Am I a Ken, my editor asks? Let me call Barbie (my wife) and check

Ryan Gosling as Ken in Barbie.

So the Barbie movie is actually all about Ken – ironic, given that the joke is that it’s all about Barbie. As the tagline goes: “Barbie is everything. Ken is just Ken.” It’s Barbie who sails through life in a parade of serene brunches and perfect parties with professional dance choreography, while Ken bases the success of each day on whether his de facto girlfriend acknowledges his presence. The Ken-squashing jokes fly with merciless regularity: how it’s always girls’ night in Barbieland, how nobody has actually owned a Ken doll, how Barbie never lets Ken stay over in her Dreamhouse. “What would we do?” she asks, a fair question given their mutual lack of genitals.

Yet by making Ken such a glaring spare part, the director Greta Gerwig puts him centre stage. It’s a high-risk decision to divert the film away from Margot Robbie’s Barbie but Ryan Gosling has a blast as Ken, almost as much of a blast (sorry) as Cillian Murphy has in Oppenheimer. The signs were there when Gosling dominated the publicity drive with his deadpan talk of “Kenergy” and his home country of “Ken-ada”. He knew it was Ken’s time.

“Are you a Ken?” my editor asks me. At first I’m weirdly flattered. Sure, the abs are nowhere near as outrageous as Gosling’s and I don’t have that funny contoured bit between my pecs, but nice of her to notice that I’ve not totally gone to seed. Then the penny drops. What she means is: am I emasculated, constantly overlooked, totally dependent on female approval? Oof. Nobody wants to be that.

The Ken-squashing jokes fly with merciless regularity in the Barbie film.

I don’t think I’m any of those things, and I’m certainly no good at “beach”, which is Ken’s raison d’etre in the film. Maybe I’m a Ken without realising it, though. Confused, I do what he would do: I call Barbie, aka my wife, and ask her what she thinks.

“Does Ken never listen to Barbie?” she asks, having not seen the film yet. “If so, you’re definitely a Ken.” There’s also something Ken-like in the way I let her and our daughter gang up on me over the virtues of lip gloss, Love Island and TikTok dance routines. I certainly need female approval too: as my wife points out, when our daughter says, “Bye Mum - I love you” and I am in earshot, I always pipe up, “What about me?” That’s very Ken. Blimey, the evidence is starting to pile up.

How prevalent is this? I need to canvass some other potential Kens. My first port of call is my colleague Kevin Maher, the chief film critic of The Times. “I am totally a Ken,” Kevin says. “I’ve definitely done the book thing that he does when Barbie calls for him. ‘You caught me reading. A book.’ In my single days I left only the most pseudo-pretentious texts lying around, usually about postmodernism or new ‘readings’ of James Joyce. I’m not especially good at surfing, but I like to beach. Also, I grew up with three sisters and no brothers and, like Ken, I love hanging with the girls, listening to their chat and watching them practise their dance moves.”

By making Ken such a glaring spare part, the director Greta Gerwig puts him centre stage.

Wow, Kevin is even more Ken-like than I am. As is my friend John. “I’ve been put in the friend zone a few times, which feels very Ken-y,” John says. “And I once fancied a girl so bad I listened to Pat Benatar in an attempt to ingratiate myself with her. That was peak Ken.”

Another friend, a film critic called Nick, admits to feeling “overlooked, emasculated and desperate for attention every time I try to get into a film screening”.

Like me, though, he “doesn’t have the abs to identify with Ken. I’m more like his discontinued friend, Allan.” Ah yes, poor Allan. Unlike Ken, who has a horde of fellow Kens to bond with over their insignificance, there’s just one Allan. Played by Michael Cera, he’s the saddest character in the film. At least Ken has safety in Ken-umbers.

Kevin makes another good point. Like Ken, he says, “I have that sense of not being especially invested in the patriarchy. When Ken says, ‘When I found out that patriarchy wasn’t about horses I kind of lost interest’ - I feel that. Like I’d rather just do my work and then hang out with my dog. Which, actually, sounds a bit Ken too.”

That does seem kind of great. Maybe I don’t need to worry about being a Ken. Maybe being emasculated, constantly overlooked and totally dependent on female approval is OK. Maybe, in the immortal words on the front of the great man’s hoodie, “I am Kenough”.

The Times