The two genders: Scary and scared

 Lately, my social media feed has been dominated by these man vs bear memes. Would you rather be alone in the forest with a man or a bear? Often, the situation is quite under-described. There are bears in the forests where I live, but despite lots of hiking I never see any; they keep to themselves. In general, I'm neither afraid of random bears nor random hikers regardless of the latter's gender. However, the memes sometimes ask whether you'd rather meet a man or a bear when alone in the forest. If a bear walked towards me on the trail, that would be hella weird bear behaviour and I'd be scared. And some posters explicitly say that the bear might be dangerous, might attack and maul them, but even so - that's nothing compared to what you'd expect ... uh ... some random hiker dude to do to you? What the fuck, people. 

I discussed this with a couple of American colleagues the other day (colleagues who belong to the same gender as me - by which I mean the scared one, see further below for explanation). Lots of women have been victims of rape and physical assault. These are, sadly, common crimes. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, the perpetrator was the woman's partner or another man she knows. Stranger rape is rare. As a matter of fact, men are much more likely than women to be victims of violence from strangers. (Of course, statistics can vary over time and between countries, but this is a really strong pattern in Sweden, the US, and many other places.) Thus, if these constant violence warnings were based on actual risks, men would be told to stay at home so they don't get hurt, whereas women would be told to stay single.
But the warnings are not based on facts. They're based on traditional gender roles (which makes it highly ironic that so many feminists share these memes). Men are supposed to be strong and invulnerable and not have to worry about being victimized, while women are supposed to be little damsels in perpetual distress. And, of course, women aren't supposed to be out and about so much. Your place is in the kitchen, ladies! Not out in public. Or the woods. 

The man vs bear thing is the latest, but not the only viral thing of this kind. I remember how this thing went around social media a few years ago, where women wrote of what they would do if all men got a curfew or all men got locked up somewhere. Women then proceeded to list perfectly normal stuff that I already do without a second thought. 

Now, stranger rape does happen. If someone is extremely scared of unknown men because they or someone close to them have been through this, it would be a real dick move to rub statistics in their face and say it's nothing to worry about. It's like serious car crashes that maim or kill people; they're not very common, but it would be a real dick move to rub statistics in the face of someone who had been hurt in a crash. The big difference is that no one expects everyone to be terrified of cars. No one asks me "wow, you have a car? That you drive in? Aren't you scared that you'll get hurt or die? No matter how well you drive, you never know when you'll meet a drunk in a two-ton jeep who comes driving full speed at the wrong side of the road, and then it's game over! I really don't understand how you dare." 

But people do ask these really absurd questions re stranger rape. For instance, I once had to go from the bus station to my then-house via a pitch dark forest path and I didn't have a light with me. I thought well, worst case scenario is that I get lost, which is gonna suck, because then I'll have to freeze my arse off waiting for sunrise, when I'll find my way again. But I can probably find my way home by what little moon light there is and by feeling my way along. And I did.
When I mentioned this to some other people later, I was asked whether I wasn't scared of being attacked.
Let's unpack this, shall we? It's a little path. Through the forest. That a couple of people a day takes. So this would-be rapist hides behind a tree, for hours or days even, freezing his balls off, on the off chance that a lone woman will walk by? That's the scenario you think it makes sense to worry about?
I was even asked, once, whether I'm not scared of taking long walks alone on the frozen sea in the winter. It's the sea! Which is, famously, quite flat! I can see for kilometers that there's no one coming to attack me! Am I supposed to worry about the possibility that some rapist has donned an isolating snowsuit, buried himself in a small mound of snow, breathing through a straw, on the off chance that a lone woman will walk by?
When I worry about demons hiding in mirrors, then I'm "insane" and should "take my meds", but worrying about arctic snow-burrowing rapists is apparently quite normal and sane. 

