It might be a case of culture coming full circle, since modern heteronormativity has moved more gender neutral and drag has wrapped around such that 1950s heteronormativity is now camp.
Everyone in the culture who is paying attention knows all of that, so this pastor may be unconsciously responding to that, even though he thinks he’s reacting to something more basic. Despite his best efforts, he looks at Barbie and sees a drag queen because some part of him knows what we all know- that hyper-femininity is silly.
There’s also that - I was reading a whole article talking about how there’s a lot of online discussion in right-wing evangelical circles about non-gender conforming behavior (e.g. cross-dressing) and how it’s considered perfectly fine, but only as a sexual kink within the confines of a heterosexual marriage. So non-gender conforming behaviors automatically get seen as sexual, because they’re projecting. But I think there’s a larger issue, where any kind of consideration of gender roles, etc. is threatening, because they see it as a God-imposed set of rules that underlie literally everything. It is, fundamentally, a foundation upon which everything else rests, both literally and metaphorically, so if you start presenting “alternatives,” it undermines their whole religion.
I think he also doesn’t want to acknowledge (or think about) femininity (or masculinity) in general as a cultural construct, because it goes against fundamental church teachings. (And if you think about it at all, even just acknowledging how it’s changed in the last 70 years, which Barbie touches upon, those church teachings start falling apart. They don’t bear examination, so nothing about sex or gender can be examined.)
Likewise nationalists don’t want to acknowledge national identity as a cultural construct, even though (or because) constructing national identity and defining who is and is not part of the nation is precisely what they do.
While attempting to define nationalism, Anderson identifies three paradoxes:
“(1) The objective modernity of nations to the historians’ eyes vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists. (2) The formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept […] vs. the irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations [and] (3) the 'political power of such nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence.”
As the trailer says ‘It’s the movie for people who love Barbie and for those who hate Barbie’. It’s not for those who are affended by everything (that might not be in the Bible) and don’t know what comedy, humour and satire are.
To be fair I’m going to shit on that fucker without having done any of the above either.
The Barbie movie is a must watch in our house (the kids are into it precisely because it looks like it might annoy the transphobic wizard crowd, and I’m a Grreta Gerwig fan from her mumbledore days) so I would hazard a guess that he would pop a vein if he did actually watch it.
Misogyny and anti-feminism are very popular among young men in South Korea. They think of feminism (of any kind) as an extremist ideology and regard all feminists as man-hating fanatics.
Describing feminism as extremist reminded me of the 4B movement. Although I doubt that’s what Margot Robbie was thinking of when she said feminist. It does seem like the broadcaster is creating a spectacle out of nothing, as they are prone to do.
In looking up 4B, I found this article that says there have been many different similar movements over the years in response to persistent misogyny:
