“What do women want?”

I slunk into the theater after lights had been darkened, sitting just a row or two down from a row of girls dressed in pink. I remain a boy at heart, and didn’t want anyone to see me watch a movie about girls’ dolls. But I was curious how Barbie answered that enigma.

Geoffrey Chaucer pondered the same question in the most famous of his Canterbury Tales some six centuries ago. The classic Disney movie Pinocchio asks what it takes “to be a real boy.” Nor does Barbie shy away from deeper questions: “Why am I alive?” “What does it mean to be human?”

The best answers to all these questions can be found in Genesis. (The second-best may come in Pinocchio.)

What Women Want — According to Chaucer

Chaucer described a group of pilgrims who set out from London to visit the tomb of Thomas Becket in Canterbury. They tell stories to pass the time. One of the first stories comes from a well-to-do middle-aged woman from the city of Bath who had buried five husbands, and is now on the prowl for Number Six.

The Wife of Bath begins by bragging long and loud about how she handled her husbands, frightening one young pilgrim into disavowing marriage. But when she finally gets around to telling her story, it is precisely about what girls want.

Her story is about a knight convicted of rape and sentenced to death. He is allowed a reprieve of a year and a day to answer this question. If he can name the treasure that women most value, his head will be spared. Some he meets say “fame,” “riches,” “love,” “pleasure in bed,” “freedom,” or “flattery.” (One of them sounds 21st Century Disney, saying men should encourage women to “follow [your] hearts.”) Finally he meets an “ancient hag, ugly as death” who promises him the true answer — if he will marry her. So on the fateful day, he escapes the death sentence by parroting her answer:

“What women want is sovereign power in their hands, not only over husbands, but whatever lovers they take.”

Barbie and the Battle of the Sexes

That’s one opinion, anyway. Barbie, unlike that helpful hag, wants no lovers. For her, Ken is barely a friend.

The movie begins with an ode to 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Itself a secular echo of Genesis.) Little girls tire of playing Mommy and begin to smash their baby dolls. (As ape-men in 2001 smash one another’s skulls with clubs, and as Cain killed Abel.) Then a giant Barbie appears like a heavenly obelisk: a perfect woman, who will overthrow the Patriarchy by revealing the God-like capabilities of the female sex. “Because Barbie can be anything, woman can be anything.” Well, almost anything: Mattel discontinues Pregnant Barbie since “a pregnant doll is just too weird.”

Queen Barbie lives a “happy” life of smiles, hand waves, and choreographed dances in her pink “paradise,” until thoughts of mortality begin to disturb her.

She owns every material good. What could Barbie want from Ken? Or does she need him like a fish needs a bicycle? (A “tyrant over ourselves,” complained the witch Medea in an ancient Greek play, of men like her cheating husband Jason.) Some young girls now aim to become men. Others just want locker rooms and swimming pools to themselves.

The Battle of the Sexes seems a bit artificial in a world of toys who do not reproduce, in which one is defined by positions of power — as writer, judge, or president — rather than by concrete responsibilities. Like bees, ants, and stormtroopers, Barbies are too similar to form true community. For community, the apostle Paul said, is a union of unlike parts.

Pinocchio Becomes a “Real Boy”

Pinocchio comes closer to discovering what humans need to be happy. Pinocchio is a “child’s plaything” (as another of his tribe put it) who wishes to become a “real boy.” But he was created from out of a wiser and more Christian civilization. So he learns that maturity comes not by self-fulfillment, but self-abandonment. “He who dies, will live.” The Blue Fairy tells him he will become real when he learns to be “brave, truthful, and unselfish.”

So with his sidekicks (a cricket-conscience, and cat and fish who echo his emotions), Pinocchio loses life (swallowed by waters as in baptism) to rescue his father from Monstro the whale, and thus becomes (spoiler alert!) “a real boy.”

Who Suits Us?

“It is not good for a Barbie or a Pinocchio to be alone,” says God, after completing creation. “I will make a suitable helper.”

Who suits us? A complement. One who brings new capabilities, perspectives, and parts, to a union of different kinds. Not just a plastic clone in a designer outfit.

