What's the opposite of a fundamentalist?

On the Barbie movie, nuance, and not becoming the thing I hate

Oct 31, 2023

Okay but like, what if Barbie and Ken took turns driving?

I liked the Barbie movie. Allan* made me laugh. I love Ryan Gosling in anything. I thought Kate McKinnon’s portrayal of a janky Barbie (we all had one) was on-point. Who doesn’t want to stare at Margot Robbie for two hours? And yes, I teared up at America Ferrera’s monologue - it does feel impossible to be a woman sometimes.

And yet, there were moments in the film where the metaphor lost me. Like, wait: are we saying the Supreme Court should be made up solely of women? What was happening there with Ken at the end? Are we allowed to be in love? To need each other? (And also, why don’t we talk more about pregnant Midge basically getting written out of the plot? Or wait - literally just had this thought: was pregnant Midge being left out the entire point?!)**

My sensitive, romantic 12-year-old son*** hates that line in Taylor Swift’s Blank Space where she says “Boys only want love if it’s torture.”

“That’s not really fair,” he said in the car the other day. I agreed, and we talked about hyperbole, about using exaggeration to make a point. And then somehow that conversation morphed into sexism and then into the pendulum swing that often happens when our eyes are opened to injustice. The way - sometimes - when we see what we’ve done wrong and we want to do better, we have a tendency to overcorrect.

I briefly followed a woman on Instagram who was trying her hand at poetry. The mother of daughters, one day she posted a poem she’d written about (what she believed) “little boys are taught” (which wasn’t at all what my little boys are being taught, or what most little boys I know are being taught), compared with what “little girls are taught.” The final line was something like: “I’m cheering for the girls.”

And herein lies the problem.

When we answer inequality in one direction with inequality in the opposite direction, we end up making false adversaries of each other. This might seem like a weird thing for a woman who’s pretty adamant about the evil of the patriarchy to say, but…the future isn’t female. The future isn’t male, either.

The future is all of us, together.

I can speak to sexism because I’m a woman, but honestly, pick your favourite injustice and apply the same logic.

When we’ve been wronged, like many of us have - when we’ve been silenced and devalued, abused and oppressed - as much as we might thirst for revenge: revenge won’t save us.

When I first started pulling at the thread of my doubt surrounding my very specific brand of religion a few years ago, my greatest fear was that I’d be alone. That my marriage would crumble (it didn’t). That all my friendships would end (the good ones are still here). That in the silence, in my fear and uncertainty and pain, I’d realise no one, nothing was holding me. (I didn’t.)

On this side, my greatest fear has become something else: I fear I’ll become what I hate. There’s nothing wrong with feeling angry. I feel angry often. But if I, in reaction to my anger, counter my old certainty about my rightness with new certainty about my rightness; if I swing like a pendulum from militant conservative/Christian/pro-Life/complementarian _________ (fill in the blank) to militant progressive/exvangelical/pro-choice/egalitarian/______ (fill in the blank), I haven’t moved forward or grown into something new. I’m the same thing, just backwards.