Ken was born an accessory. Not an invention, per se, but a byproduct of consumer demand. He was forged in the mold of a 1960s teenage boyfriend on his last leg of puberty: boyishly slim with a Tony Curtis jawline, ocean blue eyes, and a delicate carpet fuzz of hair, with only a pair of Lilliputian red swim trunks and a tag on his wrist that read “Genuine Ken” to cover him. His role, as determined by Mattel, was male companion to Barbie. They met on the set of his very first commercial, the final frame of which shows the pair dressed as bride and groom while a narrator suggests we “see where the romance will lead.”
Oh, the places it went. Nearly 62 years later, the two have inspired everything from matching lamé ice-dancer outfits to breathless tabloid coverage. The latest vessel for their joint brand is Barbie, a surreal comedy directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as the most famous toy couple in history. The movie begins in a fantasy doll paradise called Barbie Land, a realm the journalist Willa Paskin calls a “multicultural Barbiarchy.” While Barbies (women) run society, the Kens (men) are relegated to the vague occupation of “Beach,” where they compete for glances, greetings, and smiles from their female counterparts.
From this unsatisfying environment emerges the most complex Ken to date. Played with an innocence that could only come from the cobwebbed Mickey Mouse Club corners of Gosling’s mind, Ken struggles to find his own self-worth. He ruminates in the shadows, just outside Barbie’s disco spotlight. Always an Instagram boyfriend, never an influencer. After stowing away with Barbie on her quest to the real world, Ken gets a taste of the patriarchy, and his alienation mutates into a childish misogyny. He trades in his pink cotton shorts for a hyper-masculine ninja-slash-biker(?) outfit and a floor-length fur coat; he installs an excessive amount of giant flatscreen TVs all over Barbie’s Dreamhouse, as if it’s a sports bar; he starts singing about wanting to take Barbie “for granted” in an acoustic rendition of Matchbox Twenty’s “Push.” Finally, his tyranny dissipates into self-pity during an elaborate musical soliloquy called “Just Ken,” in which he asks: “Is it my destiny to live and die a life of blond fragility?”
Through Ken’s evolution, Gerwig and her cowriter/partner Noah Baumbach are no doubt gesturing at a yearslong discourse that suggests “men are lost” in a society in which it’s increasingly hard to get ahead, and women can surpass them in earning power and professional accomplishment. But as diligent students of the Barbie-verse, Gerwig and Baumbach are also incorporating the cultural conversation that has surrounded Mattel’s Ken doll since his 1961 inception: his obsessed-over introduction, makeover snafus, and Mattel’s shifting strategy in his marketing that add up to his current-day persona as an afterthought. “I think all the dead ends are a reminder that they were just trying stuff out,” Gerwig said of Mattel in a recent New Yorker story. “Dealing with all the strangeness of it is a way of honoring it.” For the character of Ken, that meant engaging with a people’s history of the doll rather than the one you might find in a Mattel press release. The movie alludes to his smooth nether region, that time he inadvertently became a gay icon, and, ultimately, Mattel’s own tendency to think of him as superfluous. Within the context of a decades-long Ken-versation, Gosling’s character brings to life a question that has always plagued the doll: What kind of man can Ken be in the shadow of a woman who’s designed to be larger than life?
The tale of Ken’s tortured existence began, as many a toy’s, with a board meeting. Two years after Barbie’s breakout debut, Mattel’s financial advisors sought to convince cofounders Ruth and Elliot Handler to expand the brand into the profitable world of product licensing, according to Barbie Bazaar, a 1990 series of articles by the doll collector A. Glenn Mandeville. Save for the presence of Ruth, it’s easy to imagine this discussion resembling the roundtable of male executives in suits who represented Mattel’s top brass in the Barbie movie. The Handlers were initially concerned that assigning Barbie a fixed biography might limit children’s imaginations during play. They nevertheless agreed, per Mandeville, that “select firms would be allowed to develop the personality of Barbie, under the watchful eye of management of Mattel.” With that obstacle cleared, the floodgates opened. Out came vinyl record totes, Barbie novels, and, crucially, Ken.
