The Barbie movie has been banned in Kuwait and now faces calls for a ban in Lebanon amid complaints in the Arab nations about the film’s social values.
Kuwait’s state news agency said that the nation acted to protect the country’s “public ethics”, while Lebanon’s culture minister accused the film of “promoting homosexuality”.
The film is however still being shown in other conservative parts of the region, including Saudi Arabia.
Barbie, which is directed by Greta Gerwig and stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, has grossed more than $1bn (£784m) worldwide within weeks of its release.
Lafi al-Subaiei, the head of Kuwait’s board of film classification, said that the board usually asks for movie scenes to be cut if they are deemed to flout the country’s culture. But when a film promotes behaviour the state considers unacceptable, it is banned outright.
The film “promulgate[s] ideas and beliefs that are alien to Kuwaiti society and public order”, a spokesman for the Kuwaiti Ministry of Information said (via BBC News).
On Wednesday, the Lebanese Culture Minister Mohammad Mortada asked the interior ministry to “take all necessary measures to ban” Barbie.
He said the film “promotes homosexuality and transsexuality… supports rejecting a father’s guardianship, undermines and ridicules the role of the mother, and questions the necessity of marriage and having a family”.
Meanwhile, in the US, comedian and actor Marc Maron recently hit out at the film’s conservative critics, describing them as “insecure babies”.
“The fact that certain men took offence to the point where they, you know, tried to build a grift around it in terms of their narrative as right wing [expletive] is so embarrassing for them. I mean, so embarrassing for them,” he said in a TikTok video.
“Any dude that can’t take those hits in that movie, they’ve really got to look in their pants and decide what they’re made of. I mean, Jesus Christ, what a bunch of fucking insecure babies.”
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