You can't talk about how all women spend their lives in constant fear of stranger rape, you can't keep asking women who don't do so why they're not more afraid and how dare they, without creating a norm. When we talk like this, we're not just describing a state of affairs that already exists, we contribute to making women unnecessarily afraid, and making women needlessly restrict their lives. 

Another example from an online discussion: It started with a woman writing about how some guy groped her in the metro. She didn't protest, and felt bad about not doing so afterwards. She wanted to initiate a discussion about the problematic psychological obstacles that prevent many people from simply going "Hey! Get your hand off my arse! Fuck off!"
In so many ways, people in general and women in particular are socialized into being nice and polite and people-pleasers. We're socialized into giving people the benefit of the doubt rather than getting pissed off ("maybe his hand just happened to brush on ..."). Children are often taught, from a young age, that it's wrong to protest against being hugged even if they feel uncomfortable, they should put up with all kinds of unwanted physical affection - but even if said unwanted affection isn't sexual at all, it merely comes from adults who think the kid is so cute, this type of socialization often spills over and makes it harder to object against unwanted sexual touching too.
These are real and important problems to discuss. However, another woman complained that men can't understand how scared you become when groped, and how impossible it is to just tell someone off "but maybe if we compared being groped to having someone threaten you with a knife, men might understand what it's like".
Okay. If someone pulls a knife at you, they might seriously hurt or even kill you. Depending on the details of the case, the safest course of action might be to be as quiet and passive as possible so as not to further provoke the knife-wielder. Your life is on the line!
Now, which message do we send if we say that being groped in the metro is like being threatened with a knife? That it's not only psychologically difficult to protest, but dangerous to do so. You'd better do nothing when you're groped.
Ten-thousand dollar question: Who gains if women believe that they shouldn't protest when someone gropes them in the metro? Is it
a) women?
or
b) metro gropers?

Moreover, whereas some men feel bad about being painted with this broad more-dangerous-than-a-bear-brush, others love this meme and happily share it around. Love it in a kind of ... iffy way. 

It's possible to have empathy and compassion with people you respect and consider your equals when they're going through a rough time. This is an important part of friendship and other close relationships! But it's also possible to pity people and offer your help in a condescending way; here, let me, who's so much more powerful than you and so much better off, gracefully lend you a hand. Here, you poor little creature, you don't need to cry anymore! Your betters have to come rescue you.
I think most people who consider themselves feminists and committed to social justice recognize how problematic it can be when white wealthy influencers travel to some poor country to, say, build a school or what-not - they might not know much about building houses, but these poor things should be grateful for any help they get. Cue selfies with little African children, look at this poor little child, how sad his life is! Fortunately, I'm here to make things better. Smile for the camera, kid! I wish more people cared about these poor, unfortunate souls as much as I do.
Sometimes, when men talk about how much they pity women and how important it is that men help women, there's a similar vibe.

I've seen people share a post by some man who says that it's wrong for men to feel insulted when women say they prefer to meet the bear. Instead, strong, powerful men like himself must listen to those poor, scared little women when they speak about their plight. Men must appreciate how terribly hard it is to be a weak, helpless woman. For instance, he remembers this time when he was simply walking down the street, minding his own business, and spotted a woman further ahead. She realized that a man walked on the same street as her, and he could tell from her body language that she became terrified! As a strong, powerful man, his mere presence suffices to scare every woman within a hundred meter radius absolutely shitless!
He's pretty much like the Old Testament God, whose mere presence is enough to make mortals tremble. Not his comparison, it's mine, but it struck me while reading this post. Of course, he writes that it's horrible that women are so scared of men, they shouldn't have to be - it's hard to be a god, as the Strugatsky brothers said. Nevertheless, the post goes on, in the patriarchal world in which we live, it's only natural that women react like this to any man who appears in their vicinity. It's up to men to change this! (Up to God to be a benevolent God, a protective God rather than a smiting one.)
No matter how hard it is to be a god, I can't help suspecting that it also feels a little bit awesome to think of yourself as this strong and powerful, and think of those others, of women, as constantly scared and helpless and in need of protection.
(Now I imagine a male reader angrily asking whether I wouldn't want someone to save me if someone attacked me? Of course I would. I'd prefer not to be attacked in the first place, but if I am, I prefer to be saved over not being saved. But surely that holds for you too, imaginary male reader. You would also prefer not to be attacked in the first place, but if you are, you would prefer to be saved over not being saved. As I said in the beginning, you're even at a higher risk than me! None of this implies that you'd like other people to have a constant condescending protective attitude.)

