Gen Z Bros Are Flocking to the New Barbie Flick

Gen Z Bros Are Flocking to the New Barbie Flick. By Athena Thorne.

The young men of Gen Z had an especially tough time as they came of age. They’re the boys who were told they were “toxic” and “the future was female.” They watched mutely as girls were handed all the honors and awards at school. Their Boy Scout troops were opened up to girls, ending the last boys-only bastion in the country, even as girls-only spaces were praised, funded, and expanded.

Yet despite the efforts of third-wave feminists and their gelded allies’ best efforts, these boys managed to grow into young men who don’t hate themselves. On the contrary, they think they’re actually quite alright, while the angry, pink-hatted millennial women who couldn’t stop sobbing when Hillary lost and who ruined school, “Star Wars,” and comics are the ones with the problem.

But there’s something even worse and more dangerous to the Left than the boys of Gen Z’s refusal to become submissive and self-loathing eunuchs: they have an abiding, sardonic sense of humor.

Many say that 2024 is shaping up to be a repeat of 2016, and there are certainly current conditions that support that premise. One of them is that the “may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb” attitude is making a comeback. In 2016, that meant voting for the guy who joked about grabbing women by the pink hat. In 2023, as blue-haired harpies and damaged alphabet people shriek at you that you’re a racist-sexist-homo-trans-xenophobe, it means you shouldn’t disappoint them. Embrace it, become it — fulfill their wildest unsafe-victim-of-violent-ideas fantasies. And then, as you confirm their bias and their eyes well up with terror, savor and enjoy the hysteria.

Gen Z bros are going to see “Barbie” so they can emulate (for laughs) Ken’s character arc. Slate summarizes the plot:

Barbies and Kens alike are under the impression that their matriarchal utopia is a mirror of the real world; surely, decades of playing with highly accomplished dolls must have overcome whatever biases existed in darker pre-Mattel times.

 

But when when Barbie and Ken make their way to Los Angeles in an attempt to track down the source of a disturbance in Barbieland’s perpetual bliss, they find themselves in a place that’s far less progressive, and far less pink, than their own. Barbie gets catcalled on the street and discovers that the company marketing her girl-power brand is run by an all-male board.

But Ken discovers something different: a world where men hold power, where they are noticed and admired — a place where men matter.

Ken is the closest thing Barbie has to a villain, unless you count patriarchy itself. Upon returning to Barbieland, he and the other Kens (others Ken?) take control in a bloodless coup, and by the time Barbie makes her way back, she’s been literally displaced. Her dream home is now Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House, and the Barbies who once ruled the world wear frilly maid outfits and serve cocktails.

That right there is why Gen Z lads are heading to the theater: sigma Ken goes full Chad.

 

 

So if [Ryan Gosling’s] Ken is a pro-“patriarchy” (as Leftists imagine it) rube, his fans are going to celebrate every word from his plastic mouth. If that is what Big Woke thinks of them, then by gum, they will live up to that expectation (and have a blast doing it).

Guys aren’t angrily boycotting Barbie (which Big Left would take as a win because it would prove that they can’t handle a strong, feminist Barbie); they’re flocking to the movie specifically to applaud the ludicrous chauvinism espoused by Based Ken. And to demonstrate to Leftists that they are perfectly willing to behave as badly as Leftists claim they do. And to laugh at the Leftists’ fuming and sputtering when they do it.

If there’s one thing totalitarians (like the modern Left) cannot tolerate, it’s fun. They sold their sense of joy along with their souls years ago. Unfortunately for them, their “Barbie” feminist film will generate more laughter, memes, mockery, and joy than they ever intended.