This Barbie is… reclaiming girlhood

30 (ish) going on 13: our second coming of age that's all joy, no judgement.

Mere moments into the opening montage of the Barbie movie, my eyes were glistening with tears. Specifically, it was Margot Robbie reaching for milk in the Barbie DreamHouse kitchen that set me off. There was something about a glance inside that fridge, with its 2D decal background of brightly-coloured, fully-stocked shelves, that so viscerally juddered me back to lying prone on an itchy carpet and choreographing my Barbie through the very same motions.

In specificity we find the universal, and the joy of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie leans into both the nostalgia of girlhood and the multitudes of womanhood. In speaking to a collective experience that has – much like the eponymous brand itself - traversed generations, the film traces a constellation of female recognition: joy, solidarity, pride. Rage, shame, contradiction.

The film is a sobering confrontation of the disconnect between the worlds we build for ourselves as young girls, the ones we believed we could grow into, and the reality of the one we find as women.

It reminds us - poignantly, powerfully - that just like our mothers before us, we were all (literally or figuratively) once a little girl with a doll. And it asks: when and why did we leave her behind?

Growing up, I was regularly told that as girls we just matured earlier, but now I wonder if that was only because we were hurried along. I found being a kid excruciating; I was in such a rush to have agency, to be taken seriously. And I don’t think I was alone in that. We romanticised adulthood like we now romanticise youth. Whilst boys seemed free to play on into the Mojo Dojo Casa of adulthood, somewhere along the way, girls were taught that to grow up, we must out-grow.

And so, in a frenzy of haste and self-consciousness, we relinquished our girlhood to an adult language of shame. One that devalues the joy of female-centric culture to the insipid and the insignificant; one that sours passion into ‘guilty’ pleasure.

Until now, that is. Because there’s been something in the air this Summer: A collective nostalgia seeping from the pores of pop-culture, like an over-enthusiastic spritz of Britney Spears Fantasy.

Grown women are flocking on mass to cinemas for Barbie in ways we haven’t since Twilight, aged fourteen.

Taylor Swift has us making friendship bracelets to trade with strangers at concerts and reliving the soundtrack of our adolescent heartbreak with the re-gifting of Speak Now (TV).

We’re wearing our fandom like the walls of our childhood bedrooms, flocking to arenas for Harry Styles et al. in a swarm of merch, home-made costumes, and hand-drawn signs.

TV streaming platforms are aglow with coming-of-age escapism, The Summer I Turned Pretty & Heartstoppers teasing us back to never-ending summers and the blush of first love.

Jelly shoes are in. Small handbags are in. Even self-choreographed dance routines are making a comeback.

We’re seeing an ebullient hijacking of cultural consciousness in a hot pink cloud of girlish joy. And best of all, its unapologetic AF. Much more than rose-tinted wistfulness, this is reclamation. We’re 30 (ish) going on 13, and we’re having the time of our lives.

Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot that sucked about being a kid, and honestly, I’d sooner fend for my life in shark-infested waters than have a re-do of my teenage years.

But still, in girlhood there was an intensity, an intimacy, an innocence, and I think it’s that which we are rediscovering. All that joy, with none of the judgement.

It’s a second coming of age. But this time, we’re beholden neither to parental consent, the limitations of pocket money, nor the shame that robbed us of it all before.

Why now, I wonder? Perhaps our future feels so nebulous that we crave the certainty of the past; back to a time before tech billionaires challenged each other to cage fights and the world was catching fire; back when the drama of the latest Jacqueline Wilson was as high-stakes as it got. Or maybe, as Generation Therapy, we’ve spent enough time on the couch to know that any inner child exposed to the 90s/00s is in need of all the healing it can get…

Either way, it’s happening. Track by track of the Millennial Mix-Tape, we’re reclaiming all that we shed as girls in our haste to become women. And gosh, it’s fun!

*Alexa, Play Aqua*