I want everybody who’s calling Ken a Trophy Husband to know that he’s actually a Trophy Boyfriend, because when Ruth Handler invented Ken in the 1960s, she was adamant that he would never marry her and instead be her “handsome steady”, so that Barbie remained a figure of independence for the little girls and was never put in the position of housewife.
Her house is hers. She bought it and furnished it with money she made in her own job. In STEM, in politics, in healthcare, in fashion, in academy, in customer service. Her credit card is in her name (women in the US couldn’t have their own regardless of marital status until 1974). And it’s all pink and fashionable because femininity and badassness aren’t mutually exclusive. No matter who you are, you can be anything.
That’s why Barbie’s slogan is “you can be anything”. Teaching these ideals to little girls is why Barbie was created. Empowering women and empowering femininity is the original meaning of the Barbie doll. It’s not that you have to be all this to be a woman, but if you are all or some of this, you too are awesome.
And somehow pop culture deliberately changed that narrative. Sexualised, bimbofied, and villainised her, when she actually isn’t responsible for the impossible beauty standards — people are, she’s just a stylised, not-to-scale toy like most others.
Men are frothing because he’s just Ken and I guess they were expecting her to be just Barbie, but that’s exactly what Ken is. Canonically. A badass woman’s himbo boyfriend.
This movie has the potential to change the way we collectively see Barbie radically into what Ruth Handler’s intended, I’m so very excited
It’s also important that while her physical proportions have been subject to a lot of criticism for being unrealistic (and they are), there’s a reason she has an exaggeratedly hourglass figure. Ruth Handler wanted to make it explicitly clear that this was an adult woman. Not a baby doll or any kind of doll that encouraged a little girl to pretend to be its mother. The whole reason she created Barbie was because her daughter only had baby dolls and no adult dolls that would let her pretend to be something other than a mother or maybe babysitter.
Investors were hesitant to back a doll that had boobs. Because a doll having boobs might be construed as being sexual! But Ruth was like “women have boobs, there’s nothing wrong with boobs, fuck off with your combo body-and-slut-shaming.” (Note that later in her life, Ruth Handler also invented fake breasts for women who’d undergone a mastectomy due to breast cancer - obviously there are problems with equating boobs with womanhood, but in a time when women were largely supposed to have them & be sexy with them BUT simultaneously be ashamed to have them, she saw them as an empowering symbol of femininity.)


















