I didn’t give my daughter a Barbie when she was growing up. Instead, I bought her an anatomically correct doll made of fabric and yarn and a Barbie knockoff featuring flat feet, a modest bust and a proportional waist.

She was not a fan of either, but I didn’t want my child trying to adhere to role models with unrealistic body images based on impossibly shaped measurements. Yet after seeing Greta Gerwig’s movie about the doll this summer, I bought my first Barbie — Soccer Barbie — for my granddaughter.

In a similar attitude reversal, I texted my daughter immediately after leaving a performance of “Boop! The Musical” to suggest she get tickets before it leaves Chicago on Christmas Eve.

Barbie and Betty Boop share a sex symbol past and have been given a feminist makeover future. Film and theater re-imagine long-held female stereotypes with sly winks and frothy humor. In these new productions, once-dated icons Betty Boop, an animated character from the 1930s, and Barbie, a doll created in 1959, question their existences and seek answers. They travel from the high-heeled worlds of the Jazz Age and Barbie Land to the real world of New York City and Los Angeles, respectively.

Once there, they find the places rife with sexism.

In the movie, Barbie hails from a gated community run by Barbies who are doctors, lawyers, Supreme Court justices and president. When she visits the real world, she discovers women aren’t in charge; they are ogled and pursued by predatory men.

In the musical (and cartoons), Betty is the star of her own show in which she plays a trapeze artist, doctor, race car driver and even a presidential candidate. Though she’s chased by lecherous men seeking to take her “boop-oop-a-doop,” she always escapes by outwitting or hitting them in the head. When she visits the real world, she learns women don’t make the same wages as men; they’re not in charge; and yes, they’re still pursued by predatory men.

In this new real world, Barbie and Betty explode with feelings. Their once-monotonous, one-dimensional lives undergo consciousness raising. Both face the question of whether to stay or go back to their old lives. And while I won’t give away the endings, each brings about positive change in their homelands.

“Barbie,” which stars Margot Robbie in an effervescent performance, has achieved monumental success. The highest-grossing movie of the year, it’s leading the Golden Globe nominations.

“Boop! The Musical,” in its pre-Broadway tryout at CIBC Theatre, stars Jasmine Amy Rogers, in “an astonishingly fleshed-out performance” that will make her a star, Tribune theater critic Chris Jones writes.

Before it goes to Broadway, “the piece needs to lean in far more to the difference between being a cartoon figure without any single story and drawn by others, and being a real woman finding a real voice,” Jones notes in his review.

By providing inspiring revisions to Barbie and Betty’s hypersexualized images, the musical and film give timely, uplifting messages for girls and women. Because during both of the two-plus hours of joyous, colorful, musical, dancing entertainment, you can forget the setbacks women face in the real world.

Today, we live in a country where the right of women to control their bodies has been repealed by the Supreme Court. A reality TV star can say on tape, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the p—-” and be elected president in 2016. That same predator can be found liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll and face 91 criminal charges across four indictments. Yet, he surges in the polls in the 2024 presidential election.

What does it mean when the year’s most aspirational message of female empowerment comes from a doll and a cartoon? Barbie and Betty lead in their worlds, but we can’t get a women elected president in this one.

There’s a quote in the movie that made me cry. Barbie encounters her creator and inventor, Ruth Handler, played by Rhea Perlman, who says, “We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back to see how far they have come.”

What is distressing is that our daughters face many of the same struggles that we did. The sad truth is neither generation can afford to stand still. It is sometimes harder to regain what is lost than to win what has never been.

As a parent, it’s natural to look back and wonder if you could have done more or better.

My regret? I wish I’d gotten my daughter the damn doll in the first place.

Christine Ledbetter is a former senior arts editor at The Washington Post who lives in Illinois, where she writes about culture and politics.