How was Barbie received depending on your gender. We asked this question to four high school students around the age of 15-16.We asked them how much they personally enjoyed the movie and if they thought it was worth all the media and hype it was receiving. I thought that this idea would bring out who people resonate with, and what art they use to show what and how they think. We asked two boys and two girls and the responses were very interesting.

While you might think that this would have been very divided and separating between genders it really just was not. I thought the same thing when going into the interviews and was very much expecting very different responses and maybe even controversy. The responses we got were honestly very different with each person but the overall reception of the film’s message stayed pretty much the same throughout the interviews.

I started seeing a pattern in the interviews, this is when I began to realize that humans as a whole love to put people in boxes, whether that is by ethnicity, political affiliation, race, and much more. When conducting these interviews I noticed myself doing the same. I, like many, thought that being a woman made you the biggest barbie fan and being a man made you the biggest barbie hater. I found quite the opposite while interviewing Tahj Cole when he said “I think the Barbie movie was very powerful.” After the responses we received I totally dismantled this belief system and thought that everyone has their own experiences and has their own thoughts on the film’s message.

When I dived deeper into the whole putting people in boxes idea I started to notice this happening more and more. I saw that numerous men and women both connect themselves to ideologies that are pertaining to their gender, all the time. We see it most predominantly on social media, where men tend to resonate with different experiences then women and vice versa. This is clearly seen in one of our interviews when Sophia Burns said “It focused a lot on womanhood and what girls went through when they were younger.” None of the buys we interviewed got this from the film, which just goes to show how we all have different experiences that would make us resinate with the film further. At the end of the day the human experience is very universal and we should focus on all the good things we share, not all the different things meant to divide us.