Teaching Little Girls to Hate Boys, One Barbie at a Time

The latest cultural meme to make it big in feminist circles is Feminist Hacker Barbie:

Last week, the internet was disappointed to discover that, countary to the title, Mattel’s illustrated book Barbie: I Can be a Computer Engineer sends pretty much the opposite message. Instead, Barbie says things like: “I’m only creating the design ideas. I’ll need Steven’s and Brian’s help to turn it into a game.” She infects her sister’s computer with a virus and can’t even restart it on her own.

Enter Feminist Hacker Barbie. Real-life computer programmer Kathleen Tuite launched a website where you can hack the original book, creating re-captioned and much improved images. Check out some more of the user-submitted images here.

As if computer guys didn’t already have a hard enough time with chicks, now Barbie has to one-up their game. Is that how pathetic contemporary feminists have become, that in their absurd need to “do it all” they wind up emasculating the most de-sexualized men among us? As if The Big Bang Theory hasn’t already done a good enough job, there’s the incessant whining about the lack of female employees in the tech sector (because you should obviously hire based on boobs, not binary) and, of course, #GamerGate. If a guy so much as goes near a keyboard he’s obviously a misogynist. If he’s actually good at operating, let alone building, a computer, he’s an obvious threat to the female sex. And if Barbie dares to suggest teamwork with male participants, well, she’s obviously just a tool to empower the patriarchy.

As far as girls go, they’d better suppress any instinct they have towards members of the opposite sex, playing with dolls, or enjoying life or the color pink lest they be considered an idiot. How do chicks get street cred? By being a tech wiz, of course. In the mixed-message world of contemporary feminism, the same professional pursuit that totally emasculates a man totally empowers a woman by allowing her to transcend her gender the way their spinster librarian forebears did in the pre-digital age. That’s not very Beyonce-with-her-backseat-blowjobs, or Lena Dunham-with-breasts-flying. What exactly does contemporary feminism stand for when it comes to sexuality? Rape culture, perhaps. An androgyny that Grace Jones couldn’t even make sexy, definitely. But not femininity, let alone the power that goes along with it.

Here’s my own take on the Feminist Hacker Barbie meme. It’s what I’d like to call a more accurate reflection of exactly how important computer dudes can be in a woman’s life, and how powerful a woman can be when she knows how to fearlessly embrace and appropriately express her sexuality around men.