Fox News leads a right-wing freakout over Barbie movie

Did you have “Republicans freak out over the gender politics of the Barbie movie” on your 2023 bingo card? I, for one, did not—yet here we are. The movie hasn’t even been released yet, but Fox News is leading the charge against it, giving a host of right-wing influencer types the space to whine that, as one chyron predictably put it, the “Barbie movie goes woke.”

According to one of its stars, Simu Liu, “I’m so glad that this movie exists because I think it puts the final nail in the coffin of that very heteronormative idea of what gender is, and what is or is not gendered.” Writer and activist Charlotte Clymer tweeted a compelling review of the movie, writing that it “feels like an especially potent trojan horse, beckoning us with well-earned laughter into a larger conversation on gender and how Barbie—the defining cultural symbol of high femme expression—has shaped that discourse over the past six decades.” So you can begin to see the problem from the right-wing culture warriors’ point of view.

In the words of one Christian movie review site gleefully quoted by Fox News, ”The new BARBIE movie forgets its core audience of families and children while catering to nostalgic adults and pushing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender character stories. Furthermore, the movie was poorly made with multiple premises, losing even the most die-hard fans.” (News flash: Nostalgic adults can be parents who make decisions about their family’s movie-watching habits.)