“Barbie?! YOU?!” she spat as she sized up her edgy, boy-booted big sister in arms sprawled tomboyishly across from her.

“There’s nothing pink about you! There is no way you are part of this bizarrely pink culty revival trying to brainwash this generation of little kids back into girls and boys!” she howled. “No way! Not YOUR androgynous ass!I don’t believe it!”

Glyph absently bent down and undid the side zippers on her vintage combat boots before she began to dig through her despotically & ironically acquired Birkin replica. She pulled her beat to hell, very real vintage Louis Vuitton wallet out and rifled through it as her young friend fussed.

“Aha! There it is~” she murmurred, tossed a teeny card onto the table and leaned back in her chair across from her late millenial feminist friend. Bewildered, her friend picked up the card and peered at it.

“The Fuck?!-What IS this?!” the late millenial feminist screeched. All activity in the bustling cafe stopped.

Glyph kicked off her boots and flicked her ridiculously baggy denim encased gams up onto the table and crossed them, brandishing gigantic, beautiful, obscenely arched feet for all to see as the cafe whirled back to life.

“Et tu?!” the young feminist barked hoarsely as the room begin to spin around her. “This makes no sense! not Barbie! Not you! You’re walking around with a fricking Barbie credit card in your-“

“Gotta give credit where it’s due~” Glyph chuckled and cocked her head to the side like the doll that had freed her and all those like her from the real Matrix in the before times.

The Before times…

Speaking of giving credit where it is due: Pops got it before anyone else in my world and got them all on the bandwagon when it came to birthdays, holidays and the like. He watched his lanky, wild daughters and their ever-growing brood of only female cousins riffing insane stories over the heads of their dolls daily before he headed off to second and third shift factory gigs. Dude knew the dolls were brain building , imagination muscle machines due to the leaps of demented fancy we barreled down like little demiurges. We shook that man down for every iteration of Barbie that showed up on the scene so hard and so often that he started getting them for us ahead of time, before even WE knew they were coming out.

Barbie was the gateway to my dark Fantasy storytelling via moviemaking, integral to my “attic MGM studio”-ing out. A good quarter of the 400+ dolls my little sister and I had between us were Barbies, especially because we came of age when Barbie first went global. Every “better hued for us” Barbie that came out hit our house first, and fast. He threw in the knockoffs too. “So what if her legs are hollow! Give her a chance to play with yall!” Dude even believed troll dolls had right of way to play in our wonderlands. We were THAT house in our girl gang neighborhood. To this day I wonder how many households he pissed off outfitting us with the latest and greatest. We had every house Barbie ever had in ours and were the reason our block was rife with them.

And It had fuck all to do with the politicized PINK (of now) where I came from.

Barbie was the penultimate slash-person before that even officially became a bona fide thing due to us Gen-Xers.

Hot Wheels were only gonna be Hot Wheels. Their highest high was their make and model showing up in the Transformers toy universe and getting co-opted into a kiddie take on the classic Black and White film Metropolis, as a doll’s stiff yet ever-willing love interest.

G.I. Joe was a soldier, through & through. Unless he got lucky and tossed onto some little boy’s kid sister’s pile of dolls to do battle with or bump …humps…with a favorite doll or punk-assed Ken before we had any care about the morals afoot in what we had them up to.

But Barbie? The doctrine of Barbie is how all the chicks in my generational wave knew from jump that we could be whatever we wanted to be, for as long as we liked, in whatever succession we felt like flowing career-wise !

A.B.

Do you think Doctor Barbie burned her medical license to sell houses or become President? Did she off the ponies she raised and rode out in Malibu after picking up the pink corvette or the hot red ferrari? Nah.

Barbie wasn’t about minimalism or excess, she was literally above all that. Barbie was the Dao of doing whatever the fuck you wanted as a creative kid, the pure multiplicity of all things, encased in somewhat bendable bodies. She was almost just like us, willing and able to walk around and rule in any realm any child came up with for her. Long before Keenan Ivory Wayans made having multiple gigs at the same time comically Jamaican in the zeitgeist via In Living Color that vibe was just known as Barbie-ing the fuq out to chicks near and far.

