SNP MP Mhairi Black should be more like Barbie and stop doing the patriarchy's job for them – Susan Dalgety

Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie is a glorious, comic blockbuster which explains and celebrates feminism

One of the most poignant moments in the movie Barbie – which is currently breaking box-office records – is an encounter between the living doll and an elderly woman. Stereotypical Barbie – all jutting breasts, long legs and high heels – has just entered the real world, and, pausing to catch her breath, she sits down on a park bench next to a stereotypical white-haired old lady.

Barbie looks at her, and in an awed voice says, “you’re beautiful”. The woman smiles and replies, “I know”. And that's it. A fleeting moment in a movie packed full of pink plastic, feminism for beginners and Ryan Gosling’s pecs. But it is the heart of the movie, as director Greta Gerwig recently explained to the New York Times: “The idea of a loving God who’s a mother, a grandmother – who looks at you and says, ‘Honey, you’re doing OK’ – is something I feel like I need and I wanted to give to other people.” She added: “If I don’t have that scene, I don’t know what it is or what I’ve done.”

What she has done is make a glorious, often comic, blockbuster which uses contemporary tropes to explain, and celebrate, feminism to a young audience, and reminds an older one that there is still a long way to go before we finally smash the patriarchy. Watching it with my two granddaughters, on the cusp of adolescence, I asked what they thought it was about. Without hesitation, they both said: “Women are brilliant and men try to stop them, but they are too stupid.” Harsh, but a useful starting point for any budding feminist.

Margot Robbie stars as living doll Barbie in the eponymous film (Picture: Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images)

I wonder if Mhairi Black MP, 28, has seen Barbie? Somehow I doubt it. Reading her snide comments about women that she made during a Fringe show a few days ago made me at first angry, then sad for the young woman who had made them. In what she clearly thought was a clever attack on women who disagree with her views on transgender rights, she dismissed them as “white supremacists” and then sneered that they were “50-year-old Karens”.

If, like our First Minister, you don’t know what a Karen is, let me explain. It is a pejorative term to signify a middle-aged woman who is seen as demanding beyond what is normal behaviour, using her ‘white and class privilege’ to get her own way. The meme has its roots in the USA, where black Americans used it to satirise racism and class-based hostility. Here, today, it is used by people like Black to denigrate women who argue for their sex-based rights.

Black, who was first elected aged 20, has a first-class honours degree in politics. She may have passed exams in the theory of political communication and democracy, but after eight years in the mother of all parliaments, she has learned little about representative politics, or life.

It is not her job to pick and choose who she represents. As the duly-elected MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, it is her responsibility to stand up for all the 64,000 electorate, not just those who voted for her. And, I would argue, insulting women over 50 is not the act of a class warrior as she likes to portray herself, but of an immature, insecure youngster.

But Black has announced she is standing down at the next general election, and as yet has not indicated what she plans to do after giving up politics. Before deciding her next move, she could do worse than learn from her parliamentary and party colleague, Joanna Cherry MP, who did not become an MP until she was 49 and had already carved out a career as a successful lawyer.

Her maturity shone through her Fringe show on Thursday where, in a wide-ranging conversation with journalist Graham Spiers, she talked about campaigning in the 1980s as a young lesbian for equal rights, of her hero Martina Navratilova, and how, in her view, the SNP’s coalition with the “totalitarian” Scottish Greens is bad for Scotland. And she had some advice for Black, explaining that the role of an elected politician is to embrace debate, not shut it down and, crucially, to understand nuance and to be tolerant of other people’s views.

In her short political career, Black has shown little tolerance for views that don’t chime with hers. She appears to believe that Scotland is a colony of England, that anyone to the right of Jeremy Corbyn is a fascist, and that older women who do not indulge in identity politics are irrelevant, worse they are “Karens”.

Except Mhairi, one day you will, like stereotypical Barbie, live in the real world where you will, hopefully, celebrate your 50th birthday with friends and family. You will, like Barbie, discover cellulite on your once-smooth thighs. You will find yourself crying at inopportune moments, as Cherry did when attacked by her so-called colleagues. And you will, as you age, realise that death is inevitable, even as you are still full of life.

I hope that when you reach 50, there is not a powerful young woman – perhaps yet even to be born – who dismisses you as an out-of-touch, irrelevant has-been with outdated views and a bad hair-cut. Because that would be a cruel and unusual punishment for a woman who has achieved much, and no doubt still has much more to offer in 2045.

And forgive me, as a 66-year-old Susan, for offering you some unsolicited, but heartfelt, advice. Be less Mhairi Black and more Joanna Cherry. And try being a bit more Barbie. You don’t need to wear pink, or a revealing swimsuit – in Barbieland there is a diversity of Barbies – just more sisterly. Don’t do the patriarchy’s job for them.