47 Times Movies Didn't Know How Women Work At All

Bella Swan from Twilight. Her dependence on Edward to the point that she can barely even live when he leaves her is just pathetic and a bad role model for the teen/young adult girls that read those books. Those books romanticize female weakness and enforce the idea that having a boyfriend is more important than even being alive.

Exact_Opportunity606:

My speculation on why he couldn't read her mind was because there weren't any thoughts in there to begin with.

OP:

🤣

Every time I remember 50 Shades of Grey exists, I want to projectile vomit in rage. Literally both a book and movie about a one dimensional woman whose entire self worth is validated by an jerk man, that manages to somehow be even worse than Twilight.

Medusas_snakes:

I hate read all 3 books in one weekend when I was getting over the flu. The flu was the better experience of the two.

It's a classic but women wearing heels all the time in films and TV series. Honestly, it drives me crazy!

It is a trope - the woman in a movie always runs away from violence.

They trip the bad person/monster or hit them with a pan and then... Run away

NO. That thing is going to attack you. Attack it first. Use the pan you just dropped until its head is no longer recognizable.

Women in stories rarely fight back and all of my instincts are the opposite.

I'm not a violent person but I'm also not stupid. Women are portrayed as tactically idiotic victims.

sneaky518:

Women don't just trip, they trip over nothing. It's like a pratfall trip. When you're scared you generally get improved athletic performance from adrenaline, but movie and TV show women fall over their own feet instead.

Nearly all of them.
Wakes up. Perfect hair.
Escapes a deadly attack and still has better hair than me after visiting my hairstylist.

the-rioter:

Oh oh, I also need to include:

Woman sleeps in full make-up like this is normal.

The one scene in Scrubs where Eliot and JD hook up the second time around and she's hanging out in her tank top and shorts PJs because her car with her stuff was stolen and when the intimate scene starts and she strips she's in a full red matching bra/panties set under her pajamas.

The entirety of the 3rd Transformers movie where the woman who replaced Megan Fox as the love interest is in a full, white top/bottom ensemble and gets ZERO dirt on her outfit as buildings are literally collapsing around her.

As a woman, we all only have a few standard jobs to choose from:

- kindergarten teacher
- housewife and mom
- magazine something (or, variation: Intrepid Girl Reporter)
- Nurse
- military who grew up with 37 brothers

Those are your only available careers, ladies. Enjoy!

library_wench:

Hey! You totally forgot about the viable career options of:

Owner of a cutesy little shop (that in real life would never make a profit), and

Cinderella job (maid, waitress, or personal assistant to a total b*tch) that you keep until you fall for the rich love interest.

I really hate the trope in fantasy and historical dramas where a pregnant woman is having a difficult birth and goes “let me die, but save the baby” or some other iteration of self-sacrifice.

I get that it’s dramatic but it’s so so ubiquitous and I’m pretty sure that the “it’s either her or her baby” trolly problem wasn’t super common in premodern medicine. More like “yeah you both gonna die bruh”.

I’m sure there’s worse examples but I was always bothered by how the women in The Walking Dead stayed gorgeous and never had a problem with their periods.

fawn-witch:

And no body hair, AT ALL?!? You telling me that not a single woman at the end of the world has at least a little bit of a ladytash?

cant_be_me:


Yep, we want realism in our dystopian/historical fiction, which means all of the r**e everywhere but somehow does not include other realistic physical elements like messed up teeth or armpit hair or untweezed eyebrows or catastrophic sunburn or sepsis from a tiny blister from a bad pair of shoes or any indication of how these people smell with no shower access or anything unattractive like that.

While I love Kingsman holy mother of god do I hate what they did with the Swedish Princess character in those movies.

Any movie where there is a woman who’s introduced in a power position and then proceeds to do nothing the rest of the film except ask stupid questions and cry.

A good example of this was Jurassic World for me. The main female character is supposed to be the operations manager of the park and is introduced as the stuck up boss type and then the whole rest of the movie all she does is run in heels until she falls at the exact moments when the hero can save her, and ask questions like “what’s that?” and “where are we going?”

It pissed me the off because she’s supposed to be the person who knows about the operations and layout of the park- why would you have her be the person asking those questions?

There are other issues for me, like running really fast through the jungle in high heels, having a perfect clean outfit after a dinosaur fight, and being uptight in the beginning (won’t drink tequila because she’s on a diet) and then her arc is just falling in love and becoming a nurturing motherly woman. All around annoying.

shypster:

They did her assistant so dirty too. Her death scene was so unnecessarily long. For the crime of not wanting to babysit her boss's nephews?

whydonttheysayegg:

My biggest issue with her, on top of everything you mentioned, was the perfectly clean white dress and heels at all times while she is running through the mud. Like, that's not how mud works.

A CSI episode where the plot hinges on the fact that no woman would only wear PART of a lacey underwear set (IE, just the panties), especially when the lingerie was SO expensive ($35).

Like? 1) Women can wear super nice underwear and just a plain bra. Or vice versa. They don't HAVE to be a set.

2) Really? $35 is an expensive lingerie set? Even if this was in the 90s/2000s, a set cost at least $60 at Victoria's Secret, and that's not even what I'd consider "fancy" lingerie.

I love the ones where the plain nerdy woman just needs to take off her glasses and let her hair down (and undo a few buttons) and suddenly she is a supermodel. She had no idea she could be so attractive if only she took off those silly glasses!

