A Short Essay by Lilly Busatti (Friends University ’25)
Billie Eilish has always been an artist whose primary purpose is to discuss her own feminine experience. As someone who was openly sexualized from a young age, especially as a girl who wore primarily baggy clothing to hide her physical features, Billie’s Oscar win for her song What Was I Made For? was well deserved, as well as a great step forward for young girls struggling with their own body image—including self-hatred and depression because of it. What Was I Made For? as a song discusses how Billie as a person doesn’t exactly know what her purpose is in life, while in the Barbie movie itself, the song is used in the context of Barbie discovering what it would be like to age.
Billie Eilish has been notorious for writing songs about her own personal struggles, including how the public has a skewed perspective of her body. Having a song like What Was I Made For? featured in the Barbie movie is not only a monumental moment for women struggling with their own body image, but also for women as a whole. Eating disorders are quite common between women, and the idea of a woman aging is often seen as “unattractive” and “not ideal”. The media has given women such a distorted perspective on how they are supposed to look, and whether or not their body type is attractive, that it causes women to begin to hate themselves. They stare at the person that they see in the mirror and think “is this really me? Is this how I actually look?” They think that maybe eating healthier or icing their faces will prevent the creation of wrinkles. Young girls are obtaining retinol cream, so that they will have baby smooth skin when they are old and gray. Social media’s skewed view of how women are meant to look contributes to this, marketing anti-aging products to young teenagers and preteens who do not need it. As a woman who has constantly struggled with her changing body and her stretch marks developing, the Barbie movie showcasing the beauty of aging towards the end is something that I needed to see.
Women are often told that aging is something that makes them considerably less attractive to the male gaze, when aging is something that should be celebrated. When you grow up and when you gain those smile lines on your face, it is not a bad thing. It is a reminder of the things that you have overcome, and a celebration of how your body has kept you alive for so long. Those little crinkles when you smile are not supposed to make you feel “less attractive”, but they are supposed to remind you that you lived a lot of life, and that you have lived it well.
When Barbie grabs the hands of the older woman towards the end of the movie, this song is playing in the background as a celebration of life. It is a moment of conflict, when Barbie does not know if she wants to stay in the real world or return to the pastel colors that she had been raised around. Seeing an aging woman was an eye-opening moment for Barbie, because she saw what her future could be like. During the Golden Globe awards this year, there was a man on stage who mocked Barbie by saying that it was “about a plastic doll with big boobies”, when in fact that is not the case. Barbie is a celebration of girlhood as a whole—regardless of how old you are—and What Was I Made For? was well deserving of the Oscar that it received.
There are not very many movies that define the feminine experience of aging and growing old, which makes the moment in Barbie when What Was I Made For? plays all the more special. Women lack the representation that they need when it comes to how aging is portrayed in the media, and Greta Gerwig took the opportunity to showcase Billie’s music in one of the most important moments of the movie. Aging is not something that should be considered “unattractive” by male standards. Instead, aging is a beautiful thing that should be celebrated. Billie Eilish deserved her Oscar win by the creation of this song, and I hope that in the future, more filmmakers take the time to showcase the beautiful reality of a woman’s age. Because it is not something that makes a woman less attractive. It is a reminder that we have survived, and our resilience is celebrated by the lines on our faces and the gray in our hair.
The Mews 
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