Barbie and the Despairing Quest for Self-Creation

“You can be anything” is Barbie’s latest slogan. They’ve promoted some rendition of this line of empowerment since the ‘80s. Growing up in the ‘90s, I remember the warm blanket of cultural nurturing went something like: “If you believe in yourself, you can be anything you want.”

This spurred the Fight Club reaction: “We’ve all been raised…to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

Sex and gender confusion today lands as the latest iteration of many confusions and frustrations that come from setting the bar of your human potential at “limitless possibilities” (another Barbie slogan). There’s now a group of people who fall into the category of otherkin: “beings in human bodies who identify as non-human.” A 20-year-old Norwegian woman went viral in 2016 for her decision to identify and live as a cat. This madness is only beginning. Marco is a teenager who identifies as “cloudkin”—a cloud trapped in a human body.

In one of the most subtly prescient movies in the past decade, M. Night Shyamalan takes this question to its logical conclusion in his movie Split. The movie’s protagonist bounces between twenty-three different personalities, complete with different accents and medical conditions (one takes insulin shots). The movie culminates with the emergence of a twenty-fourth personality—a beast with superhuman power.

The psychosomatic union runs deep—but how deep? Could you become a Marvel character if you just believed it strongly enough? If not, what are the limits of self-determination? People keep hearing that lived experience—felt reality—trumps everything. If gender is a social construct, why not everything? What is a penguin? What is Scottish person? What is a black hole? Aren’t these all merely social constructs? We, as a society, have agreed to call certain things by certain names, but why should society get the last word? Or to put it in Pilate’s terms—What is truth (John 18:38)?

But you know all this. Our society’s decay into validating gobbledygook has been well chronicled for years. It was back in 2008 that Danielle Kirby first presented an academic paper on otherkin. What we need to do is start connecting the dots to another recent cultural phenomenon: anxiety and depression.

Telling a twelve-year-old girl in North Carolina that she can be literally anything she chooses will not make her less anxious. Maybe she’s not a girl. Maybe she’s not twelve. Maybe she doesn’t really “live” in North Carolina. Who’s to say? Who are you to challenge her truth? To stand in the way of her dreams? We’re essentially saying to twelve-year-olds: “Isn’t this great—you get to write your own metaphysics textbook!” Then we wonder why so many of them want to kill themselves. What’s meant to look like open vista of opportunity, when you actually stand there, looks more like the black of endless space.

Young people need more reliable and fixed truths, not less. Christianity champions limits, definitions, and absolutes. You are a person created by God. You have a gender. You have a purpose. You will die and face judgment. You need the grace of Jesus. To hear these things spoken today with unflinching clarity is like a cold shower after napping in the sun. Locking onto a Christian understanding of identity is the fastest (and only) way get on with the business of actually moving forward in your identity.

Read more here on why I’m writing a book on Christian self-actualization.