Because it has broken records for opening weekend gross at the box office this summer, against my natural instincts, I relented and watched the Barbie movie trailer. I couldn’t bring myself to actually drop $12 and 114 minutes to watch the entire movie. From what I got out of the trailer, the premise of the movie is something like this; Barbie is living in her fake Barbie utopian world with a slew of other fake Barbies, and she has a revelation that the world in which she inhabits is not the real world. She is then asked to make a matrix-like “red pill” choice between her world of high heels and the real world of flats. She chooses the flats, and then is thrust into the “real world” while her utopian synthetic Barbie world disappears.
At that point, the movie apparently devolves into a man-hating anti-patriarchy screed where every man in the “real world” is portrayed as either an idiot or evil. So, Barbie decided to leave her fantasy utopian world disconnected from reality and entered another world conjured in the minds of feminists who see everything that is female as great, and everything that is male as infected with toxic masculinity and unnecessary. So, the so-called “real world” that Barbie is now a part of, is no more real and no less a fantasy than the synthetic Barbie world that she had just left. In the Barbie movie, every woman in the “real world” is portrayed as smart, talented and sympathetic. And somehow, if we could just empowered women and turn the world over to the female of the species, then everything would be right in the world.
The other blockbuster movie released last weekend, Oppenheimer, apparently paints such a horrific picture of men, that one of its co-stars, Robert Downey Jr, couldn’t help but draw the same conclusion that the Barbie movie does. We must destroy the patriarchy and turn the world over to women. Downey said, “men start wars and the entire planet should be a matriarchy… I’ve never changed position on that… This [Oppenheimer] was just a triple confirmation.” He believes if every world leader was a woman, we’d have no more wars. And if you just go by stereotypes, you may believe that women leaders would be more peaceful than men, but history tells a different story. According to a study done by the National Bureau of Economics, between 1480 and 1913, Europe’s queens were 27% more likely than its kings to wage war. In the book, Why Leaders Fight, the authors analyzed every world leader from 1875 to 2004 and found that 36% of the female leaders initiated at least one militarized dispute, while only 30% of male leaders did the same. And who can forget the female US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, lighting the Middle East on fire during her reign, when she supported the 2009 surge in Afghanistan which created the deadliest year for the US in that war, and the 2011 military action to overthrow Qaddafi in Libya, as well as the 2012 military intervention to overthrow Assad’s regime in Syria. So, would the world be a more peaceful place if women ran it? History says, not likely.
It is easy for Barbie to fight the patriarchy when the entire world in which she lives has been built by someone else, almost exclusively by men. 89% of construction workers in the United States are men. 91% of fire fighters are men. 87% of police officers are men. 99% of soldiers who have died defending our country were men, especially the 600,000 men who died during World War II defeating fascism. Of the 343 firefighters who went into the World Trade Centers on 9/11 attempting to save others, while the buildings were burning and on the verge of collapse, 100% were men.
How many of the workers on the TV show, Dirty Jobs, with Mike Rowe are female? Not very many. Most of the workers doing the dirty jobs in the world, the necessary jobs that nobody else wants to do, are male. If we remove the men who do those jobs from society, society collapses. Yet those are the men who remain perpetually invisible in Barbie’s world, and in the minds of the women who keep screeching about the patriarchy. These men don’t exist to those women. They don’t see, or even acknowledge these men. These men are beneath them, literally beneath them, because these men are the foundation on which everything else in our society is built. But all they see is the patriarchy.
Prior to the industrial revolution 95% of the jobs outside of the home were manual labor. Work that ravaged your body and shorten your life. So, when it came to divide up the labor, men did the jobs outside the home and women did the jobs inside the home. Men didn’t do those hard manual labor body destroying jobs, because they are more benevolent or virtuous than women; they did those jobs, because physically they are more capable of manual labor than women are. Most men can lift a 100-pound bale of hay over their head, while 99% of the women can’t. That’s a fact. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is just reality. Society had been created where men worked outside the home and woman worked inside the home because that was a necessity for survival. And in the pre-Industrial Revolution days, women took pride in being mothers and homemakers, because that was more vital for our society as any job there was.
It is only after the Industrial Revolution when a larger percentage of jobs outside the home were indoor and not manual labor, that women started to want to work outside the home and reject the concept of motherhood. Suddenly being a mother and working in the home was like being a prisoner. I’m not saying that women should not work outside the home. If they are capable, which they are, and they want to, which many do, they should. But we need to stop the man bashing. There have been some bumps in the road along the way, as we evolve into a differently constructed society, but this idea that society is this patriarchy created specifically for men to work jobs outside the home to solely benefit men and keep women down is to ignore human history. If I had a choice between working 10 hours a day, six days a week, in a coal mine, and eventually dying of black lung at age 50, or staying at home, raising children, cooking the meals, cleaning, and living to 90, I probably would choose to stay at home. But if I had a choice between staying at home and raising kids or being the CEO of some company making $1 million a year, I would probably choose to be the CEO.
This is not a lecture explaining how wonderful men are, because I also know statistics like, 90% of the people in jail for committing murder and violent crimes are men. I also know that 100% of the people who die in childbirth are women. So, I’m not disrespecting women. I hold women in the highest regard because I know that, as with men, if women disappeared from our society, our society would collapse. We need women as much as we need men. And we need men as much as we need women. So, I’m not bashing women; I’m bashing the women who bash men. In bashing men, these women are exposing their ignorance, their myopia, their pretentiousness, and their unacknowledged privilege.
At the same time that the left is attacking the men and pushing a matriarchal, it is destroying the concept of womanhood by promoting the fantasy of transgenderism. Being a woman has become deconstructed to the point that a man can claim to be a woman simply by saying he feels like one thus denigrating the gender he claims to be. We have a Supreme Court Justice who could not even define what a woman was in her confirmation hearing for a seat on the highest court in our land that had been reserved exclusively for a woman. They twist and turn and contort reality to the point that they contradict even their most basic beliefs depending on which battle they are fighting in order to promote their one-sided fantasy.
It is right to tear down the false utopian world of Barbie, but let’s not pretend that the other world that they have created in their minds is any more real. If you’re really want to leave a fantasy world because it is a fantasy, it does no good to step right into another fantasy world simply because it is more pleasing. If you want to live in the real world and see life for what it is, then you must be willing to face the entire reality, not just the reality that props us your fantasy.
We must pry ourselves out of this vicious battle, pitting men and women against each other. Both men and women are important and vital to our survival. Engaging in this fight is both divisive and destructive. It serves no purpose. It’s not informative nor educating nor enlightening. The yin and the yang of the gender binary, which the left is so determined to destroy, is vital in not only the animal world but also to human society. Instead of attacking and trying to destroy the opposite sex, it is in everybody’s best interest to appreciate and support the opposite sex. We cannot live without each other. And anyone who thinks we can or thinks the opposite sex is inferior is living in a world of self-aggrandizing delusion, otherwise known as a fantasy.
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Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.