Finally, as a non-binary colleague pointed out when we discussed this: man vs bear and similar discourse assumes a strict gender binary. Of course, some people who post about these things try to be trans-inclusive: they'll talk about how women and non-binary people would rather meet a bear than a man, or even more narrowly about how cis men pose a danger to everyone else. But that's still a strict binary!

There are only two genders, do you hear? You're ether scary or scared.

 

Poor Things is the best feel-good movie ever

I saw Yorgos Lanthimos' "Poor Things" in the theater. I hesitated to do so because although I've really enjoyed the Lobster and the Favourite, I thought - based on some reviews I had read - that Poor Things would make heavy use of the known trope "Born Sexy Yesterday", and another one I like to call "Hot Fair Slut". Unfortunately, I'm not a famous media personality with enough clout to coin new trope names, so "Hot Fair Slut" is as unlikely to catch on as "Grimdark Preach" which I keep pushing in discussions both online and AFK as soon as I get a chance. 

People tend to think that only stories written by authors who see themselves as fighting for good (whether that be leftist social justice values or conservative Christianity or something else) ever get preachy. But there are many dark stories where the author shouts at you through a megaphone "did you think the world was just and filled with honestly good people? You're wrong! And I'm here to tell you how wrong you are!" Cue plotlines about how naïve goody-two-shoes come to see the error of their ways and reform and turn cynical like you ought to.
We need a name for this phenomenon, and my suggestion is Grimdark Preach.

Anyway. Back to Poor Things and the tropes I worried would appear in it! 

Born Sexy Yesterday: A sexy woman is either literally born/created very recently, or she's lived for longer but in a different world (fairyland, different planet, etc.), making her a newcomer among us. Because she doesn't know shit about our world, and have no basis for comparison, she's super impressed by the first dude she comes across and falls for him. Mr. Average gets the woman of his dreams, because she fails to realize that he is average! 

Hot Fair Slut: You know how misogynists rant about "Stacys"? (TBF, they might have come up with a new name by the time I write this blogpost - I don't keep up with their antiques.) A "Stacy" is a hot slut whose greatest crime isn't sleeping around per se, but the fact that she doesn't want to sleep with the men who complain about her. When a woman sleeps around already, it's just not fair that she won't sleep with everyone!
Of course, in real life, it's pretty uncommon to fancy precisely every person you come across, or even every person of a certain gender. Whether you're strictly demisexual or happily promiscuous, it's certainly more common to have some kind of preferences, be sexually attracted to some people and not to others. But since this is unfair in the eyes of misogynistic entitled men, we see plenty of fictional women without these pesky preferences. Hot, slutty women who'll happily sleep with any man they come across. See, for instance, the planet Risa in Star Trek. TBF, they pay lip-service to Risa being a gender-neutral sexy paradise where female crew members can fuck around as much as the men, and where the inhabitants are happily horny and not the least bit exploited. But there's still an overall emphasis of "any man can go there and get a hot babe - no man will be rejected, nor hit on by older or uglier women". Which always makes the place feel kinda iffy. And there are far worse examples than this in fiction.

Some stuff I had read about Poor Things made me worry that it would feature both BSY and HFS. But I was wrong.

On to the actual plot of the movie. Spoilers ahead. And, like, all the trigger warnings for people who need them, I guess.

