Pronouns in the documentary "Black Barbie"

[YankSplaining]

I'm only 24 minutes into this movie, and I had to stop and come over here to vent.

Netflix's documentary "Black Barbie" documents the history of black dolls in the US and interviews a series of women about black Barbie dolls. The women include Beulah Mae Mitchell, who was the first black woman to work at Mattel; Kitty Black Perkins, who designed the first black Barbie; and a variety of celebrities, including Misty Copeland and Gabourey Sidibe. (Copeland talks about how Mattel made a doll of her; Sidibe talks about her negative reaction to Barbies growing up.)

And every time one of these women is introduced, the screen reads, "[Name] (she/her)."

It's just boiling my blood. Wow, Beulah Mae Mitchell goes by she/her pronouns? An elderly black woman in her eighties, who the documentary refers to early on as someone's aunt - who would have thought?! Though this surely isn't the filmmakers' intention, it seems almost like it's mocking or insulting her. "You can't see with your own eyes that this is a woman, so we'd better tell you." Except, of course, that Mitchell indisputably looks like a woman, and anyone with half a brain cell would make the correct assumption that this is a she/her. It's just rubbing me the wrong way that an older black woman is being treated this way. In parts of the US, when she was a young woman, she wouldn't have been granted the courtesy of being called "ma'am." Now she's an old woman and she's not being granted the courtesy of people acknowledging that her womanhood is obvious.

And Misty Copeland! Yes, prima ballerinas are she/her. They're women. They have to be women in order to hold that job. Otherwise they'd be dancing the male parts in ballet and would just be called ballet dancers, not ballerinas.

We can't even having a fucking Barbie doll documentary without gender ideology being pushed at us.

Seems like you’re letting your own projections impact your enjoyment of a great documentary.

there are many older people, and yes also prima ballerinas who are just fine with stating pronouns.

its fine if you’re not, or even if you find it ideologically-directed, but you shouldn’t make assumptions about others.

watch or, don’t watch it, but it’s got important messages so your loss.

@YankSplaining totally agree. Good to see your anger. We need more angry women, not acquiescent ones. 💪

Was there a they/them or one of the new type of women in there @YankSplaining? Because that’s their worry isn’t it. That a person they’ll never meet has a conversation they’ll never hear with another person they’ll never meet in a place they’ll never go, and one of them will correctly identify their sex. The horror.

Every time I see an email come through about a local holiday club, the pronouns of the sender come up alongside their name and there it sits in my inbox irritating me. I can’t even open the email as I’m so grumpy about it.

Whenever I see pronouns after someone's name, it creates a bad impression of the person for me. I'd see it as them promoting a dangerous, ridiculous ideology. Must be awful to have someone insist you display pronouns, forcing you into compliance with that ideology.

Yes I'm afraid it does that for me or says they just don't think about things very deeply. Or feel compelled to follow the herd. Or feel like their feelings must overrule everyone else's.

None of which is a great first impression.

People are free to tell me about their pronouns, and I am free to ignore them, avoid them, and judge them for it.

Absolutely agree. It actually makes me feel (to quote their own ideology) 'unsafe' as I see them as querulous, looking for offence and for anything to complain about. Almost like an announcement they'd be for the genderist version of McCarthyism. (If that makes sense, been awake since 430! 😮‍💨)

This.

There is a pushback amongst teens with pronoun use. It's not cool anymore since their 50+ very boring maths teacher writes his name with pronouns on the blackboard / PowerPoint presentation.
I mean, what teenager wants to be the same as their teacher?

My kid came home from school yesterday where'd they'd an assembly on self-esteem and she said that the teacher introduced himself with pronouns, then tried to use age 13 TikTok speak (some craze that's going on, I forget). All the teens thought he was absolutely cringe.

So I think this fad phase will run out of steam just because the teens are rebelling. They'll go to Uni where this all started and it'll all quietly disappear.

