nice little breadcrumb trail to follow, which leads us to the depth and truth she would have imbued this film with if it weren’t, you know, intended to be a rollicking good time above all else. When Barbie first enters the real world (with every intention of going back to Barbieland), she sits on a bench and stares at the elderly woman beside her in astonishment. “You’re beautiful,” Barbie says to her. “I know it!” says the old woman. Aging is part of womanhood. Death is inevitable. Let’s party.
Another thing the gap between girlhood and woman contains? Sexual violence. Barbie is cat-called, demeaned, and gets her ass slapped by a stranger. Are all of these things part of womanhood? Yes, I mean, sure, yeah, they definitely happen (to girls as well as women, I might add, though if I were to import that fact the whole metaphor between Barbieland and the Real World would break down) but are they inherent?
Please, don’t take me the wrong way – sexual violence against women is a very serious problem that I would love to make less prevalent in the world. What I’m asking here is: is this what womanhood is about? Are we really defined by what bad people do to us?
By defining most of the film as about Barbies and Kens, the film loses the opportunity to explore another set of questions. What about the part of growing up where you get to know who you really are, where you have agency to make choices, where you experience heartbreak and come out stronger? Or pursue a long-held goal, fail, try again, and succeed? Or be recognized for who you really are by someone who understands?
What about using that vagina to do something fun, like have an orgasm, rather than just going to the doctor?
It is clear to me that the movie actually wanted to explore some of those things. When Margot Robbie decides to be human, we are shown a montage of women and girls, real women and girls, and are left to conclude that Barbie is excited to get to be among them. As a Pygmalion, she has crossed over from being someone else’s creation to being her own.
There’s just one problem. Whose is that? Who is Barbie?
I feel like I don’t really know! And that’s too bad. I would have liked to.
Anyway, it’s girls’ night tonight so I gotta go – let me know what you thought of Barbie, and what you think it means to become a woman, in the comments.