Barbie girl: why Amy Schumer’s wrong about how women look

The news that Amy Schumer is being considered to play Barbie in a new film has been provoking outrage in the darker corners of the internet, where the self-appointed police of women's behaviour have decided that Schumer does not have the "right kind" of body to play a live-action version of the doll.

Listen up, gentlemen: if Barbie were real she would be confined to a wheelchair, be unable to lift her head and have room for only half a liver. If that’s your notion of the ideal woman’s body, then I don’t think there’s much hope of us having an intelligent debate.

Schumer's response to the "fat-shamers" was to post a photo to her Instagram of herself on a beach in a black swimsuit.

“Is it fat shaming if you know you’re not fat and have zero shame in your game? I don’t think so. I am strong and proud of how I live my life and say what I mean and fight for what I believe in and I have a blast doing it with the people I love,” she wrote. “Where’s the shame? It’s not there. It’s an illusion.”

Schumer thanks the trolls for pointing out that “something’s wrong with our culture and we all need to work together to change it”. Good on her, I thought, even as I for once found myself in the uneasy position of sharing some common ground with the trolls.

My lack of enthusiasm for the movie has nothing to do with the size of Schumer's thighs, however, and everything to do with the notion of it being left to Barbie to put "a contemporary spin on beauty, feminism and identity". The story will reportedly begin in a perfect land of Barbies, where one woman slowly awakens to the fact that she doesn't fit in. Schumer's Barbie will be expelled to travel to the real world, where she discovers, presumably amid lots of wisecracking, that being unique is an asset. But is Barbie – even a subversive, lippy, postmodern version of Barbie, even a version given the Amy Schumer treatment (and Schumer will get to rewrite the script, so the comedy is guaranteed) – really the best we can offer little girls starved of decent on-screen role models?  And with Mattel involved, how revisionist will it actually be?

Yes, the toy manufacturer might have finally, earlier this year, diversified its range to include more dolls of more ethnicities and diverse body types – a laudable effort, slightly let down by the fact that "curvy Barbie" would measure up only to a size 6 or 8 here – but Mattel is a primary architect of a culture that sets women up for a lifetime of feeling bad about themselves. Barbie is the first impression that many little girls – and boys – have of a what a grown-up woman's body looks like, and it's a very damaging first impression.

If Sony Pictures, which is planning the film, wants to put a contemporary spin on feminism, beauty and identity, why doesn't it forget about Barbie and pour all those millions into making a film about, say, Nancy Wake, the second World War Allied spy who escorted hundreds of men to safety? Or Lillian Bland, the Anglo-Irish journalist and aviator who was one of the first women to design, build and fly an aircraft? (Sony, get in touch: I have a long list like this.)

There’s something else that makes me uncomfortable about all of this, something that’s harder to express without sounding unsisterly. I am a big fan of Amy Schumer. She is hilarious and bold, a combination of traits for which I have a particular weakness. But I am more than a bit uneasy with the way that she has become an accidental poster girl for women who are totally happy in their skin. That’s because I’m not convinced that she is totally happy in her skin.

The photograph she posted on Instagram is one she previously posted in response to negative remarks about her size. It’s a lovely shot in which she looks natural and happy. But she also looks a lot thinner than the average woman. It is not a photograph that says: “Look at me, letting it all hang out. I don’t care what you think, I am happy with how I look. Now, go and do your worst.” It’s a photograph that says: “Look at me! See, I’m not fat!”  It’s not so much giving the finger to the trolls as pleading for their approval (echoed by that question “Is it fat shaming if you know you’re not fat?” A friend who saw Schumer’s recent live show said afterwards that he found it quite sad how she did, indeed, seem to “define herself in a major way in terms of her sex appeal and attractiveness to men”.)

Posting this photo is not a perfect riposte to the trolls, any more than the 2017 Pirelli calendar is a "feminist victory", after it replaced nude models with artfully shot, naturally lit black-and-white photographs of actors.  The calendar, which features Nicole Kidman, Robin Wright, Uma Thurman and Helen Mirren wearing little make-up and "minimally retouched", may be a beautiful piece of art, but it is not going to do a lot to help the rest of us feel more comfortable in our skin. There is a particular irony in an accompanying video interview of Nicole Kidman, whose face is an actual work of art, insisting that her husband, Keith Urban, "totally" prefers her looking natural and without make-up.

If we are serious about shifting a culture that judges women primarily on how they look, then we don’t need yet more photographs of celebrities looking impossibly perfect – regardless of whether that perfection is wrought with the help of Photoshop, Botox or just great photography and exceptional genes.  We don’t need a revisionist Barbie movie about a doll who gets cast out for not looking as good as the other dolls and finds happiness anyway.

We don’t need Amy Schumer insisting that she’s not actually fat.

We don’t need the Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame cattily pointing out the “flaws” in the way celebrities look. What we need is actually quite simple.

We just need to stop fixating on the way women look.

That’s it. There’s no magic formula.

We stop fixating on their looks and focus instead on what they’re saying or what they’re doing.

We need to stop complimenting our daughters primarily for being pretty or cute and start noticing when they’re clever, brave or assertive.

We need to raise our sons to be respectful and unafraid of strong women.

Oh, and we need to stop buying Barbies.