Godwin "God" Baxter is a mad scientist, like his father before him. He was also his father's guinea pig - his dad used to operate on him, take out organs just to see which are necessary for survival, and overall, God looks more like a traditional movie version of Frankenstein's monster than Frankenstein himself. He's disfigured and castrated and only survives by hooking himself up to various machines of his own invention, but can't bring himself to condemn his father - you see, it was for the good of science! 

He teaches physiology and medicine at a university in a bizarre steampunky version of Victorian London, and hires bullied student (he's noticeably poorer than his classmates) Max McCandles to be his assistant. God explains that he cares for Bella, a young woman recovering after serious brain damage, and he needs Max to observe and make notes of her progress. 

Bella is played by stunning Emma Stone, but immediately deconstructs the whole Born Sexy Yesterday trope for us viewers by not only doing baby stuff traditionally considered sexy in grown women (such as vaguely toddlerish speech and body language, looking at you Leeloo from the Fifth Element - I hate the Fifth Element so much - and tons of other fictional examples), but also throwing food around and pissing on the floor. 

Eventually Max suspects that there's more to Bella than God has told him, and demands to know the truth. Okay, says God, fine! It's actually a real sunshine story.
You see, he stumbled upon this heavily pregnant woman who had committed suicide via drowning. He brought her home and noticed that there remained some electricity in her brain, meaning she was revivable. But he decided against it, because if she wanted to die, he should respect her autonomy. However! The baby's brain was alive and well, so he decided to stick the baby brain in the adult body and make a brand new creature instead.

God is such an interesting character because he does have a conscience and he does try to do the right thing and be ethical. But given his background, he's not (generously put) very good at it. 

This is a fantastical movie in many ways. You gotta accept that biology works differently from real life. (See Bella's entire creation.) Bella's mental development - I guess because of her adult body - goes much faster than that of a real baby. But she remains weird by regular societal standards. It's also a really weird situation, where Max and Bella hardly ever leave the mad scientist's house. God gets the idea that Max and Bella should get married and live with him forever, and they both agree. He draws up a contract that will legally bind them to do that, but then Bella runs away with Duncan the lawyer (a fun and over-the-top-sleazy Mark Ruffalo) who falls for her Born Sexy Yesterday charms (she's stopped throwing food on people and pissing herself at this point). 

They travel around in amazingly bizarre steampunk-versions of European cities. Bella is, initially, thrilled by seeing the world and having lots of sex. However, their relationship soon begins to unravel. Bella isn't some loyal puppy-dog like Leeloo (I hate that movie so much! ). She fucks other people. She tries to punch a screaming baby. She dances and talks in embarrassing ways. She gives away Duncan's gambling money in a fit of compassion after seeing poor people for the first time. Eventually, when they're starving in Paris, she gets a job at a brothel. At this point, it's revealed that Bella does have preferences - she thinks that much (though not all) of the brothel sex sucks. Nevertheless, for various reasons, she decides to stick it out.
Even though Bella, in her typical hyper-rational way, explains to Duncan that her new job is good for their relationship, since she appreciates sex with Duncan more when she's got those crappy sexual experiences to compare it with, Duncan gets super upset and leaves. And then he comes back again and wails beneath her balcony that she's the love of his life and he wants her back. This previously irredeemable fuckboy even wants to marry her! However, at this point, Bella has concluded that (in her words) an unconventional and experimental woman like herself would need an open-minded and forgiving husband, and Duncan is none of that. Goodbye!

So, so much happens in this movie. I'm not gonna recount the entire plot or spoil everything. It's got marvelous visuals, it's frequently laugh-out-funny, but it's also, at heart, a genuine feel-good movie.

