My mind was racing with questions like, Why is there a transfemme Barbie but no transmasc Ken? Did I just pay $17.50 to witness the spectacle of capital subsuming dissent? Have the filmmakers deliberately cast “Weird Barbie” with an actress who dated Bari Weiss and played “Hallelujah” on the piano while dressed as Hillary Clinton after the 2016 election in order to politically center “weirdness”? Why is there no mention of doll materials designer Jack Ryan and his past employment engineering missiles for Raytheon?
Real estate greed, the glutted police budget, ceaseless gentrification, racist journalists, Eric Adams, Kathy Hochul, white people—we cycled through the injustices, against them, resuscitating despair into focused rage.
It was weirdly boring until it was devastating, over and over
They told me they’d wanted to be around women. They hadn’t loved the speakers or the claim that Mayor Adams was one of “the men who get it,” but the gathering was, at the very least, a space of shared outrage. Some 14-year-old boys told me the most memorable speeches were the ones that situated the court’s decision within broader struggles and insisted that this wasn’t a single-day or single-issue action.