…My personal Barbie mystique? ALL my Barbies marched happily (up? down?) the road to( perdition? paradise? ) Wherever and whoever #katemckinnon IS in this f ureaking upcoming movie🤣. And I am Telling you here and now~ Every single One of Us who came up in the cosmic realm of the #churchofbarbie knew the exact archetype that Ms. McKinnon is embodying in this upcoming flick on first sight.

We all got a whiff of that spirit. She was literally the equivalent of Lady Guadalupe, beckoning us deeper into the holy of holies of self-creation, beyond the boxed templates we had foisted into our grabby lil arms with love along with cutesy little outfits … and she spat us out onto the roads to making every aspect of all of it{LIFE, as we could shape it} as real (or play) as we wanted to.

My dolls? They all knew what amazonian, vestal virgin temple/ movie soundstage they were signed onto… (there were contracts. I learned to read off of D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths and Hollywood Babylon. My flights of fancy were Dark Fantastical arthouse flicks even then, in hindsight). & In my hood we girls even traded along those lines! There could be a doll in a friend’s gang that wanted the tribal markings my crew were notorious for who’d return to her clan looking like a shaman after rolling with us for a weekend. & there were dolls in me and my sister’s tribe that were like “fuqiswrongwithyoutwo?! Get that marker away from me! Put the scissors Down!” and would demand to go live within the calmer, gentler climes around the block with Cheryl, Angie and Robin. Those kind of requests were always honored amongst us women, too. We not only could Hear them… we listened to them. Those conversations were as real as all the other ones we were learning to have out in the real world.

Ah yes… The Real World.

The Now times…

See, this is where this whole current Barbie tsunami gets complicated.

Let’s jump over all the nonsense and just ask the real questions that have chicks who grew up in the post-“Barbie-is Dead” apocalypse age on edge. They are shaking in their boots as they stand up for themselves, looking around at the mores and mental constitutions of terrified old folks crumbling into the draconian calls these feeble fucks are breaking their necks to get into lawbooks before they dogmatically die off. These kids feel the peer pressure from facing off against their bullying grandparents at every turn.

Is this Barbie media thrust the perverse pinnacle of the Great Reset? Is this media blitz its greatest card toss? Has the damage caused by confusing the symptoms with the issues been done and the next batch of kids are going to be blanked enough by living through pandemics, unchecked school shootings, drugging students into behaving, fake news, social currency systems and narcissistic parental trauma that they’ll receive the imprinting of Blue is for Boys and Pussy Pink hats for girls once again more docilely?

Is Greta Gerwig willfully in lockstep with those who thought the overturning of Roe v. Wade was a good idea that would fling of age chicks back into homes ‘where they belong’? Some Chicken Littles are running around screaming this movie is that.

Will getting your kid a Barbie be a generational push back into the kitchens and shapeless, everready nightgowns their grandmothers escaped from?

Is Barbie the handmaiden to the hollowed out stay at home rhetoric espoused by manipulative guys and girls who have no comprehension of what that was truly like for the women and men imprisoned by the masks of it because they are two generations removed from it?

Wait- Let’s make it weird …and go deeper~

Are men who are unwilling to do on a good day any of the things that men of even a modicum of substance did even on the bad days to provide for their families when they could (because their sense of societal self was tied to how well taken care of their nuclear family was) really primed to benefit from chicks publicly dousing themselves in all things pink because it’s code or some signifier of passive “temple priestess” immolation?

Is the Barbie resurgence proof of a buckling to all things petulantly patriarchal in this stupid sex war?

Is the Barbie movie a waving of the white flag by women exhausted by picking up the slack on both sides of the “gender-normative” role playing equation?

…maybe~.

But~ What if those women loudly spouting #tradLife white-washed, quaint versions of yesteryear tropes they find online are doing so not because documentation of the truth and consequences of what was fought against have been scrubbed but actually because they want …vengeance , or even dominion?