From the start, Ken’s identity was intertwined with Barbie’s, quite literally shaped by Mattel’s obligation to preserve her precious image. Yes, he was meant to be Barbie’s boyfriend, but his very presence risked more complaints from mothers about Barbie’s over-sexualization. So Ken’s face and body were molded in the shape of a teenager’s. (In Barbie, the closest equivalent to first-edition Ken is Michael Cera’s Allan, an early “buddy” of Ken’s whose main selling point is that “all of Ken’s clothes fit him.”) Though Ken stood a half-inch taller than Barbie, “Mattel was careful to give him boyish, clean-cut looks, and the overall, non-threatening, asexual appearance of a wimpy little jerk,” according to Children’s Television, a 1987 book written by Cy Schneider, the executive who oversaw Mattel’s account at the Carson/Roberts advertising agency. (Schneider’s unkind description is at least one piece of evidence that widespread anti-Kentiment originated from inside the building.) To put a fine point on it, an early Ken accessory set titled “In Training” included a pair of white cotton briefs, two dumbbells, and a book titled “How to Build Muscles.” Compared to Barbie, who carried the busty frame of a German fetish toy, Ken was just a boy in her shadow.
Mattel’s hand-wringing over the first Ken culminated in a debate over his nether region. “If his genitalia were included, some mothers would object. If his genitalia were omitted, would he look like some wounded Hemingway hero?” Schneider wrote. After consulting with a child psychologist, Schneider said the company settled on “a permanent set of shorts with a lump in the appropriate spot”—the suggestion of a penis without the commitment of one. But the realities of mass production threw a wrench in the plan when, according to the 1995 book Barbie’s Queer Accessories, a supervising engineer at Mattel’s Japanese manufacturing plant found that removing both the underpants and lump would simplify the production process, therefore cutting a half-cent in manufacturing costs for each Ken doll. Capitalism had the final word: Ken’s “suggestion” was smoothed down to a plastic knob for half a penny. In the film, Kate McKinnon’s character drops a reference to Ken’s legendary knob, calling it a “nude blob.”
However careful Mattel was about Ken’s early iterations, the company soon learned it could shape-shift the doll’s hair, body, face, and nether regions to appeal to the culture of the moment. “Normally, he reflects whatever kind of movie star or sports star or singer is popular or famous at the time,” said Joey Jarossi, a content creator who hosts the doll-enthusiast YouTube channel Beauty Inside a Box. With the 1970s embrace of sideburns, shaggy haircuts, and mustaches came a Mod Hair Ken with rooted auburn locks and stick-on facial hair. When disco swept the nation he was given a Robert Redford jawline, bent arms, and articulation in the waist to boogie. And in the 1980s, Ken went full Gordon Gekko with slicked-back hair and a power suit. You could argue Mattel was the company first known for dropping a new “type of guy” every few months before it became Twitter’s specialty. But each of his looks followed two simple rules: He was there to make Barbie look good, and to move merchandise. “[Mattel] needs people to want to pay the same amount of money that they would pay for a Barbie doll for him,” Jarossi said. “So he can’t be too much of an accessory. He can’t be too plain. He needs to stand, hold his own next to Barbie.” In practice, that has typically meant Ken’s outfits are, more often than not, cut from the same fabrics, in the same style of whatever fabulous frock Barbie’s wearing. “At the end of the day, all the thought and resources and design energy has normally gone into Barbie,” Jarossi said. “So now they’re like, ‘OK, now, we need to make a male version of this.’” Will Ferrell, who plays Mattel’s CEO in Barbie, appropriately sums up the company’s attitude toward the doll when he says: “Ken isn’t something I’m worried about—ever.”
For a long time, Mattel didn’t spend much time thinking about Ken. Then, in 1991, something—presumably the doll’s lagging sales numbers—inspired the company to ask young girls whether Barbie should get a new boyfriend. “The Ken doll has never been as popular and the kind of cash cow that Barbie has been,” Ann duCille, an English professor at Wesleyan University who has studied the cultural impact of Barbie dolls, told me. “And there have been various times when Mattel has tried to address that.” The girls Mattel spoke to thought Ken just needed a new look. “They wanted Barbie to stay with Ken, but wanted Ken to look a little cooler,” Mattel manager of marketing and communications Lisa McKendall told the Chicago Reader at the time. The company got to work on yet another Ken makeover.