Bella, God and Max form a kind dysfunctional family, where God the father figure seems to do his best, but given his own horribly traumatic childhood, he can't help but passing on lots of shit to his "children".
However, he does realize, towards the end of his life, that his own father had been terrible. And Bella calls him out on how he's, well, played God with his creations. And then, after many morbid and bizarre twists and turns, we're finally treated to some sort of reconciliation and a happy ending. (Except for that poor goat! If you've seen the movie, you know what I mean. The goat did not deserve his fate)

I rarely like feelgood stuff. It often feels too soppy, and like serious problems are too easily glossed over. For instance, I enjoyed the over-the-top craziness of "Everything, Everywhere, All at once", but really felt that way about the ending - the mum-daughter relationship seemed terrible, but in the end we kinda gloss over how bad it is.
Poor Things, on the other hand, takes everything up to eleven and beyond, including the relationship problems. There's no shying away from how grotesque God and Bella's "family" is, and yet - at the end of the day, they're still family.

Best feel-good movie ever!

The millionth take on the Barbie movie (this philosopher is negative)

 As the last person in the world, I've seen the Barbie movie. If you love Barbie, this post is not for you.

Now, there's no denying that the movie has awesome aesthetics. It starts out in a kind of pink plastic hell, reminisent of Yevgeny Zamyatin's "we" - the houses have no walls, everyone sees each other all the time, everyone has the same opinions, everyone smiles all the time. In Zamyatin's dystopia everyone ate some strange artificial food made of oil (sic), whereas in Barbieland, people don't eat at all - perfectly thin women, still hysterically smiling, go through the motions of eating, but it's just a pantomime. Everything is slightly skewed and off scale - mimicing the scale issues with the toys, cars are too small and hairbrushes are too big, but everyone keeps smiling, keeps moving these hopeless objects around as if they were actually useful. 
Of course I get that it's supposed to be fun and cute - I don't think it is, but whether cute or hellish it does look hella cool, there's no denying that. The 2001 parody is fun, the journey to the real world is delightfully whacky - there's a lot to like here if you watch the movie with your brain turned off.

However, I watched it with my brain turned on, and after having been subjected to tons of hype of this supposedly smart and feminist movie. It did not hold up.

1. The fake criticism of the Mattel Company

Obviously Mattel won't fund a full-length movie commercial for their products only to criticize themselves. This is nothing to be surprised about - but it still annoys the hell out of me that they inserted this fake "criticism" and that so many otherwise smart people swallowed it hook line and sinker; went "oh, Mattel are brave enough to criticize themselves!"

They make fun of "weird" Barbies and Kens that got discontinued, without ever mentioning the elephant in the room: All their dolls have been extremely thin. At one point, they launched a "curvy" Barbie who was a little less slim than the others (still slim, mind you), but it got discontinued when they discovered that little Barbie-loving girls thought this one was a disgustingly fat loser. In the movie, they pretend that down-right fat Barbies are a thing. (Edit: Turns out the somewhat-less-slim Barbies are still sold as "Fashionista Barbies". Anyway, the movie never touches the Barbie weight issue.)

Mattel has received heavy criticism for the horrible conditions their factory workers endure, but there's no slave labour in the movie since toys magically appear in warehouses in response to what happens in Barbieland.

They present the made-up problem of Mattel's all-male board (you can Google what it looks like in real life - six men and five women), and for about five hot minutes they use it to make fun of sexist men. Then we learn that Will Ferrell's CEO character, as clueless as he might be, cares about one thing only; making the world a better place for girls. He's not even greedy! Doesn't care about how much money he makes!
I've seen people claim that this movie is both feminist and "as anti-capitalist as a big blockbuster is allowed to be". This is completely baffling! I get where the feminist claim comes from - the movie has lots of women, and human character Gloria gives a Feminism 101 speech at one point. But anti-capitalist?
I recently saw The Meg 2: The Trench. This is a very silly monster movie. At one point, Jason Statham's action hero uses a torn-off helicopter blade as an enormous sword to impale an even more enormous monster shark. If someone asked me if I had any good anti-capitalist movies to recommend, I would not recommend The Meg 2: The Trench. But it still manages to be more anti-capitalist than the Barbie movie, featuring villains who do environmentally destructive drilling on the ocean floor so they can make more money. Whereas in the Barbie movie, we see that capitalists only want to improve the world. At worst, they may be a little clueless!