If I take off my glasses I will struggle to correctly identify people standing five feet away. I guess being blind is fine so long as you look good?

Anon:

This bothered me a lot in She's All That. Even though I felt like Zack's character sort of saw Laney for who she was before she got made over, at the same time it was like, was it really necessary? He didn't seem "starstruck" with her until she came down in a red dress, freshly cut hair and makeup and no glasses. I won't lie, I thought she looked cute the way she looked before in the movie, with the clothes that were her, her long hair and her cute glasses.

But guys won't notice you that much unless you are smoking hot, right?

ill-settle-for:

“He had noticed, not that Elfine was beautiful, but that he loved Elfine.” -Cold Comfort Farm
I think it’s possible for someone to find a woman attractive in her everyday getup and still be in awe when he sees her in makeup and a well-cut dress; I think it’s almost impossible to get that across in film.
I mean, fancy clothes and makeup are designed to make us look good. They’re good at it. You can look equally as enticing in good casual clothes and glasses, but that doesn’t mean a man won’t notice when you’re dressed to go out either.
It’s just very difficult to portray that kind of thing in a movie. You can write out someone’s thoughts (if you care to) but you can’t always get them across just by facial expressions, etc.

Black Widow’s “I’m a monster… Just like you” speech in Avengers: Age of Ultron. She’s a monster not because she’s unalived people but because… She’s infertile. An absolute Marvel classic.

PracticalSolution352:

I remember being really excited that they were going to address the moral grey-ness that a character who is an As**ssin (but only taught that) must have… And they did the no babies reveal and I almost cried in frustration. Like I want deep and three demisional characters damn it!!!

What's up with all the beaten-up yet so gorgeous looking women in those apocalypse movies?

Perfect trimmed eyebrows and mascara? Dude, their body shimmers under sunlight! Tell me where they got body oil and glitter when the zombies come!

And who the heck goes to a tropical forest wearing short sleeves, the bugs will eat you!

I don't ask for them to be ugly or anything but at least try?

The movie Crazy, Stupid, Love. It has a side story where the young teenage son has a crush on the 17 year old babysitter, who in turn has a crush on the dad (Steve Carell). The story includes the girl taking nudes of herself for Carell's character and his son basically stalking and harassing the her. After repeatedly turning down his advances she has a conversation where she tells the boy that his actions make her uncomfortable.

When the film resolves, she still doesn't date the boy but she gives him her nude pictures!! My brain did a record scratch. What man believes a girl will seek out her stalker, who makes her noticeably uncomfortable, and give him nudes as a consolation prize?! Just. Wow.

The way that was written still drives me crazy and it wasn't even a very big part of the story.

Reddish81:

Yes this movie is deeply troubling - even worse that I used to love it!

Any instance where it's implied women faint at the sight of blood.

Comfortable_Bell9539:

And where it's implied that they're cowardly in general - oh god, I should have mentioned that girl in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom... She was useless as f**k, always crying and screaming hysterically.

Specifically the book - Bird Box.

I remember reading the birth scene and wondering out loud if the author had ever met a woman who'd given birth before. Unfortunately I have erased from my mind precisely what it was that offended me so much!

alyeffy:


SPOILERS but at least in BirdBox, Sandra Bullock’s character didn’t get pregnant again during the 5 years before they learned the existence of the blind school sanctuary.
For A Quiet Place, the whole time I kept thinking, why the hell would you choose to have babies, that are literally unable to stop making noise when their needs are not met, in an apocalyptic world ravaged by monsters with ultra sensitive hearing. They’re literally endangering the rest of their still alive children by doing so too.

Teyla from Stargate Atlantis. While heavily pregnant, she is captured by evil aliens. Of course for ~the drama~ she goes into labor on their ship, and her only assistance is the awkward nerdy science guy who’s panicking about having to deliver a baby. As they’re running down the hallways trying to make their escape, she has to stop to give birth. It maybe takes 30 minutes? A short enough timeframe that no aliens walk down the hallway and discover them. (Her first baby, by the way.)

The baby comes out clean, and also
looking about six months old. No gushing blood (or other bodily substances). No placenta.

One commercial break later, she’s up and continuing the dash for safety, fighting off aliens with one arm with the baby in her other arm. Her hair is a little disheveled but she’s still got a full face of makeup on.

Okay, to be fair, technically she is Athosian and not human, but ‘Athosian’ is Stargate for ‘we’re going to call them aliens but our makeup department DGAF and in every respect they’re just going to look and act like humans’.

The actress was pregnant IRL and the writers had *months* to try to lampshade it a little! At a prenatal appointment have the doctor comment, “So your people give birth quickly, without any pain or blood? Fascinating!” *Some* kind of half-assed explanation.

I’ve seen some pretty bad on-screen birth scenes, but that one wins the Worst Ever award pretty handily.

Not the most egregious, but it lives rent free in my brain. In an episode of Criminal Minds, two women get boxed in by a car of men in a deserted parking lot at night. They proceed to get out of the car to confront the men. In what universe would that happen????

I've been watching a lot of youtube videos about Colleen Hoover books lately and boy howdy is it astounding how bad she is at writing characters of her own gender. And equally, how abysmal she is at writing compelling romantic male leads. All her men are next level horrible, and she writes romance. I seriously don't understand how she's published, let alone how she sells as many books as she does. The line "We laugh about our son's big balls," is burned into my head forever now.

Also, I guess she had one or more books she had to edit in later editions because the originals had straight up SA scenes? What the hell.