Life

Gays think Barbie is a lesbian. Republicans think she’s a communist

Reality check: She's a plastic doll.
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It's a Barbie world.
It's a Barbie world. Photo: Mattel

Barbie’s most enduring quality has always been her ability to be whatever her fans wanted her to be. She’s been a doctor, an astronaut, a model, and a lifeguard.

But as the highly anticipated Barbie World movie gets ready to hit theaters later this month, the internet is giving her two new roles. LGBTQ+ people think she’s a lesbian. Republicans are confident that she’s a communist.

Related:

Michael Cera’s character in the “Barbie” movie has a very gay past

He’s based on a doll considered to be Ken’s ambiguously gay “buddy.”

Proponents of both theories have their “facts” to back up their assertions. Whether or not they’re worth more than the cost of the doll remains to be seen.

As LGBTQ Nation previously reported, the vast majority of the characters in Barbie are based on various iterations of the iconic doll released by toy company Mattel over the years, from Dr. Barbie (transgender actor Hari Nef) to Mermaid Barbie (Dua Lipa). But Gerwig has also drawn inspiration from a few long-forgotten Barbie characters from the 1960s, including Emerald Fennell’s “Midge” and Michael Cera’s ambiguously gay “Allan.”

Details about the plot of the Mattel-endorsed take on the iconic doll remain sparse. According to one official logline, the film follows Margot Robbie’s blonde bombshell Barbie on her quest to find true happiness in the human world after being expelled from “Barbie Land” for being less-than-perfect. Another implies that the film finds Robbie’s character in “a full-on existential crisis.”

The film’s trailers highlight Barbie and Ken’s relationship, including a joke about a potential sleepover at Barbie’s house because they’re “boyfriend and girlfriend,” where they admit they don’t even know what that means. While Barbie has had several careers, Ken has always just been Barbie’s boyfriend.

As Barbie sets out to explore the real world, she meets a Mattel employee, Gloria (played by America Ferrera), and LGBTQ+ fans are reading between the lines about their relationship.

The theory has been helped by reports that Mattel’s actual CEO objected to one scene in the movie that felt “off-brand” until star Margot Robbie and director Greta Gerwig convinced him to allow it to stay in the film by performing the scene in front of him.

Robbie has also admitted that she wasn’t sure the toy company would approve of the script.

“The script was… when I read it, I thought, this is genius, and they’re never going to let us make it. What a shame, this is all going to go to waste,” she told Fandango. “It’s not just that the movie is unexpected, I think it’s like, Greta kind of pushes in directions that I didn’t think they’d let us go in.”

Republicans, however, have a different take based on a map shown in one scene. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), has accused the doll of “pushing CCP propaganda.” The claim has quickly been picked up by far-right outlets, including Fox News, where anchor Rachel Campos-Duffy wondered, “Is Barbie a communist?”

“Maybe!” her co-host responds.

The controversy comes after Vietnam banned the movie over a map shown in one scene. It includes the nine-dash line China uses to make controversial territorial claims in the South China Sea. Despite international rulings that the claims are illegal, the country has used it as an excuse to build military bases in the disputed region.

The crudely drawn map has no basis in reality.

To justify his claim about the plastic doll’s allegiance to nefarious communist propaganda, a spokesperson for the bombastic senator told the Daily Mail, “China wants to control what Americans see, hear, and ultimately think, and they leverage their massive film markets to coerce American companies into pushing [Chinese Communist Party] propaganda—just like the way the Barbie film seems to have done with the map.”

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