What if they’re mobilized across the system to lure weak-minded incels [who’ve spent the past ten years publicly bleating about how they HATE women and how wrong it is that they can’t be horrid little beta or putrid alpha male examples of humanity and still force any hapless chick to make their meals, wipe their asses, rear their demonic children and suck their dicks at will like their grandmothers used to HAVE to do to survive] with the promise of passive, pliable, basically purchased into silence pink whathaveyous in exchange for checkbooks ?

What if baiting these petulantly coddled dudes (whose parents consciously made sure they’d never even be able to mentally bear the load or reward of fully caring for themselves, let alone their families) into that dance in 2023 is actually the sleeper cell manifestation of seriously pissed off Sirens beckoning sailors to hostile shores only to wreck them on the rocks of their bullshit to castrate them once and for all, ensuring their incel seed dies out with them?

Nah. That’d be obscenely delicious for an auteur of Dark Fantasy to witness in real time, but alas, I honestly believe it is something much simpler afoot here.

THIS… is about Right Wing Nuts and the Butterfly Effect.

A wing nut is a nut that is characterized by having two tabs positioned like butterfly wings.

Ring-Wing Nuts are conservatives that routinely act as though the one wing they represent doesnt have to be attached to a live bird in order to actually …fly. Without the left wing they gnaw at and claim to hate so much, they’d be no more than the still feathered, ripped off wing left behind by the cat that had been stalking the whole bird the entire time for its dinner.

Ring Wing nuts rhapsodically hearken back to the days of yore when you kept girls out of school and shoved baby dolls in their arms so they could learn to mimic their moms, their only rightful service to the patriarchy. Dolls were tools foisted on kids that supported the hierarchy within the patriarchy that needed to spit out docile, fully trained fembots to take care of the automatonic men needed as cogs and pawns in the industrial and post modern age. But make no mistake: the mindfuck was wholly equal opportunity.

Barbie has ALWAYS been the Trojan Horse sent in to bring the patriarchy down, including how every aspect of Ken’s existence lined up with the bland list of all the things the “ideal wife” was supposed to be for all these men heading out into the workforce to play these myriad of parts… in their cute little gray flannel suits and lumberjack shirts and tuxedos-

Barbie has ALWAYS been the Trojan Horse sent in to bring the patriarchy down, including how every aspect of Ken’s existence lined up with the bland list of all the things the “ideal wife” was supposed to be for all these men heading out into the workforce to play these myriad of parts… in their cute little gray flannel suits and lumberjack shirts and tuxedos-

But even Barbie’s Momma thumbed her nose at that “tool for use by men” concept.

Barbie had a mom? Oh yeah. And she was a doozy! Barbie’s mom was a perverse play on a German “adult gag-gift/gold-digging” Escort doll named Bild Lilli, just another arm of “always discreet” service for those male automatons the schools spat out into the global workforce.

Barbie and Ken’s comically DOA relationship was the springboard for MANY women in the 60s and 70s to finally stop Stepford Wiving through life and start seeing the unions that they were trapped in for what they were. And they wanted out, vehemently so. Barbie having all the experiences she could dream of planted and watered the first seeds of insurrection against being trapped at home in many a daughter watching their self-medicating mothers from the halls.

…what was normal for barbie from her birth onward… had been normal for MEN for millenia.

Barbie was the tangible, tongue in cheek manifestation of the blueprint for women breaking free of the short shrift they’d been societally given up until the mid twentieth century. And then, as well as now, all that went totally over the wannabe warden’s head.

Barbie was the tangible, tongue in cheek manifestation of the blueprint for women breaking free of the short shrift they’d been societally given up until the mid twentieth century. And then, as well as now, all that went totally over the wannabe warden’s head.

Born in 1959, Barbie was almost 15 in 1973, the very tender age that alot of pedophiles idealized and used to start openly hunting the schoolyards for girls, openly in search of moldable child brides while the rest of society looked the other way.

We GOT to Roe v Wade in 1973 thanks to women whose little sisters were Barbie-ing the fuck out watching it all go down.

