Barbie's Beauty Standards

Even plastic, hyper-processed, sterile "humans" are haunted by duality

The Barbie movie, which releases on July 21, isn’t a kids’ film. It’s overtly aimed at over-13s and tackles adult themes: corporate greed, body image, fear of mortality. According to director Greta Gerwig, it’s also a feminist story. Barbie is expelled from Barbie World after finding she’s falling short of that world’s artificial beauty standards, first discovering cellulite on her legs and then - shock horror - that her feet aren’t permanently hyper-extended to fit ultra-high heels like those of a “real” (ie plastic) Barbie.

Who is real? Who is really plastic? What is reality anyway? It’s all very witty. But one burning question seems importantly unanswered: where do baby Barbies come from?

In Feminism Against Progress I set out to extend Ivan Illich’s arguments on “vernacular gender” and “economic sex” to the era of AI and biotech. For Illich, the destruction of vernacular gender - an irreducibly dual lifeworld characterised by pervasively gendered work, tools, gestures and even foods - is a key precondition for our entry into industrial modernity. But the end of ‘vernacular gender’ wasn’t the end of sex dimorphism, because men and women still exist. Instead, our duality returns, in far more profoundly discriminatory form, as “economic sex”: an order that, in Illich’s term, is “both genderless and sexist”. Think of the female erasure baked into “unisex” tools, facilities, medical standards and so on, as exhaustively documented by Caroline Criado Perez in Invisible Women.

It’s my view that a central enabling condition of our departure from the industrial to the cyborg era is the effort to abolish economic sex as well. The vehicle for that abolition is a new wave of biotech interventions, that appear to resolve previously irreducible sex asymmetries - most centrally, that of the reproductive roles of men and women. Regular readers will know my argument that contraception, underwritten as a last resort by legal abortion, is our entry-point into the transhumanist age and signals the transformation of feminism into bio-libertarianism.

In turn, this transhumanist era appears, at least in theory, as our liberation from economic sex. This promised flattening of reproductive asymmetry sets a new, normatively both ‘genderless’ and ‘sexless’ standard for how men and women are understood to exist in relation to one another. It’s an order of total optionality, in which interdependence is presumptively viewed as oppressive, unless freely and continually chosen.

But if sex asymmetry returns as “economic sex” even in the supposedly “genderless economics” of modernity, so too sex asymmetry returns even after we turn our technologies on ourselves in an effort to eliminate economic sex. And one of the phenomena that reveals this is Barbie feminism. This worldview was perhaps first and most influentially popularised in Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 Sex and the Single Girl, which sold 2 million copies in 3 weeks when it was first published and as such was arguably the first and most influential expression of this worldview. In the book, Gurley Brown offers advice on work, dating, parties, clothing, personal grooming, sex, having affairs with married men and much else besides, arguing that marriage and children should be rejected in favour of the rich, passionate, and fulfilling life.

Gurley Brown asserts, from her own example, that you can have it all: she married at 37, and had a family. And prior to supposedly attaining this, there’s a rich and fulfilling single life - in which total optionality reigns: an optionality that has no space for the exigencies of childbirth, let alone the obligations called forth by dependent infants. Nowhere in the book does she mention birth control, but the lifestyle paradigm she eulogises would not be easily attainable without it.

Not everyone, as we know now, manages to have it all as Gurley Brown did: the proportion of never-married and childless men and women continues to rise. Some Barbie feminists frame this explicitly as overall a positive change, and childlessness as a feminist cause. But even among those who merely downplay this worldview’s constitutive sterility, the Gurley Brown feminism of women as high-earning, high-spending, well-groomed, materially abundant and sterile by default still finds itself haunted by sex difference.

This is evidenced by the persistence of that kind of feminism Gerwig promises in the Barbie movie, for example a critique of sexual mores, of unrealistic beauty standards for women, or of the draining-away of masculine agency for men. In the movie Barbie gets cellulite. Ken, played by Ryan Gosling, declares: “My job is…just beach”. He is explicitly framed as secondary, a sidekick: in other words profoundly unmanly in traditional terms, even as the movie’s styling ironises and interrogates his emasculation.

Barbie, then, expresses a mounting anxieties about the haunting of post-sex, post-human “equality” by the spectre of our duality, and of our no-longer-salient but still-persistent sexed differences. And this anxiety isn’t confined to Barbie world. As work becomes “unisex”, cartoonish masculine and feminine styles of presentation have emerged, for example in the inflated biceps of the “deano” and his wife’s Brazilian butt lift. Studies show men and women lean more vigorously into masculinity and femininity, as technology flattens the material exigencies (such as manual labour or the need to breastfeed infants) that previously nudged us toward divergent sex roles.

