The Women

I saw The Women this Saturday. Though reviews are generally abysmal, I will offer my qualified recommendation to the contrary: The Women isn’t good. But it isn’t bad. And if you’d like to see more movies with female protagonists, and more movies aren’t solely about those women’s relationships with men, give The Women your money. Hollywood will not respond to petitions or politics or all the bloggers in the world. But it will respond to cash. If The Women makes a reasonable chunk of change, then they’ll try it again, and maybe next time it’ll be good.

The film revolves around four friends: Mary, the do-it-all suburbanite (Meg Ryan), Sylvia, the magazine editor (Annette Bening), Edie, the frazzled, fertile mom (Debra Messing), and Alex, the hot, edgy lesbian (Jada Pinkett-Smith). (I was unaware the last was a trope of chick flicks, but maybe this is The Women trying to break the gender barriers of movie genres.) The four live in the control environment of “upper class,” where the mundane concerns of day-to-day are neatly solved by money and the hired help, allowing the film to have pinpoint focus on other (but not frivolous!) problems. One you probably guessed from the previews: Mary finds out her husband is cheating on her. The other is Sylvia’s futile quest to bring intelligence and substance to the women’s magazine she’s recently come to helm. There are incremental perturbations of mother/daughter problems, the betrayal of friends, etc.

The main failing of The Women is that it could have landed so many solid blows – but it pulls its punches at best, or just never goes for it at all. The Sylvia’s struggle to bring quality content and writing is opposed time and again by the establishment – airbrushed actresses, diet tips, and appeals to our worst emotions. She fails (realistic), quits (understandable), but for all her passion has nothing to say about it in the aftermath. The closest she comes to criticism is when she’s talking to Mary’s daughter, who wants to be skinny like the models in her magazines – to which Sylvia only says, “No one looks like that. They’re all airbrushed.” Mary fails worse in reassuring her daughter, however. Her daughter is 12, a stick, and when she refuses a cookie on the grounds that it is “too many points,” Mary only laughs amusedly then goes back to prepping for her little garden party. Then, of course, Mary gets into a messy almost-divorce with her cheating husband, and sort of forgets about her daughter’s weight obsession, because of course her daughter won’t be even more driven to gain control over some aspect of her life while her parents’ relationship is disintegrating in a most ugly fashion around her.

Ultimately, none of these issues – seeing the impotence of one’s passion towards a laudable goal, tweens suffering poor body image because of pictures better qualified as drawings than photographs – are very important because the characters live in the magical world of wealth. Much like money allows them the luxury to dwell on such problems, money, apparently, can also sweep them all away. Sylvia will launch her own magazine and do whatever she likes regardless of profits, and Mary’s daughter will follow in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother, buying hair-straightenings and face lifts to bring her nearer to that fictional image she never stops admiring.

The one hit the movie never took, and I really wish it had, was men’s culpability in the messes that are personal relationships. They get credit for not playing the blame game on men, which I think is what a lot of people assume “girl power” and “feminism” are, but in ducking that they were equally unfair – since men weren’t the evil overbearing monsters ruining everything, they’re impotent, barely culpable for their own actions. In the whole cheating scandal, the mistress Crystal (Eva Mendes) is blamed much more than the unfaithful husband. Even when he’s forced to move out, trying to make amends all the while, Crystal comes by his place on a daily basis – but it’s hardly his fault, or so his daughter claims, saying “I don’t think he even likes her. He’s just lonely.” Of course, he’s lonely! He can’t help having a mistress, he’s just a sad little man. It is strangely Crystal that offers the only fair and balanced view of the situation, saying when Mary confronts her, that husbands don’t get stolen. They go willingly. But then Crystal is a self-obsessed, money-grubbing home wrecker, so is likely not meant to be the film’s vessel of wisdom.

But even if the movie isn’t as good to women as it could be, as hard on the problems it presents as it might have been, and contains its fair share of stereotypes, it’s not anywhere near as bad as the rest of Hollywood. These women are able to pursue the lives they want – and what they want isn’t shoes, or wealth, or men. And if they must live in a world of financial freedom to have that luxury, at least that freedom seems to come from their own efforts, and not from the benevolence of the men in their lives.

What’s a movie, $10 and two hours of your life? A small price to pay for the chance at women of real substance on the silver screen.

The McCain Timewarp

To a time when he was young, and a woman’s place was somewhere under his feet.

This was originally an email to my cousin, who I recently converted from her undecided status to an Obama-supporter, but who, alas, has a wide circle of Republican friends. I thought I was fairly on point despite my obviously strong feelings about the situation, so why not share with the general public:

Please forward this to your undecided friends, your female Republican friends, and any male Republican friends who know/like/are dating/are married to women and should have, you know, some interest in those women’s rights as human beings. Because last I checked, this is the United States. You know, land of the free.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/opinion/26collins.html

The gist: Lilly Ledbetter was paid less than her inferior (rank-wise, people) male coworkers for 20 years while working for Goodyear. She found out shortly before she retired, and sued, and won – until the case got to the Supreme Court, and they decided since she hadn’t filed 180 days since the discrimination started (even though she found out a good 19 years and 6 months AFTER that), she could not seek compensation or back pay. The Lilly Ledbetter Act was introduced to close this loophole, and allow discriminated employees to file a claim 180 days within finding out.

John McCain did not show up to vote on this Bill, which only got 56 of the 60 votes it needed to pass. Not that he would have voted for it. McCain has stated his opposition to the bill because it’s ripe for abuse; plus, this vaguely nonsensical, definitely insulting tidbit below:

“Having delivered his objections to the Ledbetter bill this week, McCain went on to tell reporters that what women really need is “education and training, particularly since more and more women are heads of their households, as much or more than anybody else. And it’s hard for them to leave their families when they don’t have somebody to take care of them.”"

I am not sure, good sir, how you gathered Ms. Ledbetter was less educated, not as well trained, nor in any way inferior to her male, less-senior, less-experienced colleagues. I dare say she wouldn’t have been the one woman to stick it out for 20 years in the reportedly female-unfriendly Goodyear if she was quite so pathetic as the picture you paint. But she has a vagina, so of course she’s incompetent in comparison! As are we all. And excellent point, to boot, that some people might take advantage of this legislation – because if a law might be abused, we just shouldn’t pass it. Closing a loophole to allow legitimately discriminated employees to seek compensation is SO not worth the hassle.

This, on top of Sarah Palin opposing abortion even in the case of rape (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/01/palin-on-abortion-id-oppo_n_122924.html), makes things fairly clear for me: If you give a damn about women’s rights, about your rights, about human beings being truly equal and living in a fair and just society that is not just just for the privileged white male, you cannot vote for McCain/Palin.

I’m begging you. For the sake of my rights as a person, and the rights of every other woman in this country, those you know and those you don’t, those who are fortunate enough to never need to exercise these rights, and those who will have to fight to have them acknowledged. Even if you disagree with Obama, if you think Biden is the political equivalent of white toast, even if you think the whole change message is bullshit and it’ll just be the same old same old: I say that is still better than stepping backwards, to a time when women were less, and somehow that was okay.