We GOT to the Equal credit Opportunity act of 1974 (when women could have their own bank accounts, have credit cards, and make wills and unmarried women could no longer be legally blocked from owning property if they didnt have a male co-signer)… as Barbie’s iterations started to pick up steam.

Even Barbie going global and Barbie collectors breaking their necks to acquire them all… seeing the beauty in all of them, is nothing but pure, gorgeous anarchy.

I like to think of it as any chick born from 1974 onward was up in heaven watching all these equality dials turn and doors unlock as they geared up to portal down onto earth.

I was 5 when Black Barbie came out. FIVE years old. Now~ props given, Mattel did have black dolls who were friends OF Barbie before 1980- Diahann Carroll had a Julia doll in like 69, plus there was Francie[67] Christie & Brad[ 68/70] & Cara & Curtis[75], & the first Black Ken there was landed in…you guessed it, Malibu, in 82.

…but Black Barbie meant she was riding through life on the same “be who and what Ever I wanna be” vibe as the Blond Barbie. She cost exactly the same as the blond Barbies for our parents to buy, fit into the same clothes and shoes. She looked bad as hell in 1985’s red Ferrari too, especially to a pair of lanky 10 and 7 year olds in Cleveland whose proportions were closer to Barbie’s than any of their peers, living in a home chockfulla clothes by fashion loving, wardrobed to high heaven, young outlier borderline Buppie parents-

Barbie has BEEN the butterfly Effect this entire time, quietly leaning into the shackles of various zetigeists that were itching to be broken and applying pressure.

Barbie IS and forever will be the most gorgeous, penultimate example of a perfect ANARCHIST.

THE exact Amazonian Anarchist needed on the field in times like these.

an·ar·chy

noun

1. 1.a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority or other controlling systems.
2. 2.the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government; anarchism.

And don’t think this is the first time. From the concept of Voodoo Dolls to (now) hallowed Kachina Dolls of the American Southwest( because the denigration white supremacists attempted with Kachina Dolls did not work), the multiverse-hopping, liberating power of tangible stand-ins to help you flesh out the details of your dreams in oddly huggable effigy is something humans often seem to happily revert to.

We’re an oddly spatial, hopeful, diorama loving bunch of beings, aren’t we?

For all we know, each and every one of us may just be some Barbie doll in a cosmic dollhouse God set up that is having fever dreams about living real lives sincerely, a doll occasionally interacting with other dolls on their own internal trips that are scattered across and through said entity’s playroom, grappling with sentience and the singularity fractaling out into eternity.

But~ either way, from the looks of it, this movie MAY be right on time.

The Late Millenial Feminist who had proudly worn her badge of Barbie Condemnation and preached to whomever would listen about shaking off the “suspect” shackles of all things barbie at age 8 for the duration of Margot Robbie’s Barbie press junket looked through her fingers. She cradled her face as she sorted through the reverse patriarchal ruse she’d fallen for.

“You mean all this time I thought Barbie was how they were caging us in as a conceptual motif and it was Barbie herself that broke all you crazy, emboldened , brazen genX chicks out in the first place?!” she whispered, mystified.

Glyph chuckled. “not exactly,”

Late Millenial feminist looked off into the distance, “then what? and how- and-“

Glyph sighed, snapped her fingers to fully get her friend’s attention, then flicked her in the forehead.

“Barbie…showed us…in no uncertain terms…that really? it’s all drag, baby. ALL of it. Even the boys. Especially the boys.

Do what you wanna do…until you find something else that piques your interest… then, if you feel like it… go learn how to do that too. The only limiting factor…is YOU.”

“Barbie…showed us…in no uncertain terms…that really ~it’s all drag, baby. ALL of it. Even the boys. Especially the boys. Do what you wanna do…until you find something else that piques your interest… then, if you feel like it… go learn how to do that too. The only limiting factor…is YOU.”

