Barbie, Objectification, and the Internet

I saw the movie Barbie today. Some of the themes reminded me of a blog post that I’d been thinking about writing. I don’t want to spoil the plot or themes of the movie. It’s very good! Go see it! So I’ll just write the blog post I was thinking about, and then maybe expand on the idea of the relation to Barbie later.

In the patriarchy, women are often objectified for their beauty. In modeling and acting, women are often implicitly objectified for men’s consumption. But also in the patriarchy, men are often objectified for their status, money, and power. I wrote in a previous post about the relationship between ideal forms and gender, and how people adopt these ideal forms as goals, certain beauty, power, or other expectations.

Online, we often don’t see people’s humanity. We fail to see men and women as complex, complete human beings, instead we see them as sex objects, or money objects, or power objects. Maybe that’s partly out of necessity, because I don’t have the time to know everything about everyone, all of the time. We see 144 characters of them, or a photo on Facebook, or in the news. We think to ourselves, “Wow, what an outrageous, horrible thing this person said or did. They must be a bad person!” or, “What a ridiculous photo or stupid thing this person did, let’s laugh at them!”

One potential solution to this objectification of people via the internet is existentialism. Existentialism was a philosophical movement born in response to the trauma of the Great Depression and World War II. Existentialism focuses on people’s humanness, the joys, heartbreak, and absurdity of human life. Barbie comes from the same historical line as plays like, Waiting for Godot by Beckett and Rosencrantz and Guildentsern Are Dead by Stoppard, bringing existentialism and absurdity into the 21^st century, focusing on the contradictions, social norms, and individual expectations and goals of being a woman or man in the internet age. It will be a classic.