Kenergy claims its final victory over feminism,
Maybe in BarbieLand– “She’s everything. He’s Just Ken,” but in OscarLand the predictable winner is…. patriarchy.
Yet again, a female film director of a major movie was overlooked for an Oscar nomination by the Academy of Motion Pictures, and the old boys club.
By snubbing Barbie director Greta Gerwig they missed the whole message of Barbie the movie. Additionally nominating Ken (Ryan Gosling) but not Barbie (Margot Robbie) is literally the plot of the film.
Social media went into justifiable outrage over the snubs.
Original Ken Doll
Yet the truth is in my childhood world of SallyLand, Ken always got top billing.
The blonde flocked hair doll with just a touch o’ bulge was more than Kenough for me.
Allan ( spelling changed to Alan in 1991) was eventually discontinued but has been brought back as a cultural icon thanks to Michael Cera’s portrayal of the doll in the “Barbie” film.
While other little girls were clamoring for their first Barbie doll in 1962, it was a no-brainer for me. I chose Ken over Barbie just as in 1964 I picked his red-headed pal Allan over Barbie’s freckled face bestie Midge.
Ken whose full name is Kenneth Sean Carson, and was named after the son of Barbie creator Ruth Handler, came out 2 two years after Barbie.
Even though Mattel tried to sell him gushing “he’s a doll,” poor Ken was never as popular as his fashionable gal pal and few even remember Allan being marketed as Ken’s best friend with the selling point that “all of Ken’s clothes fit him!”
Accessory Ken
Vintage Ken Booklet 1964
Ken wasn’t considered essential among diehard Barbie collectors.
“No one really wants a Ken,” Maria Teresa Hart, a Barbie expert and author of Doll, a book about doll culture, recently told Vox. Ken is an accessory. “Ken,” she says “is a doll that you would get, but never ask for.”
Except he is exactly who I asked for on my seventh birthday in March 1962.
The world Barbie inhabited celebrated things we associated with girliness, all pink, soft, and fashiony. Things that did not interest me.
In Barbieland in the 2023 movie, Barbie’s accomplishments and Ken’s lack of them seem to be just the norm.
Vintage Fashion Booklet Barbie and Ken 1964
Vintage Fashion Booklet Barbie and Ken 1964
For the first generation of Barbie players in the early 1960s she had yet to break any glass ceilings when it came to career goals while Ken had a much more robust, active life.
Barbie was in way over her pretty blonde head when it came to being a doctor, or an airplane pilot. The same messages we girls got in board games and books.
Her fabulous feminist future was a few years past my playtime.
Vintage Fashion Booklet Barbie and Ken 1964
Vintage Fashion Booklet Barbie and Ken 1964
Barbie wasn’t an American Airlines pilot- Ken was. She was the stewardess. While Ken could be dressed as a doctor, she was a registered nurse. Ken served proudly in the armed forces in crisp Khakis or could morph into a Navy man in a white sailor suit. Barbie was a babysitter or volunteered as a Candy Striper. In her tweed suit, she could be a career girl but never called a business executive.
Ken was definitely part of the patriarchy.
Vintage Fashion Booklet Barbie and Ken 1964
Vintage Fashion Booklet Barbie and Ken 1964
He had all the manly suits and rep ties worthy of Brooks Brothers. His Rah Rah campus hero togs worthy of any Ivy League fraternity boy. He was even a rugged outdoorsman sporting a hunting rifle.
Magic earing Ken was far in the future
Unlike in later years where Ken really took a back seat to Barbie’s ambitions, my childhood Ken embodied all the masculine stereotypes of the time period.
“I’m just Ken,” Ken sings in the movie “I’m just Ken anywhere else I’d be a 10.
Outside of BarbieLand he could be the main character. He could have all the ambition and wouldn’t be an accessory.
In SallyLand he was.
Envisioning The American Dream 