Still, it’s not exactly hard to find the hidden Ken in today’s real-life battles for power, in business, culture and high-level politics. Silicon Valley is essentially Ken’s beach if you gave all the Kens coding skills and venture capital. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have literally been talking about a cage fight, as if their enormous bank accounts aren’t bright enough peacock feathers. Gaetz and U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers almost got into a fistfight on the House floor during Kevin McCarthy’s speakership battle. The Republican presidential aspirants find macho-seeming ways to undermine each other (Chris Christie’s current presidential campaign is largely built around trash-talking Donald Trump) or preen about their willingness to take on big figures (Ron DeSantis puffs up his chest against the Disney empire, and/or the amorphous Woke monster). And according to some of the most heated online rhetoric — along with string of recent books and podcasts about men being men — these kinds of super-charged macho displays are the way men can reclaim some of the power they’ve been losing. In a world where, as with Barbie, women can do everything men do, and sometimes better, some men’s anxiety rises. And there’s no easy way to dance it off.

In actual life, it goes without saying, men still have no shortage of power — in the world writ large and Mattel in particular, where according to the company’s website, all but one of the current executive officers are men. That’s not to say they aren’t doing well by girls’ toys — this movie and the surrounding hype are, among other things, a work of next-level marketing genius. Still, the fact that men play a major role in determining what girls and women will consume puts a slightly dark spin on the movie’s gentle self-mockery. “When you think of sparkle, what do you think after that? Female agency!” Will Ferrell’s Mattel CEO says in one boardroom scene. The sequins in the theater proved his point.

In Barbie Land, meanwhile, the Ken of it all is a little too easy to defeat. With respect to Ginger Gaetz, it’s not that Gosling’s Ken has low testosterone as much as that he seems totally uninterested in the privileges testosterone bestows. Yes, he does plenty to show off his male prowess, showing off for Barbie with his surfboard and, in his peak patriarchy moments, preening around in a floor-length white mink coat. But when he faces defeat at the hands of a smarter, savvier, more competent set of Barbie dolls, he cries piteously but accepts his fate, admitting that leadership was too much work. If there’s a real fantasy in here, it’s that the guys wouldn’t want the power, anyway. Mattel knows: That’s Ken the way the girls would have him be.

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