Swapping High Heels for Football Boots: Barbie and the Game of Men’s 5-Aside that Redefined My Feminism

By Isobel Lewis

I know there are bigger issues in the world at the moment than a row over which celebrity deserves to be the most publicly self-satisfied. But omitting to nominate Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie for an Oscar while Ryan Gosling was up for an award felt like an unsavoury rejoinder to Jo Koy’s Golden Globes comments. While Barbie’s plastic ‘big boobies’ taint her creator and lead actress with superficiality, Ken’s plastic pecs pose no comparative obstacle to serious recognition.

It's a frustrating double standard in a long line of many which have been set before the public eye recently and it’s all beginning to snowball into a perception of extreme polarisation between men and women. Incidentally, my one criticism of Barbie in the first place was the mechanics of its anti-sexism messaging. I felt that pitting a whole society of women against a whole society of men – well nearly, let’s not forget Allan – overlooked the way sexism is often systemic rather than individual: it can and does exist without men and women being in direct conflict with one another all the time.

When I spoke to a fifteen-year-old family friend about the film, however, it was clear she was in love. Barbie was her feminist manifesto and she championed it with all the enviable enthusiasm of the teenaged. Phoebe had just moved from a single-sex to a co-educational school and was shocked by the change. Whereas girls studying STEM had previously been the norm, she was now in the minority, and she also encountered teachers who doubted her abilities. This experience had supercharged her feminism, and she was grateful to Gerwig for making the character of Barbie so relatable to her at just the right time.

I was struck by a parallel between Phoebe’s experience of moving schools and Barbie’s experience of disillusionment upon leaving the dreamland and entering the real world. While Phoebe was clearly frustrated, she seemed exhilarated rather than despairing. She had gone out to gather a worldliness that she could show off to her former peers a little bit, and she was thrilled by her ability to cope with the change.

This troubled my own feminism: I couldn’t reconcile the idea that spaces of unequal representation could also be a source of empowerment because it felt like a paradox. Then I had a Mojo Dojo Casa House experience of my very own and it changed my mind.

My uncle plays a game of 5-aside football with nine other blokes in Salford every week, and he’s been encouraging me to play with them whenever they need a reserve for months. Don’t get me wrong, I was relieved that his enthusiasm about football was distracting him from his earlier efforts to break down gender roles by teaching me about central heating systems. But I’d always been too nervous to take my few months’ experience of women’s football to play against men who’d revolved large portions of their lives around the sport.

One week, I ran out of excuses. I found myself jumping out of my uncle’s van straight into the pre-match warm-up: cigarettes in the car park. Part of me had expected everyone to be fairly unwilling to have me on their team. But no one even seemed particularly bemused by my presence and a lot of them thanked me for turning up to make the numbers.

Then the real warm-up began, which was just kicking a ball around in a circle. Nothing too nerve-wracking, you’d think, but I have a proven track record of disaster in situations where there’s time to overthink. I once took my little cousin to a baby group and instead of throwing a balloon back into the circle of tiny humans as I’d been asked, I almost brained an infant by bouncing one off the poor thing’s head.

The men from Salford seemed slightly more robust than babies, though, and the more time that lapsed without any concussions, the less I resembled a marionette in lycra. In some ways, the knowledge that I would definitely be the worst player there gave me the freedom to enjoy myself and I began to relax. Then I began to love it. My team would pass to me even though I’d lose possession of the ball most of the time, and it meant that by the end of the hour, I had even managed to pass to someone else who then scored a goal. Bring out the trophies!

It might also have helped that basically no one would tackle me. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m a beginner or because I’m a girl and they were afraid of being the 5-aside version of a wifebeater, but I’ll let it slide: it was honestly the princess treatment I needed. By the time the comically solemn close-of-match handshakes were exchanged, I was exhilarated.

The fact that everyone weathered my inexperience with grace even when it bordered on team sabotage limits how far this experience is comparable to Phoebe’s, who did face prejudice. Phoebe is also extremely good at science and anyone who doubts this is doing her an injustice, whereas if anyone had pointed out that I barely even know what a football looks like they would hardly have been committing a crime against women.

The brightness of Barbie depends largely on the unsubtle optics of pink vs blue, working through a brilliant exaggeration of life (what else is a doll?), which I can’t re-apply to my anecdote here without generalising. All-female spaces are essential, and they can be as energising as they are reassuring. My experience of pushing away from that was a little bit life-affirming too, but it would have been a whole different story if people had been less welcoming. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that centuries of gender inequality would be solved if women just got out more.

That being said, I think it’s important to acknowledge that both Phoebe and I found sources of empowerment in potentially uncomfortable situations. To me, Barbie is at its best as a symbol of that moment in adolescence where you must turn away from what is comfortable towards the future, to a space that is intimidating but that offers you the confidence of achievement. It was this that I recognised in Phoebe and which, as I hope my experience shows, we can continue to find in adulthood too.