The 'Barbie' Poster In French Is Very Horny (And Hilarious)

Aqua was right: we are living in a Barbie world.

One of the most anticipated (and important) movies of 2023 is being released next month, and with it comes slumber party screenings, limited-edition pink lunchboxes, and viral posters.

A French poster for Barbie features Margot Robbie as Barbie looking triumphant and being held by Ryan Gosling as Ken, giving off unprecedented amounts of “Ken-ergy.” There’s also a tagline — “Elle peut tout faire. Lui, c’est juste Ken,” or in English, “She can do everything. He’s just Ken” — that has a “double-entendre meaning in French slang,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. “Ken” is slang for “f*ck” in French, so to someone in Paris, the poster reads, “She knows how to do everything. He just knows how to f*ck.”

The wordplay was likely intentionial.

Many began to suspect the poster’s NSFW message was a deliberate act of guerrilla marketing. A closer look at the tagline seems to confirm this. The original, English Barbie tagline is: “Barbie is everything. He’s just Ken.” But the French translation of the first line isn’t “Barbie est tout” (“Barbie is everything”), the literal translation, but rather “[Barbie] peut tout faire” (“Barbie can do anything”), a line that feeds nicely into the slang-y Ken line with the dirty connotations.

“It’s definitely deliberate; there’s no way a French speaker wouldn’t have noticed the dirty pun,” a French marketing executive told the Hollywood Reporter. “It’s sort of genius, really, that they slipped that in.”

So, it’s confirmed: Ken f*cks. Even if it’s unclear what he f*cks with.