There's a discussion along these lines on the thread Boycott Hollywood. Oscar Wilde said, Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. It probably happens a lot more than is presumed.
Edward Bernays. Freud's nephew, and nephew-in-law, the extremely influential New York-based social engineering expert, explained in this documentary that to persuade people who don't like bacon to eat it, you just hire 4,000 doctors to go public and convince citizens they must partake, for health reasons, which is how the American fried bacon and egg breakfast was instituted -
His advertising and public relations advice seduced many people into smoking cigarettes as acts of freedom, and again, of health, using plenty of doctors' promotional publicity. He wrote books titled (and in favour of) Propaganda, Crystallising Public Opinion and The Engineering of Consent. The idea was to turn people into better consumers by finding ways to instill new desires in them without raising suspicious those desires were being externally implanted and manipulated.
This
essay comes at such meddling from a different angle. The more fearful and confused subjects are, the better, because
self-doubt is the easiest way in. Doctors differ and patients die (bi?), as the saying goes.
Thank you, drop dead.
One last thing about the Barbie film, is that even though it doesn't offer radical solutions, it does urge something that GashontheNail has been advocating, which is the value of the option of safe separate sex spaces. For now anyway