FemBookSoc: Barbie and feminism

Every ideology needs a vocabulary, and as Clemmie P's session on the language of the Manosphere made terrifyingly clear: misogyny has its own argot. Women are femoids (a portmanteau suggesting that women are less than human) or AWFUL (an acronym standing for A White Female Urban Liberal) or hamsters (a metaphor suggesting women are irrational).

Men are taught that they live in a Matrix (a false reality) which favours women over men and they must take the red pill (wake up) and morph from a soy boy (a liberal male who doesn't just eat red meat caveman-style) to a MOG of high SMV (I've given up translating at this point).

Fascinating linguistically as this is, words are not neutral and this vocabulary poses a very real threat to the women of today. It is a distorting language which justifies sexual violence and preaches a debased value system in which biceps, bank balances and 'body counts' are the only markers of success. It is also a language which, as Louis Theroux's documentary on the Manosphere showed, countless young men are using to explain their social and economic disenfranchisement. 

Unexpectedly the multi-million dollar Barbie movie franchise, starring the unfeasibly long-legged and large-busted plastic doll, provides an unexpected counter to the world of the manosphere. Emilie K made a compelling case that, barely concealed beneath the pink and sparkles, these movies encode feminist and Marxist messaging about female heroism, sisterly solidarity and corrupting power of wealth and influence. Barbie may be just what today's little girls need to help them navigate and rebuff a world which is as dangerous for women as it ever was.