The Changing Role of Femininity

    Femininity is still a hot topic in today’s world, and we constantly see it being scrutinized and redefined. The Barbie movie, with its humor and exaggerated take on gender roles, makes a satirical commentary on how society continues to hold women to certain standards. Watching the movie, I couldn't help but think about how it’s not so different from what we saw in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879). While we've made some progress, many of the ideas about femininity from back then are still stuck with us today. In A Doll’s House, Nora’s character is portrayed as a “doll-child,” which symbolizes how her role in her marriage is not much different from a doll, something to be played with and controlled. Torvald, her husband, treats her like she’s his possession, much like the dolls that children play with. Nora says, "He used to call me his doll-child, and he played with me the way I played with my dolls" (Nora 145), which really shows how Nora is looked down on and restricted by her husband. Similarly, the Barbie movie exaggerates the idea of a "perfect" Barbie who, on the outside, seems to have everything, but is actually trapped by unrealistic beauty standards and expectations. The humor in the movie exposes how women are expected to fit into a mold that doesn't allow them to grow or think for themselves.

Even though the Barbie movie uses humor and exaggeration, it’s clear that the movie reflects Nora's experience in A Doll's House. Both women feel trapped by society’s ideas of what it means to be a woman. Barbie’s journey to the real world represents a move towards discovering her own identity and breaking free from expectations, much like Nora’s decision to leave her husband and children in search of herself. Nora’s line, "I’ve been your doll wife here, just as at home I was Papa’s doll-child" (Nora 145), captures the sense of being confined to these roles, and the movie shows us that, in some ways, women still face the same challenges today. If we look at Dr. Guttman’s definition of ideology, social norms, cultural institutions, and political structures, it’s easy to see how the Barbie movie critiques these same ideas. Barbie Land, with its perfect, rigid gender roles, reflects the ideological pressures placed on women to look a certain way, act a certain way, and essentially be perfect. This is exactly what Nora experiences in A Doll’s House, where she’s expected to be a loving wife and mother, but without any agency to be anything else. Both works show how these expectations can be limiting.

    What’s changed since 1879 is that women now have more freedom to challenge these roles, as shown in The Barbie Movie when Barbie decides to leave Barbie Land. However, much like Nora’s escape from her domestic life, women today still face subtle yet powerful pressures to live up to certain standards. The irony in the movie is key here—it uses humor not just to make us laugh, but to point out how much progress we’ve made, and how much more work there still is to do. In the end, both A Doll’s House and The Barbie Movie satirize femininity by showing how women are still expected to fit into these narrow, predefined roles. While we’ve certainly made progress, many of the same pressures that Nora faced still exist today, but in different forms. These works aren’t just critiques, they’re calls to keep questioning and changing how we view femininity, because there’s still a lot of work to be done.