I laughed, cried and side-eyed a 5-year-old stranger beside me while watching the Barbie movie this past weekend, and couldn’t help but connect the movie’s themes back to helping you understand legal stuff better. In the most nonsensical way possible.
Because this is “What, Like it’s Hard?”—not the newsletter I gave you last week, which was basically messy notes of MOHELA audits (I will finish that project, I promise, if you even want to hear about that). But I will be explaining legalese in the most non-sensical way possible while examining Barbie.
These aren’t quite spoilers because I’m taking the movie references completely out of context. You should be fine reading this if you don’t like plot spoilers, but if you don’t like thinking about civil rights issues, you may become upset.
Homeless Kens. Unlike in the United States, BarbieLand simultaneously requires homelessness for half their population, which is definitely a con, but does not criminalize homeless people existing. Kens, while homeless, can move freely through BarbieLand (which appears to be a walkable/floatable community that doesn’t experience climate change)—though they can’t hold leadership positions of any kind. So it’s like being homeless in Europe (*this is satire*), if homeless people could eat fake plastic food, and if Europe wasn’t experiencing record heat waves.
There’s a Barbie with a prosthetic and another in a wheelchair in the background. They really slay the choreographed dance with the bespoke song with the help of the American Disability Act, also known as ADA, which requires buildings to fit wheelchairs through doors and entrances and to generally accommodate people with disabilities.
Doctor Barbie is played by a trans woman. In hindsight, this is an interesting pairing considering that several states (including Missouri) aim to block medical care for adult trans people who are transitioning or maintaining their transition, including hormone medication. Barbie’s director Greta Gerwig thought of everything.
Weird Barbie. Non-binary people see themselves in Weird Barbie. Like Doctor Barbie, Weird Barbie is a bit like a nurse practitioner who helps fix broken Barbies and Kens so they don’t become Weird Barbies too. This once again ties into healthcare, since some non-binary people do seek hormones or surgery as steps to feel like their body belongs to them, and several states can’t handle adults seeking elective surgery. Utah happens to be one of these states, which is interesting. Utah’s demand for plastic surgery drove its 2017 ranking as the seventh-highest number of plastic surgeons per capita in the country. So Utah is OK with plastic surgery on straight people—studies and stories on the popularity of Utah plastic surgery regularly focus on women—but trans people can’t get their own elective surgeries. I’m not going to list surgeries of Utah women or gender-affirming surgeries for trans people because it feels like none of my business, but the states are heavily invested in trans people’s elective decisions.
Weird Barbie also reminds me of personal injury law, when a person sues another person or a company for their injury/injuries. Weird Barbie could be a BarbieLand courtroom expert who could testify on the treatment required for the person with the personal injury.
Alan, Ken’s BuddyTM who fits into Ken’s clothes. Weird Barbie and Alan also remind me of how gay, lesbian and transgender people can sue on the basis of gender discrimination in Missouri (with mixed results) if the discrimination can be ID’d as a result of failure to fit gender stereotypes. But the Kens also could sue Alan for using his unregistered arms of mass destruction on them in criminal court, and Alan would have a slim self-defense claim.
Barbie Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court will be equal for men and women “when there are nine” women on the bench, the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said. Currently Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson make up four of the nine justices on the bench. There’s been discussion to expand the bench to end the GOP majority (which includes Coney Barrett) but no real action.
Kens don’t win awards in BarbieLand. I never got around to writing about how the U.S. Supreme Court ended affirmative action for university admissions, but yeah, that happened last month. It’s a bummer for people of color, but I wonder how much it truly impacted admissions diversity. Middle class white people and Sen. Elizabeth Warren can stop feeling the need to check the “1/8 Cherokee” box on college admissions in the hopes of a scholarship (*this is satire*). I don’t expect white people to stop suing universities over this—here’s a RadioLab podcast about the guy (not a lawyer) who sets up lawsuits against university affirmative action policies. Anyway, Kens don’t get affirmative action in BarbieLand, either, so there’s one more thing we have in common with Ken.
KENDOM’s Mojo Dojo Casa Houses. Eminent domain and squatters rights. But there’s no law against bad taste in decor unless you rip off another architect’s bad decor ideas, AKA their intellectual property.
But you know what has a huge elephant in the room here? “Oppenheimer.”
There’s an ongoing lawsuit alleging residents’ past and current health problems are due to federal contractors improperly storing the nuclear waste (after they bought it) that leaked into waterways where children played, etc. Cancer? Check. Birth defects and complications? Check. Asthma? Check.
It took more than 10 years for the government to even prioritize it as a site that should be cleaned up. That’s the average cleanup time for a Superfund site, and now they’re behind by multiple decades. So thanks, Oppenheimer. Hope that guy can wrap his head around the unending consequences of inventing the atomic bomb.
I mentioned the Manhattan Project nuclear waste thing in public the other day and I felt like I was talking about a conspiracy theory because it sounds so bonkers out loud. But I don’t say anything I can’t cite, and you shouldn’t, either. Read the hyperlinks, please. I’m mostly messing around in this most recent newsletter, but I’m never messing around with my hyperlinks.
(Yes, I’m gearing up to finish researching where MOHELA money goes. Just let me enjoy something :’)
Did you enjoy this newsletter? Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share between your ears? Did you think I was too sassy? Let me or someone else know below. Feel free to Venmo me or PayPal me for my efforts to entertain you with my satire and educate you on basic legal stuff.
Now go touch some grass.