Given that Barbie’s box office revenue is over a billion dollars, I’m going to assume that many readers have already seen the film, and if you haven’t yet, apologies for the spoilers ahead!
I was late to the game, and saw it last week with one of my closest friends, who is a retired stripper. She wore and continues to wear Barbie swag long before this summer’s trend of all-pink everything.
I read and heard so much about Barbie prior to seeing the movie, I was hoping to see for myself what all the fuss was about. How can a movie about pretty dolls, with some of our best comedians, be so polarizing? Why is our prime minister being trolled online for seeing it with his son? Why are grown male podcasters so up in arms about a movie where they’re not the target audience?
Who is ‘Sugar Daddy Ken’?
But before I could reward myself with an early-week movie experience with my bestie, I had to work all weekend at the strip club. So there I am, taking a break with another dancer. We’re outside on the smoking patio, minding our own business. I tell her about my upcoming plans for my night off, and ask if she has ever heard of the doll Sugar Daddy Ken.
Sugar Daddy Ken was made for adult collectors in 2009 and discontinued a few years later. He is older, noticeably grey, dressed to look wealthy and has a small dog. While Mattel claimed that he’s named Sugar Daddy because the dog’s name is Sugar, I don’t buy it. Surely they could have instead sold Max’s Daddy Ken, or Fido, or Spot. Anyhow, my colleague and I are making jokes that if Sugar Daddy Ken was still being sold by Mattel, we would buy one as a good luck charm for the changing room! We would buy one for all our sex worker friends as a birthday gift!
Out of nowhere, a patron interrupts us, asking, “do you girls do anything normal like boating, or do you insist on living in a fantasy world?” I asked him if we were hurting him with our weirdness, and my friend asked him if his mother ever taught him about manners, before we stomped off in a huff. We were both amazed at the audacity! I mean, isn’t the strip club a fantasy world? Aren’t men coming here to watch us be versions of the Playboy/Barbie aesthetic? I thought these strong reactions were only expressed online for views, but here we are in the wild, witnessing a grown man get mad that two grown women dared laugh at the existence of a ridiculously marketed doll!
Barbie’s sex work roots
Before Barbie was introduced to the American market by Mattel, there was a German cartoon strip in the tabloid Bild that portrayed the adventures of Lilli, a buxom, upscale call girl. The cartoon strip was so popular, a doll named Bild-Lilli was created to sell at sex stores and tobacconists’ as a novelty gift aimed at men’s bachelor and birthday parties. Barbie creator Ruth Handler saw Lilli on a trip to Europe, and decided to bring Lilli back, rename her Barbie after her daughter, and make her a teenage fashion model instead of a call girl.
I’m not surprised that this part of Barbie’s history has been erased from the film. It would require parents to answer a whole bunch of questions they’re not prepared to answer, and I see how that could be uncomfortable for many. Nevertheless, in the darkness of the movie theatre, my friend and I whispered the word “lies!” to each other when Barbie meets her maker as she’s about to leave Barbie World for the Real World.
The initial premise of Barbie leaving for the Real World was because she was malfunctioning and started to get cellulite, but she found her humanity along the way. While some people find that funny, it made me introspective. There is a perception about women’s value decreasing with age. It costs a lot of time and money to conform to the standard of feminine beauty that Barbie embodies. I remember having an existential crisis when the clubs in Ontario were closed down during the pandemic and I no longer felt pressure to uphold that ideal.
Pressures of beauty norms
It was hard to even begin to imagine what I would like my human form to look like if I no longer felt the need to look conventionally pretty for a living. Do I like learning to do elaborate nail designs; do I even like the taste of brown rice and vegetables; should I cut my hair short? I only ever wore makeup at work and had no idea how to do daytime makeup; did I want to start now? Should I stop waxing my armpits? Like Barbie, I spent most of my adult life conforming to a fantasy of what it means to be a human female, and felt lost in the real world.
But now that I’m no longer barely legal and coming into my MILF years, I can say that while mainstream culture teaches women to fear aging, my older colleagues didn’t get the memo. It might be different in other sectors of the industry, but at the strip club, if you look carefully, it’s the older girls who get the big spenders: their clients are the Sugar Daddy Kens!
There was a time when the idea of aging terrified me, but nowadays, I feel more powerful. I no longer smile coyly and pretend not to hear when a client is being rude, I deadpan tell them I don’t have time for this and walk away. I’ve learned to preserve my energy only for those who deserve it. It feels good to be respected and looked up to by the baby strippers.
I’m not suggesting that strip clubs as we know them are some sort of feminist utopia, like Barbie Land. The club where I currently work will be raising our daily fees due to “rising costs,” meaning on top of record-high gas prices, I have to pay more for the pleasure of working for multimillionaire owners while charging the same 20 bucks per song that strippers have been charging for well over 20 years now. At a time of record inflation, the club owners don’t think it would be fair to “their customers” if we raised our rates, when the reality is there would be no customers if not for the dancers. But maybe the rampant capitalism is actually a part of why the strip club feels like Barbie Land.
Patriarchy in Barbie Land
That man interrupting my break to make me and my fellow stripper feel small is no different than Ken trying to impose patriarchy in a place where every night’s a girls’ night, and the illusion is that we’re all 20-somethings living our best lives. Owners not recognizing our existence outside the club, as if our expenses aren’t also rising, is no different than Will Farrell trying to put Barbie back in the box to protect Mattel’s financial interests.
What is the same, and the most touching, is the fun and the love shared among the Barbies. The way that Barbies organize their resistance in discreet whispers is the same way I would warn a colleague of a bad client. Instead of “hi Barbie!” it’s “hi Babe!” The way Barbies speak when receiving compliments about their achievements — “thank you, I worked very hard” — is the way sex workers speak about their achievements. We know what hard work is, and we want to celebrate every success with each other.
As a small piece of resistance, my friend and I decided that if men come into the strip club to impose the patriarchy — using boating as an example, like Ken and horses — we might as well go all out and dress up as the original Barbie, once we figure out how to make matching chevron bathing suits.
And maybe that’s what the right-wing podcasters are mad at. Now that they’ve seen Barbie, they can never be certain if the well-coiffed, doe-eye-making woman looking straight at them isn’t planning a revolt with all of her equally beautiful friends.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
