Last week, I was hanging out on the beach with a guy I’ve been seeing for the past few months when he uttered the hottest words a man can say to a woman in this, the summer of 2023: “Do you wanna go see the Barbie movie together?"

Because I am a human woman with a beating heart, this was an easy yes. I was dying to see the movie and, TBH, it had been a minute since I last gave a hand job in a movie theater went on a movie date and I was excited to revisit the height of high school romance with my grown-up crush.

More importantly, it turns out that a man’s reaction to the Barbie movie can reveal some crucial intel—namely whether or not he is a secretly sexist loser whose masculinity is fragile enough to be wounded by a movie about a doll.

While some men might use this realization as an opportunity for some self-reflection, it’s no secret that many of them will instead go on the defensive, writing off the Barbie movie as an exercise in man-hating from a bunch of overdramatic feminists who clearly haven’t noticed that we’re obviously all equal now, duh.

So when a crowded theater meant plan A (movie theater hand job) was canceled and we’d have to resort to actually watching and enjoying the show like civilized adults, I anxiously waited to see how my crush would respond to this bright-pink news flash that “Hey, guess what? Patriarchy is real and not good and still happening!”

Much to my relief, nay delight, this man absolutely ate that shit up. I honestly think he had more fun at the Barbie movie than I did, and I obviously had a blast. He laughed at literally every single joke (seeing Barbie with a Not Particularly Online Guy is especially fun because he hasn’t already seen all the memes and is rather endearingly entertained) and wasn’t offended by the movie’s completely on point if intentionally over-the-top mockery of traditional masculinity or the fact that Barbie just wasn’t that into Ken. (His response was actually just, “Aww, he loves her!”) In short, he got it, didn’t think about it too hard, enjoyed it, and in the process, managed to confirm himself to be the respectably nontoxic man I’d cautiously assumed he was.

Look, is the bar rather low? Why, yes. Yes, it is. Do I now want to marry this man and consummate our love with a movie theater hand job? Honestly, yeah, kind of. The TL;DR of it all is if you’ve got a man in your life, you should be aware that an innocent Barbie movie date conveniently (or perhaps devastatingly) doubles as a test of his feminism tolerance levels. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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