Barbie’s New Age Genius

Finding balance in our Divine Masculine and Feminine and thereby transcending the matrix.

I am a fragile man. Highly—almost desperately—well-meaning. Incredibly insecure. Enduringly unsure whether I’m worthy of love. “I’m just Ken,” as Ryan Gosling sings in the Barbie movie. Perhaps, like Ken, I’d even be in danger of being radicalized nearer to borderline Incel territory were I not a happily married simp.

But, despite these character traits exposing me to feeling drained and vaguely nauseated after the succession of final act sack-taps that the Barbie movie delivered, I actually think it’s more than worth a watch. 

The film’s been simmering on my mental back-burner and, as the flavors deepen, I’m more and more blown away by the film’s spicy New Age genius. It’s a message of marriage between the Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine that each individual must undertake within their own personal journey.

Most people mired in consensus reality probably regard the label New Age simply as an insult to levy at any and all half-baked hippy bullshit. I thought the same until our collective brush with mortality via the pandemic ushered an initiation into the Woo-niverse.

Now I understand New Age to refer to a milieu that variously evokes wisdom amalgamated from multiple mystical sources, both Eastern and Western. Ideas are borrowed, for example, from Buddhism and Ashtanga Yoga, from Occultism and Qabalah. 

The Barbie movie, whether intentionally or not, demonstrated mastery of the concept of Divine Gender that New Age philosophy seems to have borrowed from the Jewish mystic practice of Qabalah, at least as it is conveyed by famed occultist, Dion Fortune. 

With a little extrapolation based on the rule that “the difference between medicine and poison is dosage,” we can infer that there is a “toxic” form of expressing Divine Masculine traits that is basically defined by going overboard. 

With that in mind, the film’s story can be summarized thus:

• Ken’s story is about his journey from Toxic Masculinity to more balanced Masculine and Feminine aspects. 
• Barbie, meanwhile, moves through effectively expressing Masculinity before being coerced by Ken into Toxic Femininity, but ends up a balanced, fully realized, even transcendent human being. 

Are Masculine and Feminine really the best words for this concept?

It’s important to note that the New Age concepts of the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine don’t actually have much to do with sex, or even gender identity as the modern culture war frames it. 

According to the Kybalion, a New Age tentpole written in the early 20th century, the distinction is important.

The great Seventh Hermetic Principle–the Principle of Gender–embodies the truth that there is Gender manifested in everything–that the Masculine and Feminine principles are ever present and active in all phases of phenomena, on each and every plane of life. At this point we think it well to call your attention to the fact that Gender, in its Hermetic sense, and Sex in the ordinarily accepted use of the term, are not the same.

The word “Gender” is derived from the Latin root meaning “to beget; to procreate; to generate; to create; to produce.” A moment’s consideration will show you that the word has a much broader and more general meaning than the term “Sex,” the latter referring to the physical distinctions between male and female living things. Sex is merely a manifestation of Gender on a certain plane of the Great Physical Plane–the plane of organic life. We wish to impress this distinction upon your minds, for the reason that certain writers, who have acquired a smattering of the Hermetic Philosophy, have sought to identify this Seventh Hermetic Principle with wild and fanciful, and often reprehensible, theories and teachings regarding Sex.

The Kybalion also points out that “everything has its Masculine and Feminine Principles,” even people.

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So a balanced, fully realized person displays healthy, effective characteristics of both the Divine Masculine and Feminine. But what are they?

Dion Fortune could qualify as one of the writers the Kybalion warned about who took Divine Gender and mixed it up with physical sex. She would almost certainly be considered a problematic writer for her insistence on antiquated gender roles, today. 

There are a few too many moments in The Mystical Qabalah where she lampoons “cosmopolitan men” who, for example, “can’t grow truly patriarchal beards” and are therefore inadequate.

However, her elucidation of the Feminine and Masculine principles—note the capital letters—in that book will be familiar to anyone who watched the Barbie movie.

The trouble is, that while the male gives the physical stimulus which leads to reproduction, he does not realize that on the inner planes he… is dependent for his emotional completeness upon the stimulation given by the female. [emphasis mine]

Forget about sex. In fact, it’s too confusing to use the words masculine and feminine at all. I’m sick of making these caveats and referring to the writings of long dead occultists who had atavistic notions of propriety which were obstacles to love and fulfillment for both men and women, which justified oppression, and for which, as a result, there is little place in our modern world. 

Fortune essentially summarizes the Masculine principle that the Kybalion hints we each possess as “active” and the Feminine principle as “receptive.” 

The Masculine, which I will be calling “Active” for the remainder of this essay, is the sperm. It blasts forward at over 25 mph and finds the Feminine principle—the Receptive egg traveling much more slowly in the other direction, which is ready to exercise discernment and receive whichever sperm it chooses. 

Another metaphor Fortune uses is the throne in which the king sits. The throne, apparently, “receives” the king’s butt. It is the firm foundation from which he can project his power into the kingdom. 

A third is the rifle, an Active, penetrative force. Compared to the shoulder, which Receptively “takes its kick.”