But-” she started, but Glyph flicked her in the forehead again. “Ow! the- stop that!-“

“No! Not society, not the idiots in your generation or mines wasting time tussling with old folks whose only reason for having figured out how to live a bit longer is because they know they’ve wasted so much of their lives hoarding resources, not really taking chances to try to be Out There Really Living at all-“

She sipped her chagaccino, “they are still trying to work up the nerve to really get out there and Barbie Multiverse the fuck out! Attacking us is filler! All this trying to aim at your freedoms, our freedoms, our kids freedoms, is the only kind of immortality living that kind of life has on offer-“

“They’re cowards who followed scripts they never wholly believed in! Now~ being remembered as the assholes trying to nail the lid back on Pandora’s box is the only move they’ve got worth anything to time. But that fn box? No matter what else spilled out of it, it is still quantifiable as a GIFT…from ye Gods. It all comes down to how WE each chose to work it-“

“Okay, I get that, but-“

” When you stress yourself fighting them, screeching at them in the streets Instead of being out in those streets living in their faces…you let them suck your lifeforce into the black Hole suck they’re been treading water against for decades.”

The Late millenial Feminist paused. “..huh. The only real way to fight back~”

“Is to get back to wildly living your generational lives. “

“It flies in the face of reason…but only if you’re playing by their rules, I guess- that’s fn-“

” It’s Fucking Genius, yeah. They’re our parents. We know the cracks in the-” Glyph grinned darkly and changed direction.

“…go live your fucking life, kid. They already can’t reach your freedoms unless you turn around and dive into the trenches with them. Let’em stay in the trenches…and fill the fucking trenches in On them by having fun figuring out how you want to go about living your Life.”

The Late Millenial Feminist sat back in her chair in silence for a few minutes.

“Why the fuck don’t you fn GenXers Tell anybody Anything while all this is going on!?!” she yelped.

“…Cloak and Dagger Mad Magazine comics & Guerilla Warfare. We’re the offspring of the ones they tried to kill off in Vietnam. We came in here on a “Fuck That! No you will Not! lol” …It’s why so many of us look younger than yall~” she scratched her chin, eyes sparkling in the now golden hour light of the cafe.

“You really think THEY came up with this? …with everything currently in place that genXers came up with, that you guys keep perfecting, all the damage they’re trying to do, the bullshit they’re rubbing in our faces… is telling on themselves and showing us the paths to their stashes. Even the ‘traitors’ in our generations who blindly followed after their horrid parents were motivated by trying to suss out & game the old system. At best, they’re moles… at worst?? They’re nothing more than cats pried from their parents arms by Ghenghis Khan whose tails we set on fire before letting them run back home.”

“Wait-“

“Because of idiots like Gaetz & the Amys, Karens & Kavanaughs of the world openly mimicking their disgusting road-raging, hate-filled, old guard parents but being so egotistical that they want to be famous from doing it down roads we carved into bedrock…We can see HOW the old guard has always been pulling off the shit. All that used to be hidden from view. It will be that much easier to rub out as they are being rubbed out. It’s the Unveiling. It behooves us to let them keep acting reprehensible. It makes our pending and current work easier-“

“Wow, that’s a-dark take-“

“Maybe Greta Gerwig is going to enlighten you on all of that in theaters on July 21st. She was one of the first of your generation to buck up. I mean…unless she really is working for the Man-“

Lola opened her mouth to speak then paused as the sleight of hand colorway coordination of the activewear peeking through the layers of Glyph’s bizarre ensemble finally registered. “OMG…What in the~?”

“Malibu Barbie~?” GLyph raised an expertly arched brow and flicked her friend in the forehead again, laughing.

“Dude, ya know I’m a f ureaking Fashist! Even without the frickin history lesson, you being surprised a six foot tall Black chick with hair down her back and four feet of legs grew up fucking with Barbie at all is indicative of You guys just not paying attention to your surroundings the way you should at all! The tells are all around you! I mean, really!!”

“Geez! I’m Sorry-“

“Yeah, yeah, yeah~ Pay Attention! Go LIVE life! All the weird variations of it that sing out to you, for the love of-“

“Okay, okay, okay! sheesh!-“

A.B.