This Barbie has emotions

My favorite lines from the movie were about emotions (no surprise)

Last Wednesday, my friend Laura hosted a wonderful Barbie party for women pastors, theologians, bible scholars, and ministers. She invited us to dress up in a custom Barbie costume of our own creation.

Laura, front and center in the pink dress, apron, and tent peg, was Biblical Womanhood Barbie. :-)

We also had some wonderful Kens join us.

Laura committed to the theme, and I love that in a person. She had pink drinks, pink dinnerware, pink party bags with pink candy, and a huge pink table with charcuterie surrounding a Barbie in a pink dream car. A woman after my own heart. (And I love that this lady pastor who always wears pants donned a PETTICOAT AND HEELS for the entire evening!)

Laura and her husband Jeff (Ken on the right) were on the Turkey and Greece trip earlier this summer - Laura was our fabulous TA who masterfully handled the logistics - along with Noemi and Dan (Mexican Barbie and Ken on the left).

My mom was visiting, so she got to join my Archaeologist Barbie as Hiking Barbie.

After dinner, we went to see the Barbie movie at a special pre-release party at the St. Charles theater. I loved it so much, I went to see it again on Friday with my kids.

In a shocking turn of events, I loved the movie lines about emotions.

One of the Barbies says, “This makes me emotional, and I’m expressing it. I have no problem holding both logic and feelings. And that does not diminish my powers—it enhances them!”

I wanted to stand up and cheer. I’ve been harping on that point for ages, and I’ll say it again and again. Logic (or rationality) and emotion are not opposite of each other. They are not opposed. They are both necessary for good decision making. Here’s a reel I made about that. Paying attention to your emotions, expressing them, and holding them together in your thought processes does indeed enhance your powers.

I don’t want to give away any plot spoilers, so I’ll just say that the movie deals with some beautiful themes around being human, how hard it is to be healthy women and how hard it is to be healthy men, and the complicated emotions involved.

When Barbie experiences tears for the first time, she says, “That felt achy…but good.” Tears are really important to balance our body budgets, to use Lisa Feldman Barrett’s language. We genuinely do feel better after we cry. Tears are one way our emotions help us take action toward a goal, in such cases, the goal of making our bodies feel better.

Later she reassures Ken, based on her new emotional/physical experience, that crying is okay. “I cry too!” she says. “It’s actually kind of amazing.”

He replies, “I’m a liberated man. I know crying’s not weak.”

Oh, that more men (and Kens) would feel free to cry and physically express their sadness! I hate that so many American men are socialized against crying, especially because, as aforementioned, it’s VERY GOOD FOR YOU.

Barbie has other complex emotions too, and watching her try to come up for words for them is funny. Like, “I feel conscious…but it’s my self I’m conscious of?” The process of naming emotions is really much like this in real life. We create social reality when we make up names for emotions - when they can be referred to in the shorthand of a name, we can more easily construct our own emotions and share them with other people.

Other people also help our emotional vocabulary grow. Barbie observes, “I’m getting all these weirdo feelings - like fear, but there’s no particular object?” A woman overhears and tells her, “That’s anxiety! I get that too.” She names and then normalizes Barbie’s emotion construction. This is precisely how we are all socialized into our cultural emotional throughout our lives. We learn the names in our language for certain sensations in certain contexts, which teaches us how to construct our emotions in the future to fit into our cultures.

One of the last lines of the movie is about the essence of being human. One character says to another, “Close your eyes. Now…feel.”

I hope you can lean into the complexity of your life today and all the weirdo emotions.

Close your eyes.

Now feel.

Have you seen the Barbie movie? What were your favorite lines?