We all know that Ken isn’t packing — and Whoopi Goldberg couldn’t help but bring it up during The View‘s interview with Barbie director Greta Gerwig on this morning’s episode of the long-running daytime talk show.
While speaking about the unattainable beauty standards Barbie has set forth since she busted onto the scene in 1959, Joy Behar wondered if teenage girls who were “twisting the heads off” the doll in a “sadistic fashion” were simply responding to the “body image they could not live up to.”
This tidbit of the convo may not seem important now, but bear with me.
The group then segued into a discussion about Ken — and the lack of attention he’s received over the years in comparison to his famous girlfriend, Barbie, who’s played by Margot Robbie in the highly anticipated movie.
“Ken, psychologically, because, you know, Barbie was created first,” Gerwig explained. “She has a dream house and a dream car and she has all the jobs and she’s president. Ken, we don’t even know where he lives. He’s sort of like an accessory.”
Before Gerwig could finish her thought, Goldberg chimed in with her own NSFW take on the beloved doll.
“And he has no genitalia,” she pointed out. “Let’s just throw that out there. Everyone notices. Nobody talks about it.”
Behar naturally had to jump in with her own comedic explanation for the phenomenon.
“You wouldn’t want the teenage boys to twist off his penis,” she joked, referring back to the “sadistic” girls who would destroy their Barbie dolls. We hate to say it but she has a point.
When the laughter died down, Gerwig explained how she and Ryan Gosling, who plays Ken in the movie, chose to approach the character — and how his daughters helped him decide to take on the role.
“Ryan Gosling has daughters and they play with Barbies and he said, ‘Oh, don’t you guys have a Ken somewhere?’ And they were like, ‘We don’t know where he is,'” she told the panel. “And then he said he found the Ken in the mud, faced-down, under a squished lemon. And he was like, ‘Oh, I must portray this man.'”
The View airs on weekdays at 11/10c on ABC. Plus, you can watch Barbie when it premieres in theaters on July 21.