You can see how this would be problematic. 

Can you believe a woman wrote this?

For now, let’s just look at these Active and Receptive principles and how they apply to Barbie and Ken. 

This will require spoilers.

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Ken’s journey from being starved for Receptive energy, to overcompensating with Toxically Active energy, to—finally—effective Receptivity.

The line introducing Ken makes his inability to effectively express Receptive energy obvious. 

“Barbie has a great day every day. Ken only has a good day if Barbie looks at him.”

Ken depends, just as Fortune wrote, on Barbie for his sense of emotional completion. If you’ll allow the New Age lens, Ken is insecure and needy because he hasn’t opened himself up to the love and acceptance of his creator—which is exactly what Barbie does later on in the movie.

But Barbie is her own person. Ken is inevitably insecure and unsatisfied when her energy radiates to others. She isn’t Source, with its infinite compassion and unconditional love, she’s just a boss ass lady with her own priorities.

When Ken travels to the Real World and discovers a strategy for forcing Barbie to provide him with all of her love, he begins to express as Toxically Active. 

As I’ll explore briefly later on, a bit of balanced Active energy is absolutely a good thing; it’s why Barbie has her own priorities. But, again, too much medicine is often poisonous. We call this a “toxic dose.”

Ken learns from our world to structure all of society around controlling Barbie’s energy and directing it toward himself. 

In real life, some theories postulate that men have instituted patriarchy in order to control women’s reproductive capacity because we have viewed it as an economic and political resource. One possible New Agey implication is that the miracle of making a baby—of being able to create life—is exactly what makes a woman’s love, affection and attention an obsession for some depressed and nihilistic men. They seek to use women, who are a source of life, as a substitute for being openly receptive to those things from the source of all life. Whatever you consider that to be. 

And that’s where we find the ultimate meaning of “I am K-enough.” 

With or without the love of other humans, each of us is enough. Exactly as we are. 

The New Age asserts that there’s nothing we could possibly do that isn’t exactly what was meant to happen. In accordance with the laws of physics and the universe, everything that happens can happen no other way. 

New Agers—who admittedly often enjoy privileged positions in society that make these beliefs more palatable—believe that because everything can be no other way, all is Good. And because all is Good, all is God… after all, that is the etymological derivation of “good.” 

Finally, God is fundamentally composed of infinite, unconditional love. 

So attuning yourself to your creator, to Source, to the Universe, to God, to The All—whatever you want to call it—aligning yourself and being Receptive to that Love can allow you to feel “enough.”

Or, alternatively, maybe being enough is just loving yourself. Believing you are worthy of love. New Agers preach that once you recognize you’re worthy, you are better able to Receive it in whatever form it arrives. 

With his Receptive energy adequately balanced, Ken isn’t desperate for attention in order to have a good day. He Receives the good that is already core to experience. 

He is enough, even without Barbie looking at him.

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Barbie’s journey from effective Active energy, to Toxically Receptive, to effective—even transcendent—Balance.

When the movie begins, the Barbies of Barbieland all display a kind of effective Active energy. They are doers. Capable of being anything. A bit of self-mockery on Mattel’s part given the wide range of Barbies you can find on store shelves. 

Personal experience with my daughter has indicated that most Barbies at Target, for example, have been pretty gendered societal roles like Teacher or Nurse, but maybe that’s just evidence of consumer demand from the patriarchal Real World that Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie travels to later.

One Barbie is shown arguing to a Supreme Court, of course also composed of Barbies, successfully criticizing Citizens United and rightfully patting herself on the back for harnessing both reason and emotion in the process. 

When Ken discovers patriarchy, he is somehow able to convince the Barbies to fall in line; they enter a phase of Toxic Receptivity. They are too Receptive to the Kens’ needy energy. To his explanations of The Godfather and mansplaining of sports. Too Receptive to his demands. 

When asked to resume her Active life, one Barbie says something along the lines of, “But I enjoy being a helpful decoration!” 

When Stereotypical Barbie wakes up and fully realizes balance in both the Active and Receptive aspects of her existence, the ending gets a little confusing. At least at first blush. But Barbie’s ultimate transcendence into the human realm is in keeping with New Age philosophy too. 

“I want to be a part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that is made.”

This line from Stereotypical Barbie echoes one of the core aims of New Age philosophy. The “new age” that believers are trying to manifest is one in which humans realize our full potential.

The Aquarian Singularity might express through a transhuman merger between man and machine. It might express through an up-leveling of consciousness that enables us to enact The Secret-style manifestation at will. It might be a mass awakening to the nature of reality following Jesus’s Second Coming in the form of Chris Bledsoe’s aliens. It might represent the mass realization that all consciousness is one unified thing and that that “thing” is God.

But ultimately, the climax of New Age philosophy is that humans will shift from Experiencers to Creators. To active, autonomous agents in our own lives who are simultaneously receptive to the abundance inherent in the infinite Universe.

The climax will be that humans achieve Wholeness.

Just like Barbie.