Two years later, Mattel showed up to the North American International Toy Fair with Earring Magic Ken, a doll styled in the fashion of a ’90s rave-goer. He sported blond highlighted hair, a lavender mesh shirt, a sleeveless faux-leather Gaultier-style vest, tight black jeans, loafers, and an earring in his left ear. Around his neck hung a large faux-metal ring, which unmistakably looked to many adult consumers like a cock ring. Given the sex toy’s popularity among gay men, chatter about Ken’s sexuality swirled. “The new Ken has gone MTV,” The New York Times wrote, leaning on “MTV” to do a lot of work. Gay commentator Dan Savage was much more explicit: “The little girls of our great nation wanted a hipper Ken, and Mattel gave them a hip Ken. A queer Ken.” After years of standard step-and-repeat makeovers of Ken, Mattel had accidentally wandered into a snake pit of sexual identity politics—proof that when a company mines real-life culture for commercial profit, it can be tricky to wash away the subversive reasons that made that culture interesting in the first place. (Especially when you accidentally add a cock ring into the mix.) The doll became a cult collector’s item among the gay community, who finally saw their own version of masculinity reflected in a mass-produced idol.
As media coverage of Earring Magic Ken hit a fever pitch, Mattel scrambled to run what it perceived as damage control. After all, Barbie canon dictates that Ken is her romantic partner, not Allan’s or Brad’s or Steven’s. And it’s likely the company saw any hit to his public persona as one to hers, too. The company’s media-relations director told duCille that the claim that Barbie’s boyfriend was gay was “outrageous.” The incident reinforced Mattel’s aversion to anything outside what it considered normal—especially in the realm of sex. “Having long denied there is any sexual subtext to their dolls, Mattel suddenly found itself in the position of having to assert Earring Magic Ken’s heterosexuality: the ring around Ken’s neck might as well have been a noose,” duCille concluded in her 1996 essay “Toy Theory.” He was to be fabulous enough to look good next to Barbie, but not so fabulous as to threaten the intricate maze of limited representation upon which Mattel had built a billion-dollar empire. Earring Magic Ken’s brief cameo in the Barbie film—in which he identifies as a Barbie Land outcast—nods at the controversy, while ultimately letting Mattel off the hook.
The Earring Magic Ken-fuffle may have forced Mattel into a hetero corner, but it also proved to the company that its dolls’ personal lives could win it free press. As the company moved into an era of stunt-based PR, it decided Ken was more valuable as a punching bag than an accessory. In February 2004, the company announced that Ken and Barbie had broken up. The event was covered in the tabloids with all the rigor of an A-list celebrity breakup, including a VP of marketing at Mattel telling Today.com that Barbie and Ken remained “just friends.” Soon after, the company linked Barbie with a new male doll, an Australian surfer named Blaine. The implication, of course, was that switching out Kens was easy.
It was not the first time Mattel would exploit Ken’s flailing reputation as a way to make Barbie sparkle. For the 2010 film Toy Story 3, the company allowed Pixar to cast Ken as the movie villain’s evil-ish henchman. Based on an especially showy 1980s yacht-rock edition of the doll, Toy Story 3 Ken is both obsessed with his extensive wardrobe, and in denial that he’s a girl’s toy. It’s only after being whipped into shape by an especially woke Barbie—who at one point declares “authority should derive from the consent of the governed, not from the threat of force!”—that he chooses good over evil. Their dynamic boosted Barbie’s image as an independent role model for young girls while digging Ken into a deeper, shameful hole. “There were so many jokes in that film about Ken being a girl’s toy and an accessory for Barbie,” Jarossi told me. “That kind of became the definitive view of Ken.” The way Mattel has spun it, being a vaguely inferior companion is actually the role that Ken was born to do. “I think lots of people joke, myself included, about Ken being an accessory to Barbie,” Jarossi added. “But Ken himself doesn’t seem to care or mind, he’s always smiling.”
Jarossi’s description seems to capture the essence of Ryan Gosling’s very Method press tour for Barbie, during which he has been exceedingly deferential to Barbie and offered himboism after himboism. “Very little is known about Kenergy,” he told ET. “And we don’t have the funding for the research. We know that it’s real. In my case it came on as a rash, and then it turned into a tan. And then suddenly you’re shaving your legs, and you’re bleaching your hair, and you’re wearing bespoke rollerblades.” He admitted to BuzzFeed that letting go of the Ken role was “a bit like that Pillsbury dough—go with me on this—Cinnabon mix? Like once you open that canister you’re making Cinnabons. And you’re loving it. You’re loving making Cinnabons.”
Following the emotional denouement of the “Just Ken” musical sequence in Barbie, Gosling’s Ken is finally able to see himself as an individual, someone who can stand alone without Barbie. It’s a radical moment for a doll who’s always been no. 2. And historically, Mattel and its customers have disagreed. But something about Gosling’s mesmerizingly ditzy Ken—combined with the most elaborate movie marketing campaign in ages—may finally be Kenough to turn that corner for good.
Alyssa Bereznak
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