The closest they get to some real self-criticism is when angry teenager Sasha rants about how Barbie presents an impossible ideal and brings down people's self-esteem. But that rant brings us to the second big issue I had with the movie ...

2. The extreme gender essentialism

When Sasha rants about how Barbie is bad, the movie makes sure to tell us that she's wrong and we shouldn't listen to her. Before the rant, a teenage boy tells Barbie that Sasha is a horrible bully. During the rant, Sasha's croonies gleefully urges her on while she tears down what they think is a mentally unstable woman with Barbie delusions and reduces her to tears. Of course we shouldn't listen to anyone as mean and nasty as Sasha! In addition, she wears - gasp! - loose-fitting unisex clothes at this point. It's not like she looks all butch or anything, she's got long flowing hair for starters, but she doesn't look very feminine either. And this is bad. 

There's a ridiculous trend in shallow internet feminism that equates feminism with femininity and a lack of femininity with internalized misogyny. I think it started when people put a name to the trope "not like other girls". Sometimes, in works of fiction, people talk of how girls generally speaking are terrible, because they're cowardly and shallow and vain. The heroine of the story, however, does not share these traits - she's not like other girls, she's great. This trope is legitimately criticized for being misogynistic. Real-world girls may also pat themselves on the back for not getting along very well with shallow and vain girls, and getting along much better with the supposedly superior male gender. And there's a very narrow conception of "the tomboy" which often gets valorized in fiction for children.
The problem is when shallow internet feminists talk as if there's no pressure at all on girls to be feminine in any way whatsoever. Yes, being cowardly and shallow and vain are often stereotyped as feminine traits and also lambasted, but it's not like we live in a world in which butches like Lea DeLaria are held up as an ideal for all women to emulate. Girls may fail to conform to standards of traditional femininity simply because those standards don't suit them - it doesn't have to be internalized misogyny all the time! Feminism should be about letting go of gender roles, not enforcing them! (It's absurd that this even needs to be said.)
But back to the Barbie movie, Sasha starts out kinda non-feminine, horribly nasty, and yells at one point that "everyone hates women, both men and women hate women" clearly including herself in "everyone". Her arch in the movie is about simultaneously becoming sweet and nice and learning to love Barbie and embracing a feminine style with pink little dresses. 

All the Kens do stereotypically male things after their (ultimately failed) revolution, and we learn that those things are not for women. For instance, one Barbie realizes to her horror that she had spent time discussing Zack Snyder's the Justice League - because she had been brainwashed, you see. Well, guess who's also spent time discussing Snyder's Justice League? Yours truly! Quite recently, even, on a geeky internet forum. I didn't get much in the way of uptake, though. Everyone else kinda went "ugh, Snyder". Which is fine. It would not have been fine if they went "Jeppsson, what's happening? Are you discussing a male movie even though you're a woman? There must be something seriously wrong with you! Have you been brainwashed?" 

3. The terrible treatment of Ken

I've seen people share this meme about how Ken is written the way women are written in most movies. This is blatantly false. The problem with women in many movies is that they get too little to do in the narrative. The plot is driven by male characters, and women's role in the narrative is basically just love interest. But they're usually normal people in-universe, with houses, jobs, friends, etc. The problem with Ken is the exact opposite of this. He's got a very important role in the narrative, but in-universe, he's seen as nothing but Barbie's love interest (whom she doesn't even want).

I don't think for a moment that the terrible treatment of Ken is due to Gerwig and Bumbauch being manhating feminazis. I think it's because they had two ideas for how to make a fun feminist movie:
1. Let's make Barbieland this topsy-turvy place where women are in charge and men are oppressed!
2. Let's use the Kens to parody terrible real-world types like Nice Guys (tm) and mansplainers!
- and then failed to realize that 1 and 2 are incompatible. It's kinda essential to Nice Guys (tm) and mansplainers that they live in a patriarchy and has a patriarchal sense of entitlement. It's so essential that Gloria might have mentioned that in her Feminism 101 speech! 

