Huh, Ken is way hornier in the French poster for Barbie

Warner Bros. has been pushing the “Ken-ergy” angle pretty hard ahead of the upcoming release of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, emphasizing the affable, toned doofus nature of Ryan Gosling’s Ken. But the French marketing for the film has pushed the definition of that nebulous-but-hunky concept even further, it turns out—in what may, or may not, have been a very deliberate direction.

This is per THR—truly, your one-stop shop for all French fornication slang—which reports on an online hubbub surrounding the French posters for Gerwig’s movie, which declare “Elle peut tout faire. Lui, c’est juste Ken.” (Literally, “She can do everything. He’s just Ken.” All well and good, and pretty close to the film’s English tagline. Except, guess what, “ken” has a very specific double-meaning in French slang—which means that the poster also translates to “She can do everything. He just knows how to fuck.”

Leaving aside the question of whether Ken does, in fact, know how to fuck—the movie’s PG-13, so we may never actually find out—it’s an open query whether this was deliberate or not, with THR quoting “a French marketing executive from a competing studio” who claims there’s no way anyone under 30 would read the tagline as it is without seeing a double entendre. (“It’s sort of genius, really, that they slipped that in.”)

Warner Bros., for its part, is playing deliberately coy, releasing a statement that simply says that “The speculation around the Barbie marketing campaign shows that there is a high level of awareness and major excitement from the public surrounding the upcoming release of our film in France.” (Which is either “We didn’t mean to do that but the buzz is lucrative,” or “We would get in trouble if we admitted we deliberately put the fuck-word in our Barbie posters.”)

Barbie opens worldwide on July 21, Ken’s carnal acumen decidedly TBD.