#1
When cringe meets misinformation...
#2
When we got in touch with Embarrassed-Toe-1920 to learn more about her now-viral post, she reiterated that its roots lie within that Adam Sandler production.
"The question popped into my head when I was deciding what movie I should watch this week," she told Bored Panda.
"I remembered my disappointment with Just Go With It from the previous weekend, and as a woman who has cringed at many sexist films in my lifetime, I just knew my fellow Redditors would have fun with this topic. It's always refreshing when women have a safe space to vent!"
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Despite the $1.4bn success of Barbie, last year's top 100 movies had just 30 female leads or co-leads, the worst result since 2014, a new study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found.
Dr. Stacy L Smith, the head of research, said in a statement that this is a catastrophic step backward for girls and women in film.
The study's authors said, “We cannot explain the collapse,” calling it "an industry failure."
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Audiences definitely pick up on it. "Some common stereotypes or tropes that stand out to me are that women are not an important part of the plot or only serve as eye candy in the film," Embarrassed-Toe-1920 told us.
"I am also so sick of seeing the stereotype that a woman can either have a career or have a family and social life. I'm currently watching Ugly Betty, and the male magazine executive (Daniel) has a thriving career and 1,000 booty-call girls, meanwhile the female executives (Wilhemina and Alexis) have almost no social life outside of work. Work is their life."
"Stop saying that women can either have a career or have a social life. If men can have both then we can too. We shouldn't have to work twice as hard just to achieve the same career level that men can with half the work," she added.
#8
She plays an archivist working in the f*****g National Archives, a bona fide professional in her field, but once she gets wrapped up in the (from her perspective, INSANE) hunt for the Declaration of Independence she's treated like a child. I can't count the number of times the two male leads share a look and shake their head in response to DK's character asking questions. They just oozed "aww isn't she cute, she's trying so hard to keep up" energy. The infantilization was crazy.
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However, the woman who initiated the discussion acknowledged that some of these pitfalls are due to a lack of skill, which carries over to other genders as well.
"While female characters are often poorly written in movies, so are male characters," the Redditor said. "And the messages that male characters may send to an impressionable young audience can be highly problematic. For example, in Ugly Betty, Betty breaks up with her boyfriend because he cheats on her and then he stalks her incessantly until she gets back together with him. Nowhere in the script is the stalking named for what it is or made clear that it's not appropriate," she explained.
"I wish the writers had made it more clear that stalking is more than a silly little subplot. I could go on forever, but honestly, I think the comments on the Reddit post are very enlightening. I was so glad to see that thousands of women related to the post and could easily list off movies that gave them a major ick at the obvious lack of female writers."
#11
There is NO way in hell a woman would open up the house to a male stranger (much less TWO) who knocked on the door and asked to come in just because they "used to live there", and ESPECIALLY not when she has a young child with her at home too. WtaF.
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#13
ETA the strong woman who doesn't communicate or suffers in silence. Again...a man attempting to write a strong woman character and making them behave like a man.
#14
Him switching the semen to his own in the cup she’s gonna use for insemination must be some form of a*sault if not r*pe adjacent. And obviously the movie wants it to be this romantic thing that it was his son all along when it’s actually horrifying that he overrode her choice and made her have his child instead. (I don’t care that the character is drunk as he replaced the semen. When she finds out and loves it instead of running for the hills is disgusting.).
Having said all this, we felt like we had to give credit where credit was due, so we asked Embarrassed-Toe-1920 if she could remember a movie or TV show where the writers had developed believable, well-rounded characters.
"A TV series that I really enjoyed was Glow, about the filming of a female wrestling show set in the 80s," she said. "The show was refreshing because it celebrates female friendship, and doesn't shy away from portraying harassment that male Hollywood executives engage in against women."
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The main character is a hot, mid-twenties woman who just landed her dream job. Other than thinking her nieces are cute, we get no information about how she feels about parenting. She never says she longs to be a mother. She seems extremely focused on her new career in the entertainment industry.
Suddenly she's impregnated by Seth Rogan after a one night stand. She seems to *loathe* this man. Like cannot stand him for longer than a couple minutes. And his character is written to be so gross and obnoxious, it makes sense no woman would want to be around him. But of course, since this movie about pregnancy centers on a man, he goes from annoying and disgusting to "not" and that's the major arc of the movie. He's also *horrible* to her as a partner and expectant father, which is simply glossed over.
Everyone in this woman's life tells her not to have this baby. Her mom and sister are very stressed out for her, her mom even urges her to have an abortion. Other than sit there with a stupid look on her face, the pleas of her family have no effect on her. She also has to hide the pregnancy from all her friends AND everyone at work, lest she be fired (wow Judd, could have written an entire movie on this premise alone. Too bad the movie about pregnancy was just a vehicle for Seth Rogan jokes.)
The movie could have introduced the female lead as a devout Catholic, which would have explained why she was not only against abortion, but also wasn't using birth control. She could have been 15-20 years older and always wanted a child but was too wrapped up in her career. We could have opened the movie with her leaving her husband or long term partner after they reach an impasse about having children or not. S**t, the story could have taken place in a state with restrictive abortion laws instead of California. But no. We get absolutely no reasoning for why this woman would make such an extreme and life changing decision.
#18
Which k*lls me, because I find them genuinely funny a lot of the time, and they have some funny women in them. But women are either sexy dreamgirls, or mean mommies. They don't get the joke and they stop men from having fun. In Knocked Up, Katherine Heigl is supposed to be like an E! Tv reporter, and yet she doesn't get a Back to the Future reference?
However, "My all-time favorite movie is Thelma & Louise," the Redditor added. "It tells the fictional story of two women on a road trip who each face their own struggles of being mistreated by men. This movie is very pro-woman and so refreshing amongst the sea of sexism in movies. I don't want to give too much away but I'll just say that I cried a lot and if you've never seen it before, Thelma & Louise is definitely worth your time."
#20