But even as this grows cartoonish, it all still looks weightless. And this won’t change, as long as Barbie feminism refuses to interrogate the central fact of our duality: how we make babies. No “feminist” message will succeed in tackling the gap between shiny appearance and fleshy reality, if it swerves the question of fertility. In real life, female beauty is inseparable from our reproductive role. We may sometimes chafe against this fact, but the female attributes that make men stare are robustly correlated with youth and fertility: perky boobs, a trim waist, elastic skin and good muscle tone. Conversely, too, male sexual desire is intensified by embodied features of male physiology, including testosterone levels. The telos of sexuality is, for men and women, the creation of new men and women.

To the extent that we reject the central premise that sexuality does (or should have) a telos of this kind, we will swiftly find ourselves disoriented - and, in the case of women, radically uncertain as to the point of ‘feminism’ as such. If Barbie is anything to go by, this anxiety is now ambient in the culture - as is awareness of its logical conclusion. Hari Nef, the transgender actor who plays ‘Doctor Barbie’, leaned into this explicitly in the Twitter thread announcing the role: “We started calling ourselves ‘the dolls’”, writes Nef, “speculating that perhaps “it’s a bid to ratify our femininity” and acknowledging that “underneath the word “doll” is the shape of a woman who is not quite a woman - recognizable as such, but still a fake”.

Nef is right to draw out this ambivalent relationship between femininity, artificiality, and an imagined “authentic” woman. For Barbie feminism isn't able to make a meaningful distinction between plastic femininity and the kind that could in theory produce new life. Understood as ordered to reproduction, “beauty” can have infinite cultural resonances while still pointing ultimately to something other than itself: children, ageing, and ultimately death, albeit with a living legacy. But stripped of that telos, “beauty standards” are an abstract property of synthetic, plastic and ultimately sexless dolls.

As anyone who has ever owned a Barbie will recall, both she and Ken are plastic, hollow, and smooth below the waist. They are only sexually dimorphic in the most superficial sense: there is no telos beyond wearing or using consumer products. And within this paradigm there really is no difference between a Hari Nef “doll” and a woman. This has been extensively theorised, in turn, by leading trans activists. In From Transgender to Transhuman, the 2011 “manifesto for freedom of form” written by trans activist Martine Rothblatt elaborates a vision of the end of feminism as, in effect, the abolition of sexed duality:

[A]s long as surrogate motherhood is legally available, the relevance of women's monopoly on gestation disappears. Gestation becomes a commodity. […] Feminism tells us that the differences between sexual biology are irrelevant to socioeconomic behavior. And science tells us that the differences between sexual biology are remarkably few and disappearing rapidly.

In the place of feminism, Rothblatt envisages the re-orientation of feminism’s equality goal to a kind of protean, radically commodified total plasticity. It’s a vision in which even the most fundamental features of sex dimorphism become “a commodity”, leading - per Rothblatt - to “the full cultural liberation of all people”, and eventually radical “freedom of form”.

Most liberal feminists resist thinking through the implications of this Promethean direction of travel, arguing instead that re-connecting “woman” to the female reproductive role, amounts to “reducing women to their genitals” or framing us solely as “breeders”. It’s not a baseless anxiety, in that there really are fringe conservatives who seem genuinely determined to unperson women in this way. This recent report from Hands Across The Aisle founder Kaeley Triller Harms of just such an encounter gives a sense of what that feels like up close, even for a conservative woman. This is a non-trivial pitfall of sex realism. But unless we acknowledge embodied reproductive difference, there’s nowhere to go except Barbie feminism: that is, bio-libertarianism plus rampant, empty consumerism.

It can seem at times that this is ineluctable. But I don’t think this is necessarily true, and the Barbie movie gestures at why. Even wholly immersed in the plastic, superficial, consumer Barbie World, the movie’s protagonists are haunted by everything that was evacuated to enable their transition to doll-life. And in “real” life too, most of us are still reluctant to do everything we’d have to do, to realise ourselves entirely as emancipated in Barbie-world terms: that is, to become fully hollow and featureless below the waist, with all traces of inner life and embodied generativity eliminated.

The founding precondition of Barbie feminism may be hollowness and sterility. But again and again, the question reasserts itself: what about death, or love, or legacy? And beyond this, encompassing it all: what, in truth, are we for?