Is a blonde doll worth all the geopolitics textbooks? Biggest hit of the year with $1.3 billion in revenue at the end of August, Barbie acted as an incredible revealer of the state of the world. A Rorschach test, tinged with pink, on a global scale, in which each ideological camp or each country has detected its obsessions.
In the West, the debates have confirmed, to the point of caricature, the ideological divisions and the cultural war around feminism. On the one hand, conservatives castigated the film’s “wokism”. American host Ben Shapiro devoted a 43-minute rant to it, saying it was “explicitly designed to divide men and women”. For Eric Naulleau, it is “freewheeling misandry”, while Le Figaro Vox warned against “neo-feminist propaganda”. Ironically, some of the so-called “neo-feminists” have also criticized Greta Gerwig’s feature film.
For sociologist Aurore Koechlinauthor of The gynecological standard, the fact that Barbie at the end recovers a sexed body would represent an unwelcome “return of the biological” opposing gender as a social construction. In countless forums and exegeses, academics have mostly commented on their favorite bogeyman: capitalism. According to Audrey Milletresearcher at the University of Oslo and author of Woke-washing, Barbie “shows how capitalism and ‘white collar’ gobble up political and social demands. Mattel and Warner Bros swallow and chew on the woke trend, distribute a second-class feminist message and present a patriarchy as sweet as a marshmallow.”
Phenomenon in China as in Saudi Arabia
In China, where patriarchy is not theoretical, Barbie unleashed passions when the number of rooms was initially limited, sparking a debate on gender inequalities. If for Mao Zedong, “women carry half the sky”, the #MeToo movement has been systematically censored by Beijing. Since 2022, no more women have appeared in the Politburo of the Communist Party, a first for twenty-five years. Rarely, the labor force participation rate of Chinese women aged 15 to 64 has been falling steadily for thirty years, falling from 79% in 1990 to 71% in 2021. Faced with the declining birth rate, their place, depending on the regime, is more and more at home. But the film also illustrated the tensions between China and its neighbors. Vietnam banned it due to the presence of a map that appears to validate China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. In the Philippines, the administrations of several ministries debated for a week before authorizing it, simply asking Warner Bros to blur the card in question.
In Saudi Arabia, Mattel’s doll is a hit in an unamended version and illustrates the dramatic changes in the Wahhabi kingdom. Until eight years ago, women could not drive, cinemas were banned, while religious police patrolled the streets to ensure gender segregation. “The fatal blow was the abolition of this religious police,” said sociologist Arnaud Lacheret. This specialist in the Gulf countries and associate professor at the Skema Business School compares the social revolution pushed by the authoritarian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) to that of Mustafa Kemal in Turkey a century ago. “Saudi society follows, because MBS has felt his blow, being close in age to a majority of society [NDLR : les moins de 30 ans représentent presque deux tiers de la population]. It should also not be forgotten that Saudi Arabia has few rural areas, with 70% of people concentrated in the three major cities. Many are studying, because social assistance linked to oil revenues has been cut.” Arnaud Lacheret, who gives lessons in Saudi Arabia, claims to see these changes on a monthly basis. “In January, I still had a separate class . When I came back in March, it was mixed, with many unveiled women. With each stay, I come across at least one female Uber driver.”
When a doll contradicts Huntington
Barbie was banned by the film censorship committee of Kuwait, proof of the religious radicalization of the emirate. This does not prevent Kuwaitis from going to see the film in Saudi Arabia, or in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Long one of the most liberal countries in the Middle East and a pioneer in the Pride March, Lebanon is also one of the censors. “This film goes against the moral and religious values of Lebanon, as it encourages perversity and the transformation of the sexes while calling for the rejection of patriarchal guardianship and ridiculing the role of mothers”, declared the Minister of Mohammad Mortada culture. Hezbollah, a pro-Iranian Shiite party, launched a violent homophobic campaign this summer, even as the country faces the worst economic crisis in its history. But the representatives of Christian communities also share this fight against homosexuality.
In Algeria, Barbie was canceled after three weeks of screening, with theaters sold out. “As usual, Algeria acted by mimicry. The film was censored in Kuwait and Lebanon and suddenly Algeria woke up saying that it has to be the case here too”, lamented the director Sofia Djama. In Cameroon, the authorities also cracked down after several weeks of theatrical release due to the “promotion of homosexuality” penalized in the country. In these African states, prohibitions are above all a godsend for piracy, while cinemas are few in number.
The mixed reception of Barbie on different continents confirms that, far from forming homogeneous civilizational blocks, societies evolve according to the local political situation. Like a paradoxical Muslim world, both remarkable progress and regression are always possible. Enough to deny the geographical fatalism dear to Samuel Huntington and Eric Zemmour.