Barbie Boys in a Gender-Confused World | Opinion

Before the movie hit theaters, it seemed most guys felt they could only see Barbie with their girlfriend or strictly for "cultural research." The debated okayness of men seeing Barbie, and the eternal conundrum of whether boys could play with Barbie dolls, is a chance to ask probing questions about how we understand gender identity today.

As a male who once owned numerous Barbie dolls, I can't help but think about how much the cultural scripts of masculinity have evolved since my early childhood. The rise of the transgender movement and, more recently, of the push away from the gender binary, has radically shifted the way young people who don't fit dominant gender stereotypes are taught to view themselves.

I collected a wide array of Barbie dolls, from Olympic and Business Barbies to the vintage Solo in the Spotlight and Swimsuit Barbies. My fascination with Barbie was partly indebted to my older female cousin, whose interests had a major influence on me.

Beyond my cousin's influence, what drew me to Barbie dolls was the space they allowed me to engage my creativity, imagination, and taste for beauty—something action figures didn't offer. I found the rugged and uncomplicated play to which GI Joe and Power Ranger figures lent themselves to be dull and boring. It was easier to create games with Barbie that involved elaborate psychodramas.

Though my parents cringed a little when I would lead them to the Girls section at Toys "R" Us, they willingly bought me dolls. At McDonald's, they would tell the drive-thru cashier that while the Happy Meal was for a boy, I wanted the miniature Barbie rather than the Hot Wheels race car. The one time they had no Barbies left, I reluctantly accepted the car and proceeded to create an art project out of it by painting it different colors.

Friends who saw my Barbies would ask if I was "half girl," while others made fun of me to my face. Sometimes I wondered if I would be happier as a girl—that way I wouldn't have to deal with being ridiculed by others.

My parents made it very clear that I was a boy, and that I was just a little "different" from the others. And I'm sure that had I experienced persistent feelings of dysphoria into my young adulthood, they would've been accepting if I had decided to transition. But with the current social contagion of Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria, I can only imagine how things would have panned out had I been born 20 years later. As more parents allow their children to cross-identify and even take hormones, there seems to be little space for children to inhabit the old categories of tomboys and pansies.

This shift reflects a broader American confusion about gender which predates the mainstream Trans movement. In my own research, I've come to find how much the way we talk about gender identity is shaped by simplistic notions of gender as "performance," which is to say it's defined by the things we like and the way we act. Part of the thinness of our discourse is the result of industrialization and automation's effects on our relationship with work—since the turn to mass-producing machines, the actual differences between men and women have become largely trivial.

This disintegration between our gender and our sense of self is an extension of Enlightenment ideals of autonomy and self-determination. The truths of life and reality in general are not so much "given" to us or "revealed" on their own terms. Rather, we understand them using our rational wills. Being a "real man" means choosing to fulfill the roles dictated to us by society. The emphasis is on how we choose to act, rather than discovering the meaning of having been made a male and the deeper symbolism of our bodies. We can see the fruit of this logic in the drably confining gender norms of the Post-War era.

And while purporting to be a reaction to modern Enlightenment thought, postmodernism extended this self-referential thinking to its ultimate conclusions. Gender theorist Judith Butler insists that "there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender," and that "identity is performatively constituted." Though the point of reference may have shifted from the dictates of society to those of the internal "self," we continue to think of identity in a material, behaviorist manner.

I'm grateful that my parents both allowed me to experiment with non-normative gender play and insisted that I am and always will be a boy. But I couldn't help but feel that there was still something missing as I entered adulthood. I continued to wonder what made me a male, and how my less-than-typical interests were inherently masculine.

It was through reading a wide array of writers—ranging from Nietzsche to Freud, Edith Stein to Camille Paglia—that I began to develop a more nuanced vision of masculinity. Though these writers have vastly distinct ideological convictions, they hold in common the awareness that gender is something given—it's a gift that precedes and defines our behavior and self-identification.

This view of gender transcends the matter of one's affect or sexual preference. It's not about the way we act or "perform" on the surface level; it's a metaphysical reality that shapes the way we perceive and move through the world. Paglia goes as far as to claim that gay men "are guardians of the masculine impulse," whose sexual exploits "pay homage to the dream of male freedom." "Lacking women's awesome power to create life," men, and in particular gay men, "are driven to create culture."

My manhood is not so much defined by my interests or the way I act, but by impulses and aspirations that lie deep within my psyche. Because of the shallow way I was taught to think of identity, these drives remained largely dormant for most of my childhood. But the more I engaged in self-investigation, I found that they were very much present within me.

To be sure, these drives can lead a man toward "toxic" or self-indulgent behaviors. But they can also lead him to take meaningful risks, to build and create things for the benefit of others, the summit of which is reached in fatherhood: the power to generate new life. This "masculine genius" or manly mode of perceiving and creating informs the way I entered into so-called "feminine" interests and activities.

When faced with the matter of "Barbie Boys," the question of whether or not males should play with Barbies (or see the film) at all is not really that valuable or even interesting. The real question is how males play with Barbies differently from girls. What might a man—regardless of his personality type or sexual orientation—perceive in the film that a woman may not be as likely to pick up on? The more we shift to a deeper, more nuanced vision of gender identity, the more free we will be to transcend the "performative" deadlock between progressives and traditionalists.

Stephen G. Adubato is a writer and professor of philosophy based in New York. He is also the curator of the Cracks in Postmodernity blog, podcast, and magazine. Follow him on Twitter @stephengadubato

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.