A NYTimes article today asks if movies about women who love shopping (Confessions of a Shopaholic) and weddings (Bride Wars) have “become home to the worst kind of regressive pre-feminist stereotype and misogynistic cliché.”
YES. yes. yes. yes. yes.
I say that because movies like these and even movies that claim or seem to be smarter (He’s Not That Into You) are really all about the same thing (also the thing I loathe/hate/cannot stand about Sex and the City and anything to do with it.) The women represented, regardless of their degrees or intended smarts, come off as being only full of the least admirable qualities “…neurotic, idiotic, label-obsessed, weight-obsessed, man-obsessed or wedding obsessed, and often all at the same time.”
I think it’s drivel. I don’t like chick flicks. I think the term itself is degrading and essentially means a movie with a predictable plot and characters full of “lazy stereotypes.” I don’t know anyone who lives like the women in these movies. I know that Hollywood is about fantasy and doesn’t need to hold up every character as a role model, but isn’t anyone else tired of this? Are these hollow heroines the newest clowns, train wrecks, or what exactly?
Diane Purkis a feminist historian from Oxford says “The entertainment industry allows you, the audience member, to pat yourself on the back and say: ‘I’m smarter than her, I’m more together than her, and I’m not as stupidly anorexic as her.”
Is that really what we’re looking for in a heroine? Someone we can feel “better than?”
The NYTimes article talks a bit about the lack of female directors in the film industry and how the view of women presented in these lame films is “a white male’s version of women.” I suppose that could be true, but I cannot get over the box office support from actual women that these kinds of movies receive! “Women go to these movies, because they want to go to the movies,” Melissa Silverstein, a movie marketing consultant and founder of the company Women & Hollywood, counters, “And most of the time there are no other options out there.”
The antidote to the chick-flick burden, says the former Hollywood agent Gayle Nachliss, is to populate the production sector with women. “… we have successful women agents, managers and publicists. But this is not the case creatively. And it’s why we end up with a situation where Hollywood thinks that all women care about is weddings and shopping. We constitute half of the population, and we’re starved of entertainment.”
It saddened me recently to hear that a colleague’s 4th grade daughter begged her mother to see “Bride Wars” (yes – the word was begged.) Now she doesn’t have to want to see Whale Rider or Tank Girl to please me – but can’t we offer her something better?
NYTimes claims “the good news, for right-thinking women everywhere, is that the contemporary cardboard chick flick may yet eat itself without any help from feminist producers or activist audiences. If the glut of such films continues there’s a very real danger that the genre will implode in a market filled with squealing, pratfalling heroines.”
I hope so.
