Barbie and Beyond: How to Empower the Feminine

I saw Barbie a few weeks ago and enjoyed it. I found it fun, and it was also a trip down memory lane. I loved Barbies when I was young. I made clothes for my Barbies, and I even had a weird Barbie thanks to my older brother, Greg. In hindsight, I can see the problems the doll made for the feminist movement.

Although the film wasn’t perfect in its feminist messages, I appreciated many of them including the need to recognize and call out cognitive dissonance- meaning where people’s beliefs and actions don’t line up. For instance, some women may consciously reject patriarchal standards for beauty but then find themselves relentlessly trying to achieve them. This is an important part of empowering the feminine—identifying where we might be unknowingly going along with the patriarchy in any way. We need to see where we are caught up in the brainwashing.

Recognizing where our actions and beliefs don’t align and then changing them so they do line up is an important part of feminine empowerment. But that isn’t all that needs to be done. I wish it was—life would be a lot simpler. The feminine, and women, have endured significant wounding over a large part of history whether they were being repressed in Victorian times or burned at the stake during the witch trials. These generations of trauma don’t just go away by changing how and what we think. It requires deeper work. It requires engaging with the emotional, intuitive, and somatic—aspects of the feminine that have been neglected in favor of the masculine functions of logic, ration, and efficiency.

Empowering the feminine also requires searching out all those patriarchal beliefs we unknowingly ingested. Born into a sea of patriarchy, most of us swallowed them up from the day we were born, and they lie hidden away deep in the bones. It takes work to find and extract them. While we are down in the unconscious rooting them out, we can also find aspects of the powerful feminine that have been neglected and ignored such as our intuition and a healthy connection to our bodies.

For me, this is where depth psychology comes into its own as its focus is on uncovering what lies in the unconscious. It can help us to find and transform the beliefs that contribute to cognitive dissonance. This can often be done through working with our dreams and through synchronicities, art, images, and stories. I, personally, have found this to be true. A recent dream of mine helped me to see where I was harboring patriarchal views of myself as a middle-aged woman. I unconsciously took on the idea that my value declined as I was getting older. But my dream and a synchronicity with an Edvard Munch painting showed me that there are other ways of imagining myself as I grew older and wiser. I don’t have to fade into the background.

Depth psychology also focuses on how to heal open wounds and how we can imagine a new feminine, one who is whole and in her power.

Thus, I’m thankful to Barbie for bringing to light many of the feminist issues. Perhaps there will be a sequel in which the Barbies work with their dreams and create art to heal the damage done to the feminine.