I Wanted to Fist-Bump Every Woman I Saw After Seeing Barbie…
…but I didn’t. And here’s what I think that means about women as a whole.
The movie lets out and I beeline to the bathroom with 27 other women who obviously held it for the last hour, too. I stand in line with my contraband- snacks and drinks in my oversized “purse” (aka a full on airplane carry0on bag) with an elderly woman, a middle-aged mom and her small child, and some teenage giggle girls. I am honestly waiting for someone to thrust her first in the air and say “HELL YEAH BARBIES!” to which the rest of us will whoop and holler and smile and laugh.
That is the energy I am feeling in this bathroom right now.
We mostly avoid eye-contact though, and soft-smile if we accidentally fail at said avoidance.
I look around at the Giggle Girls drying their hands in the drier, snickering as they quickly pull their hands in and out. Obviously hilarious when you’re 12. (I remember those times.) I watch the mom hold the hand of her small daughter as she guides her into a bathroom stall. (Will that be me one day? Was I that little girl once?) I soft-smile at the elderly woman whose eyes I accidentally meet, as she clutches her little wicker handbag in her pastel paisley shawl and white pants. (What would my grandma have thought of this movie?)
Y’all are so f*cking beautiful, I think.
But beautiful in the full and deep and dimensional sense of the word. Not the magazines and media sense. So f*cking cool and so f*cking beautiful, all of you! Moms, friends, grandmothers, sisters, aunts. Your braces and your bellies and your wrinkles and all. Hell yeah ladies! We’re all in this together! We all “get it” right? There are champagne bubbles and lightning bugs dancing through me. An electrified wisp of unity weaving between us.
Four hours later I am hurrying to change into my pajamas from my movie clothes, intentionally forcing my gaze away from my cellulite-y thighs and too-wide-for-my-comfort hips. I don’t want to think about how I wish those parts of me were smaller and smoother.
The champagne bubbles of Barbie have already popped.
Six hours later I am scrolling instagram before bed mocking a girl’s video in my head, rolling my eyes at the style, the content, the message, the delivery. Mentally tallying all the cringey things, silently picking out flaws. Why am I thinking these things? I know how hard it is here.
The lightning bugs have dispersed. The buzzing wisp of unity has faded.
How quickly we go from united to critical. How easily we float from building up to tearing down. How still we sit a place we long so much for movement.
For 2 hours, we sat and laughed and nodded in agreement at every truth and joke on the screen before us.
And then we trickled into the bathrooms and stood in line all separate and silent like nothing happened.
We scroll social media like there’s nothing we can do. We whine about beauty standards but continue to measure each other by them. We wish for things to change but we wait on someone else to change them. We shout “smash the patriarchy” then play right into it with the way we think about each other, upholding the very wedge it drives between us.
But what if the change began with you and me? What if we didn’t need a total revolution, just a tiny one tonight when we look in the mirror? What if we smiled big and cheered each other on and just appreciated everyone’s effort instead of shamed their shortcomings? What if we fist-bumped other women just for being women with us, because we “get it”, you know? Maybe that electrified wisp would wrap around us all and crush all the things keeping us small.
