A Twitter user named Avery Edison started a huge debate about the new Barbie movie and its socioeconomic implications by saying only rich people could afford them, and that when people say they love Barbie they’re just saying they weren’t poor. This take is now being mocked into oblivion.
The original tweet was deleted but that’s not how things work on the Internet. Edison has spent most of the past two days in an effort to defend herself as screenshots of her tweet get bashed to the moon and back, but it’s been a hard road. Let’s take a look at the “offending” tweet that has been blamed for unnecessarily trying to trigger a discourse. This post sums up people’s feelings fairly succinctly.
“Don’t know if this is entirely fair but when someone says ‘I grew up loving Barbie’ I hear ‘my family was not poor,'” the tweet that started the whole debate said. This was presented next to an ad for a Barbie that costs $7.99. And it is evident that the majority don’t agree with Edison’s thought train.
This user also commented that “the worst thing about this website is everyone’s desire to seem smarter than everyone else by turning something completely innocuous into a social class issue when it… isn’t!”
Another user said they were in foster care and had a mother with a cocaine addiction, but could still afford Barbies. Someone else said, “Barbies are sold at consignment stores.” Hard to argue with that.
“I grew up poor as hell and still had Barbies,” someone else replied.
Of course, this put Edison on the defensive. She said she was trying to “describe the particular memories of extreme childhood poverty” as a way to articulate her reaction to the upcoming live-action film, but she admitted that her posts needed an “absolutely perfect job with wording.” But her attempts at explaining why she wrote what she wrote are only fanning the flames.
People started pointing out that if this was Edison’s own experience in life, she should have said so instead of making it about a brand she doesn’t like.
A user named Natalie Wynn put it another way, saying that “envy/resentment dynamics” are at play here and that a toy becomes an “arbitrary symbol” of exclusion, and then under the guise of a “discourse,” it turns into a public issue.
When someone told her “You know you can just not open Twitter,” her response was “I make my living here.”
Then she reminds everyone she is an “actual person” and not a “bunch of pixels with no feelings.” that “can’t do this shit again.” Hmm. Sounds like there’s a pattern here.
Regardless, it’s hard to have a civil discourse with a bunch of anonymous people hiding behind keyboards. Edison gave her take, got heat for it, and then retracted it. At the end of the day, neither does her statement change others’ childhood experiences nor does their heated response have an effect on her opinion. All this has done is bring more attention to the one thing that kickstarted this argument in the first place – the Barbie Movie, which comes out on July 21, by the way.