The Real Competition Heating Up the Oscars This Year

“It is literally impossible to be a woman.” If you were at all engaged with popular culture in 2023, you’ll recognize these words as the start to a speech America Ferrera’s character gives in Barbie. It’s a rallying cry about the unfair expectations society places on women that eventually builds to an extremely relatable point: “I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us.” Almost as soon as the movie came out in July, audiences and critics pointed to the speech as one of the movie’s standout moments. Though it garnered some criticism as well, it’s fair to say that when Ferrera earned a surprise nomination for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, it was due in no small part to what’s come to be known as “the Barbie monologue.” But in the months since Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster dominated movie theaters, another feminist movie monologue has quietly emerged as a kind of foil to Barbie’s. If you were one of the people who decried the Barbie monologue as basic 101-level gender politics, chin up, because maybe you’re just an Anatomy of a Fall monologue girl in a Barbie monologue world. Not at all!” One needn’t have actually been forced to live among the goats to have the urge to bitterly sniff at an opponent, “You made us live here among the goats.” And who doesn’t long to bellow, “Your generosity conceals something dirtier and meaner” at a loved one who you think is only being nice to you because they want something or is otherwise doing you dirty?