So the Barbie movie is actually all about Ken — ironic, given that the joke is that it’s all about Barbie. As the tagline goes: “Barbie is everything. Ken is just Ken.” It’s Barbie who sails through life in a parade of serene brunches and perfect parties with professional dance choreography, while Ken bases the success of each day on whether his de facto girlfriend acknowledges his presence. The Ken-squashing jokes fly with merciless regularity: how it’s always girls’ night in Barbieland, how nobody has actually owned a Ken doll, how Barbie never lets Ken stay over in her Dreamhouse. “What would we do?” she asks, a fair question given their mutual lack of genitals.
Yet by making Ken such a glaring spare part, the