This is also worth a read.

open.substack.com/pub/flashinggreen/p/preferred-pronouns-are-a-microaggression?r=2261q&utm_medium=ios

My kid came home from school yesterday where'd they'd an assembly on self-esteem and she said that the teacher introduced himself with pronouns, then tried to use age 13 TikTok speak ... All the teens thought he was absolutely cringe.

My local authority used to have a 'Youth Offending Team'. I used to imagine them all being like this 😃

Do you think the producers actually checked with Beulah Mae Mitchell whether Beulah has a gender identity and what the preferred pronouns that go with it were? Or did they just make an assumption about someone else's identity?

How will this nonsense stand the test of time? If someone watches this is 20-30 years time, they’ll be “WTF?!”

Whether you agree with pronouns or not, in the example you gave the pronouns really weren't needed.
Beulah Mae Mitchell was being interviewed because she was the first woman to work at Mattel, not the first NB person, transman, furry or whatever other pronoun requiring gender you might come up with - the first woman.

That's OPs point though, the labelers are making assumptions about others.

I don't think pronoun lovers have a clue how stupid their labels make them look. It does impact enjoyment because it's stupid from the very beginning.

What would the documentary make's have done if Beulah Mae Mitchell had gone by he/him or they/them. I think the ideology goes that pronouns = transubstantiation. Not only is literally not a woman but she never has been. Even if she's birthed numerous kids, has a female name, clothing and only decided to change her pronouns a split second after being asked the question to mess with the producer.

Totally fuck up the premise of her being the first 'woman' to work at Mattell.

And yeah, i do judge people who display their pronouns or who call themselves 'cis'.

I have no issue at all with people asking to use pronouns that reflect their personality.

I have a huge problem with people appropriating words that we have always used to denote sex to label anything other than sex.

I would very much like someone who believes in the use of cross sex pronouns to justify why, if sex is separate to gender, it is so necessary to appropriate the language of sex to label gender. Clearly they do see a connection, so what is it?

(I'm not interested in the GC analysis of why they do it, I'm interested in how they themselves justify it.)

Update now that I’ve watched the whole thing:

There are a few men in the documentary - two worked for Mattel, and I can’t remember why the other one I’m thinking of was included. He had his “pronouns” listed as “fluid/open.” Pretty sure he doesn’t actually use those as pronouns in the grammatical sense…

One woman is “she/her/they/theirs.” Another one seemed to be having fun with the whole concept and was listed as “she/her/bad b*tch.” 😂 Everyone else has exactly the pronouns you’d expect, except for a couple women who didn’t have pronouns listed. Hopefully that means giving pronouns to be displayed in the documentary was optional.

Lagueria Davis, the film’s writer and director, is Beulah Mae Mitchell’s niece, so I’ll assume she and her aunt had at least some discussion about the pronoun thing. Willing to bet Mitchell didn’t suggest on her own that Davis should list her pronouns, though.

The documentary as a whole is well with a watch; the best parts are the ones that interview the women who were actually at Mattel when the first black Barbie was created. There’s one part towards the end that I found a little shocking - someone recreates a variant of the “Clark doll experiment” with modern kids, displaying Barbies of various races and asking black kids which one is the prettiest. Except that in the original 1950s experiment, the questions focused on whether the (baby) dolls were “good” or “bad,” which ones looked like the child subjects, and which dolls the children wanted to play with. This version was more like judging a beauty contest for dolls, and I felt like that was inappropriate.

Just so we’re all on the same page - Beulah Mae Mitchell was the first black woman to work at Mattel, not the first woman. Mattel was founded by Harold Matson and Ruth and Elliot Handler.

He had his “pronouns” listed as “fluid/open.”

😖

Interesting thought. Trans believe they have a gender and that gender has a sex, but their sexed gender is a different sex from the sex they were born with? So gender does equal sex but is different from sex? Is that about right? It’s all about sex after all… ? Makes my head hurt.

He should go to the A&E about that.