So to my hometown, which raises more puppies than babies, Moses’ words might be, “Rover may be cute and convenient, but he is not man’s best friend! Adam did not find a suitable helper among domesticated wolves. So stop gazing in that mirror, mirror, on the wall, or at video games. ‘Leave father and mother, and cleave to your (second) greatest good.’ Self-sacrifice will give you purpose, young man. It will keep you, young woman, from becoming a mere ornamental Barbie.”

Genesis Sees Us More Clearly Than We See Ourselves

Genesis’ command to “cleave” was revolutionary. Primatologists point out that while chimp society is “winner take all,” early man was largely monogamous. Great apes, like Barbies and Kens, segregate by gender. But human babies take years to learn to use their big brains, and need a safe place to grow, nurtured by Mother and protected by Father.

Cupid’s arrow hooks like a boomerang: suddenly, people of opposite genders and different clans are drawn to one another. (And thus unite also to in-laws as diverse as characters in Geppetto’s wood shop.) Then they must feed, clothe, teach, and discipline those little imps emerging in their likenesses. Sex fools us into forming bonds that only hold through affection, endurance, friendship, and self-sacrificial love.

Genesis sees us more clearly than we see ourselves. In Eden, there is but one Barbie and one Ken. But when men settled into civilizations, rulers invented the harem. Although written in a world dominated by polytheists, it subtly and repeatedly denounces the rock star or gangsta lifestyle.

Because males and females enter the world in equal numbers, polygamy leads inexorably to tyranny and bloodshed. An Alpha Male creates an “Us vs. Them” mentality among his followers, taking as many women as possible. (And to keep them, invents foot-binding or the walled harem, guarded by castrated eunuchs.)

Then he might tell followers that their path to paradise will be “lit by the flash of swords,” and if they die in defense of his patriarchy, Allah will bestow on them numerous heavenly virgins.

Before Christ, most “great civilizations” accepted polygamy, and the constant warfare and tyranny that alone could make it work.

Genesis Has Our Number. The Number is Two

Genesis undercut such baboonish behavior (and our modern cults of singleness, gender confusion, and sterility) in several ways. First, God created Adam and Eve, not a castrated comity of Kens. John Milton imagines Adam asking himself, after Eve grabbed the forbidden fruit:

“How can I live without thee, how forgo

Thy sweet converse and love so dearly joined

To live again in these wild woods forlorn.”

Jesus quoted “the two shall become one,” to re-teach the world the monogamy that (among other things) separates us from monkeys.

Genesis also exposes the mess that polygamy produces. Sarah asked Abraham to father a child by her maid (common practice in Sumer and Egypt), but then banished Hagar and her son Ishmael to the desert. Jacob married jealous sisters and fathered children by their maids as well. His sons tried to kill their half-brother. The only man in Genesis who showed much sexual restraint, Joseph, was practically the only figure in the book whose personal life was not a trailer park dumpster fire.

Why are American neighborhoods, where marriage is most in decline, also the most violent? Genesis has our number. That number is two.

Some Chinese rulers took thousands of women. Poor men remained lonely, while women married into a hornet’s nest like Jacob’s family. Beginning with the Song Dynasty, parents began bending or breaking the feet of girls so they would not stray.

Yet the Chinese created a language that, like Genesis, warned against such practices. For instance, the Chinese word “peace” (安) shows a single women (女), not several, under a roof. The word “good” shows a woman and a child (好). It is not good to be alone, but neither is it good to sleep around.

Real world Kens and Barbies reap the consequences of refusing to love, and of preferring pin-up goddesses to self-sacrificial marriage: loneliness, drug abuse, violence, knife marks on the arms of confused children. Making ourselves gods, we make worse than monkeys of ourselves.

What do girls (and boys) need? True love, yes. And movies like Pinocchio, not Barbie, that teach boys and girls what it means to leave, cleave, and become one.

 

David Marshall, an educator and writer, has a doctoral degree in Christian thought and Chinese tradition. His most recent book is The Case for Aslan: Evidence for Jesus in the Land of Narnia.