THE Barbie cinematic juggernaut has made headlines around the world; in Karachi, Pakistan, it sold out for two solid weeks after its opening. Many girls and women have been going to see the film, dressed in pink and enjoying its colourful vibe.

In Pakistan, all movies must be viewed and approved by both a federal and provincial censor board. The renowned Pakistani art movie Joyland, which centres on a transgender love story, had last year been approved, then banned, then approved, but with significant cuts only in my home province of Sindh and Islamabad, the capital. Joyland was outright banned in Punjab, whose censor board reflects Punjab’s more conservative religious, cultural and social attitudes.

Barbie nearly met a similar fate as Joyland: it was approved for Sindh, but banned by Punjab for “objectionable content”, then reviewed and cleared after said content was censored. We still do not know what that objectionable content is. I’d made a point of seeing Joyland to show my support for freedom of speech and the arts. I would do the same for Barbie, especially if it annoyed the supporters of the patriarchy. Besides, I didn’t want to miss out on what has been billed as the movie of the year, a box office smash and the first movie to be called a “feminist blockbuster”.

I’m not a Barbie fan. In my childhood, I’d been forced to play with Barbies just because she was marketed as the ubiquitous toy of choice for anyone of the female persuasion. She was everywhere, inescapable. Like many other girls of my generation, I loved Tinkertoys, reading books, and playing frisbee and soccer with the boys in my school. Barbie was for girls and only girls; I wanted to live life in all its possibilities, not recreate it with dolls, confined to safe bedrooms with other well-behaved little girls.

The writers never tell us how restoring Barbieland to sanity will change anything in reality.

This was 1980s Pakistan, where Gen Zia was bending the very fabric of society and politics to make a culturally diverse and socially progressive country fit his fundamentalist, distorted version of an Islamic state. While Pakistani women were being told to stay within the four walls of the house and the confines of the chador or burqa, Barbie said I could be “anything I wanted”. While women were being beaten in the streets as they protested the Hudood Ordinances, I was meant to play with a bathing-suit clad Barbie and make her spend time with her boyfriend Ken. It engendered such cognitive dissonance in me that I soon grew to hate Barbie.

Back to the Barbie movie, which portrays the pink, happy world of Barbie perfectly, with all the costumes and accessories and the carefree life of a Barbie surrounded by her accomplished Barbie friends and acquiescent Kens. Despite this girl power message, I was unable to agree with the central premise of the movie and Mattel’s marketing strategy for the last 40 years: that Barbie is a feminist icon, and that buying her for your daughter really sticks it to the patriarchy. I walked out of the theatre feeling that if my feminism has to shrink enough to fit the world of Barbie, it isn’t really feminism.

Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, has disturbing thoughts of imminent death, develops flat feet and cellulite, then goes to Los Angeles where she finds out the world is actually dominated by men. Worse, the Kens bring the patriarchy back to Barbieland. The solution is to take America Ferrerra and her prickly tween daughter back to rescue brainwashed Barbies from now-dominant Kens; this will have a positive ripple effect in the real world. It’s either read as a weak plot, or a sophisticated dystopia/uptopia thought experiment betrayed by having to stay faithful to the Barbie brand. Either way, the writers never tell us how restoring Barbieland to sanity will change anything in reality.

A fictional CEO and board of Mattel appear as goofy characters in the movie, just to remind us that the actual corporation and the film studio are both in on the joke. This made me think of Taffy Brodesser Akner’s magnificent novel Fleishman is in Trouble, in which the she writes that women’s stories have to be “Trojan-horsed” onto men’s stories in order to be heard. The Barbie movie is like that, except it’s capitalism, Trojan-horsed into a story about feminism so that tickets and more toys and merchandise can be bought by you, and you can be bought, in turn, by Mattel.

All girls, whether they play with Barbie or not, have a rude awakening when they grow up and find out that they’re second-class citizens; that glass ceilings, unequal pay, and sexual assault exist in this world. Making Barbie more diverse, or more feminist, or more reflective of the girls whose parents are buying them, does not turn Barbie into a magic weapon that can change the world. Besides, in today’s Pakistan, what average child’s family can even afford an expensive, imported Barbie doll?

Speaking of dolls, I’m reminded of the case of Rizwana, the girl sent to work as a domestic slave in a judge’s household who was nearly beaten to death by her employer. As she lies in a hospital, fighting for her life, Sarah Ahmed, the chairperson of the Child Welfare and Protection Bureau in Punjab, has made it her personal mission to achieve justice for Rizwana. Meanwhile, the child rights activist Nadia Jamil went to visit her and asked her what she wanted to play with. Rizwana asked for dolls; Nadia went to the market and bought her four of them, which Rizwana has arranged on her bed to keep her company in her lonely convalescence. None of those four dolls was a Barbie.

The writer is an author.

Twitter: @binashah

Published in Dawn, August 14th, 2023