So here's how Ken's story goes: 

In the beginning, the Kens are second-class citizens in a land ruled by Barbies. The Barbies hold all positions of power and get all the rewards for all the accomplishments. Mind you, all of this is fake - as far as I can tell, they never really do anything. Someone might hold a speech which contains longish words, or fly up into fake space, but whatever they say or do, the result is always the same - the others applaud them, tell them they're pretty and amazing and give them a fake reward. Also, the Kens' homelessness and lack of possessions don't have any negative health impacts like it would in the real world, because they don't need to eat and don't need actual medical care. Still, though. They're very much second-class citizens.

At first, the Kens show no resentment over this. Instead, they just hang around the Barbies, beg for little crumbs of appreciation, beg to be invited to parties in the Barbies' houses, and fight among themselves because they're so competitive about what tiny crumbs of affection and recognition they get from their oppressors. However, after main character Ken has spent a day or so in the real world, things change. He sees men hanging out with other men having a good time. He sees men getting treated with respect. Men having their own houses and possessions. Men riding horses (turns out he loves horses). He asks what all this means, and is told that it's "patriarchy". (It's important to note here that from what we can see, he learns nothing about sexual violence, domestic violence etc - only the above.) He then learns that men in the real world still have it harder than Barbies in Barbieland because they need to go to university and compete with each other and stuff. He then decides to turn Barbieland into a "patriarchal Kendom" - basically, he thinks it's the Kens turn to have what the Barbies used to have.
Who can fucking blame him? Not me. 

Ken goes back to Barbieland and starts a revolution - and somewhat ironically, he's able to do this precisely because he's so marginalized and overlooked that no one pays attention to him until the grand take-over is accomplished! The Kens then tell the Barbies that now it's a patriarchy (even though "five minutes after the second-class citizens successfully overthrew their oppressors" is nothing like "real world patriarchy"), so they're supposed to dress in skimpy outfits and give the Kens beer. The Barbies happily go along with this. Why? You might think it's because their old life was getting, well, old by now (how long can it be fun, really, to repeat to each other that they're pretty and amazing and exchange fake awards?), and this is something new. Of course, handing men beer will get stale pretty soon too, but it's understandable on the face of it that they'd do this for a while.
However, this is a movie that spells everything out in dialogue, so we know that this isn't the intended explanation for the Barbies going along with mini-skirts and beer. Instead, former President Barbie says that it's nice and relaxing not to think for a while. Really? You spent a lot of mental effort before? Then Gloria says something-something-patriarchy is a disease and remember the native American genocide and smallpox? Yeah, me neither. 

Anyway. Main character Barbie discovers that to break patriarchy's hold over someone, you only need to deliver a Feminism 101 speech to them (seriously), because oppression is all in your head or something. Then, the Barbies use their feminine wiles (obviously they use feminine wiles to strike back, gender essentialism and all that) to first flirt with the Kens and then make them jealous and turn them back to in-fighting. 

The Barbies take back power. The now defeated Kens rather sheepishly ask whether they might perhaps get some legal rights? Some, President Barbie declares. But very few. We can't just give everyone equal rights now, can we? Because that would be too radical and change things too fast. The Kens "gotta start somewhere". Yes, seriously. This is the only so-called reason given for why the Kens can't get equal legal rights - it would just be too quick, too radical, change things too fast. 

In the end, the Kens are told that their real problem isn't being second-class citizens - their real problem is how they feel about their second-class citizen status. They should stop obsessing over the Barbie ruling class and how they've got everything and the Kens have nothing - instead, they should work on some much-needed self-improvement. 

The final shot of main character Ken shows him dressed in a shirt with the text "I am Kenough". Presumably, he's also learnt to accept that society is "good kenough". 

R.I.P Revolutionary Ken. This Ken suffers from false consciousness.