Barbie and the Feminist Gaze

Erasing Men, Class, and Intellectual Property Theft in an Entertaining Gender Reductionist Fantasy

Nelson Tiffany, Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0

Any discussion of Barbie should start with this fact: its “real world” is as artificial as Barbie Land and maybe more. It looks like the real Los Angeles but its inhabitants aren’t real people. Its Mattel has an all-male board of yes-men who serve Will Ferrell’s buffoonish CEO, and its construction workers hassle women with cartoon sexism that makes them seem like they stepped out of a late-60s Hollywood hippiesploitation flick.

Or perhaps the discussion should start with the decision to erase Jack Ryan, the man who designed Barbie and made millions from his patents on the dolls. The movie promotes Ruth Handler’s creation myth in which she was a mother concerned for her daughter growing up in a sexist world, so she made a doll who could become anyone and named it for her daughter. It’s a sweet story.

Jack Ryan’s patent for Barbie, filed July 24, 1959

But Jack Ryan’s story is equally sweet: a man designs a beautiful doll and names it for his wife, Barbara Ryan. Ryan’s myth is at least as credible as Handler’s because he held the patent on another Mattel toy, the…