I have a few pink things in my wardrobe and I’ve even been blonde lately. Pink would have suited me, but I hadn’t followed the media coverage before the film and didn’t know how I was supposed to dress.

I watched the film as a fifty-year-old woman who had never played with a Barbie doll. I didn’t receive one for my First Communion, because in the 1980s the doll, created in the West in 1956, still hadn’t reached the Polish market. I didn’t buy Barbie dolls for my daughter because my girl wasn’t a Barbie fan, although she did receive a few dolls as obligatory gifts from her aunts.

What was best about the Barbie film for me? That Barbie supports feminists, and the word “feminism” comes with the Barbie doll, in a way, as a gift. It is truly something new.

In Bolesławiec at the beginning of the 21st century, being a feminist—which I was then and still am today—was equivalent to being a two-headed calf or, more aptly, a bearded woman. I know that it is still this way in certain circles associated with the Catholic Church, Konfederacja and the Rydzyk-aligned faction of Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, but the elites and cultural salons have been inoculated with feminism for years now. Yet at the beginning of the 21st century, my feminism embarrassed those elites like hell.

I remember that during the premiere of Wiesław Saniewski’s film “Bezmiar sprawiedliwości” (2006), held at Orzeł (today CIK Orzeł), I asked the director why the women in the film were so stereotypical (among other things, the female jurors were knitting some scarves). The audience silenced me then, embarrassed that I had dared to ask such a “naughty” question of the creator. I heard whispers from the stage: tour local feminist, intended to sound like: village idiot.

Now I’m hoping that girls will play with Barbie dolls precisely as feminists!

I also liked how completely Ken was unnecessary to Barbie. A difficult role for Gosling—great that he took it on. Yes, gentlemen, it’s time to take care of yourselves and your emotions, and finally notice that the days of hunting mammoths ended a very long time ago. On the occasion of this column, I also send greetings to the man who sat next to me at the film with “his woman” and suffered: he fidgeted, sighed and looked at his phone, but endured until the end.

And what I liked most was that Barbie will finally have a pussy and, presumably, an entire reproductive system. I also liked the line spoken in the film that Barbie is human. For a feminist, such a declaration—that a woman no longer has to strive to be equal to a man in terms of being human, because she simply is, with all of it presented in pink and plastic in a popular film—is something enormous. A transformation in culture on a historic scale.

There is one thing I’m not sure about, though... Did the women present in the audience at the Bolesławiec cinema notice, hear and take in the fact that they are fully-fledged human beings, not the second sex? Will they feel that equality within themselves after the film? Or will they leave the screening in their pink dresses, trying to appeal even more to the Kens who, just as in the film, are of no use to them?

Grażyna Hanaf