I wish I was taller. I wish I was a baller. I wish my cat had a phone I would call her.

Young Americans who like guns are more likely to endorse male supremacy: very predictable finding

Young Americans who like guns are more likely to trust the police: much spicier finding, that’ll be a fun grenade to drop in the discourse pot

The overlap of "I want a police force to protect my property" and "I want to use a gun to protect my property"

We for real for real for realsies have to popularize the term smith college problem . And normalize telling people they’re having a smith college problem . And if you’re always posting about smith college problems it is your duty to normalize going oh okay never mind once people tell you that you are smith college problem posting

problem: people assume that I’m non-binary just because I’m a woman with a shaved head. This is a reductive harmful and widespread approach to gender identity that people need to grapple with and work on.

Answer: you are having a Smith College Problem. If you live anywhere in the world that is not the dorms on a women’s college campus you won’t have this issue. If you lived anywhere else in the world you would be having issues like sure hope I don’t experience hiring discrimination for being a woman with a shaved head. Sure hope I don’t get called a slur on the street for being a woman with a shaved head.

Problem: when a character gets a love interest of another sex people complain because they headcanoned them as queer and now they’re confirmed straight. This is an erasure of bisexuality becuase you can date other sexes and still be same sex attracted because you’re bisexual.

Answer: you are having a Smith College Problem. You’re not critiquing reactions to a student film festival. You’re critiquing reactions to very main stream media funded by corporations who want to make money at all costs. This corporation is not trying to give you nuanced bisexual representation. This corporation is cutting gay readings off at the knee because when it did the coin flip on whether or not pink dollars are worth it the answer was no.

The cynical part of my brain left Barbie thinking, wow, what an incredible brand move. Not only has Mattel placed their product back into the front of the public’s mind, reminding their now-aging fans of what a great toy Barbie could be for their own young daughters, but they’ve also gotten out ahead of all of the criticism they’ve faced. Barbie has long been (correctly!) attacked by feminists for enforcing stereotypes of femininity, physically impossible body standards, etc. The movie directly acknowledges these criticisms without ever resolving them, instead just turning around to say, actually, there’s a lot of liberatory value in Barbie, in choosing your own fate despite the stereotypes applied to you. Now any attempt at (correctly!) criticizing the brand can be met with a perfunctory “don’t you know they already addressed this!” even though they didn’t really, it just seems like they did because one character mentioned it once in the licensed film

To be fair to Greta Gerwig. The movie ends with Barbie (the character) refusing to be a commodity because she finds it dehumanizing. It refutes the idea that Barbie (the commodity) was a good role model when not only do the roles it models of positions of power in the real world remain dominated by men, but asserts that Mattel's sale and marketing of Barbie (the commodity) did some amount of harm by commodifying a set of stereotypes about women. It refutes the idea that individual choices are enough to overthrow the material systems reifying patriarchy (as with pointing out that it will take "the Kens" about as long to reach meaningful positions of political power without material change as it is for women in the real world), acknowledges that the limits of cultural critiques are material systems of power (as with the CEO of Mattel keeping his "very real" job and salary), and asserts that the motivations of this reification of patriarchy are men who want to maintain easier access to higher salaries and political power (as with Ken looking for a job and lamenting his need for some other qualification beyond maleness). And, most importantly, the heart of its message is that choice feminism fails in the face of societal pressure and reified patriarchal power which makes unintrusive, apolitical change based on a set of personal choices impossible.

That said, you're entirely correct. While acknowledging that material systems entrench patriarchy, the movie never actually demands material change. The Barbies (the other characters of the same name) remain commodities despite this being dehumanizing; the movie never calls for an end to Barbie dolls (the commodities) despite the stereotypes that the product embodies. It asserts that it is bad that our political-economic system so thoroughly entrenches patriarchal ideals, without calling for its transformation or dismantling in either the real world or the mirror world of Barbieland.

At its heart, then, Barbie (the movie) is a cultural critique without a call for material change. Its cultural critique is potent and necessary, and criticizes the political-economic system reifying patriarchy of which Mattel, Inc. is a part. But it never takes the logical next step that the systems enforcing patriarchal power ought to be dismantled - and in this, the message of Barbie (the movie/ commodity/ advertisement) is easily co-opted and sold by Mattel.

I don't think the movie was intended as a call to action though, or to challenge its role as an advertisement for Mattel. Instead, it's an observation on what life is like for women and men under patriarchy. Two fish swim in a barrel. One happily thinks it lives in the ocean, the other unhappily recognizes it lives in a barrel. Barbie (the movie) is the fish recognizing they live in a barrel and the hypocrisy of acting like they live in the ocean without asking how they might escape the barrel.

i fucking hate it here

apparently you're not supposed to let fear control you 😭 that bitch is at the steering wheel!!!!!

I'm going to need y'all to preemptively chill out because the actor's strike is going to mean a lot of things including shows and movies we've been anticipating being pushed way back, and absolutely minimal press tours for the next however long this lasts.

The effects of the writer's strike are months down the road which made it a whole lot easier to support because as third parties we weren't really being affected (yet), the effect of the actor's strike is going to be immediate and we're going to get a lot more propaganda of "these people are overpaid to begin with."

Remember our desire for content does not supersede these people's rights to live.

Support unions, support the strikes.

jesus fucking christ

"i wish i could do something 😔 / i wish the wga had a kickstarter or a gofundme, i would throw money at it" good news! it's amazing how you can literally go onto the wga strike website or the wgawest linktree from their twitter and find links to support writers and other workers affected by the strike

inaccurate, they will survive.

can someone please make it so the cats spit the fireball back and forth

What we’ve gotta understand is that “the modern Internet is abolishing spaces for adults” and “the modern Internet is abolishing space for children” are compatible phenomena. Neither group is being favoured: the modern Internet is abolishing spaces for adults (i.e., because grown-up topics aren’t advertiser friendly) and the modern Internet is abolishing spaces for children (i.e., because online communities which consist principally of people who have no money are hard to sell things to). The Internet that contemporary corporate interests are trying to build isn’t a space for anyone – it’s the digital equivalent of an Ikea showroom.

the new yorker (left) vs new york times (right) explanations of this particular factoid are like such a perfect microcosm of why so much journalism sucks so bad