Magical Thinking Watch: The New York Times calls for more sisterhood, less patriarchy

New York Times movie critic Manohla Dargis treats readers to a brilliant parody of  a Women’s Studies major today.  Dargis wittily incorporates every chestnut of angry feminist lore in her review of the movie Bridesmaids  (which I have not seen).  

Her review opens:

“Bridesmaids,” an unexpectedly funny new comedy about women in love, if not of the Sapphic variety, goes where no typical chick flick does: the gutter.

Apparently, lesbian love is now the default mode, so that its absence in a movie about “women in love” needs to be noted.

Next comes the required jab at the sexism of male executives:

In most wedding movies an actress may have the starring part (though not always), but it’s only because her character’s function is to land a man rather than to be funny. Too many studio bosses seem to think that a woman’s place is in a Vera Wang.

Examples, please?  Studio bosses think female actresses are only acceptable in wedding movies?  News to me. 

Here’s the predictable despair at females’ atavistic desire for a wedding:

There is a big dress here, of course, an aggressively foolish Gordian knot of silk and wit that slyly speaks to how women need (and want) to be packaged as brides, dolled up in satin and all but lost in a cloud of tulle and the appreciative din of family and friends.

And of course the scorn for marriage as an enduring form of patriarchal chattel slavery:

They ask the question facing every modern woman who jumps at the chance to enact the latter-day equivalent of being passed from man to man, father to husband, if without a bushel of dowry corn and 12 goats: How do you survive getting down the aisle?

Presumably the only way to avoid being treated as a species of male-owned property is to marry your lesbian lover, under the auspices of your lesbian mothers. 

Dargis’s satire then sounds the rousing call for sisterhood, necessary for survival in this male-dominated, female-hating society:

the movie is smart about a lot of things, including the vital importance of female friendships.

You see, society conspires to keep girls apart—preventing them from owning test-messaging cell phones, say, or having Facebook pages, to name just a few of the barriers to “vitally important” but otherwise beleaguered “female friendships.”

Dargis ends her send-up of Naomi Wolfian-bathos by accusing the world of treating women as sex objects:

 It helps [in making female comedies] if the director has a clue, and if everyone involved sees women not just as bosoms with legs, but as bosoms with legs and brains.

Last time I checked, it was women who have fueled the decades-long reign of ever more towering stiletto heels, women who risk twisted ankles and long-term muscle distortion to show off their legs.  If women wanted nice sensible shoes, the market would gladly provide.  It was also women who buy push-up bras to project their bosoms more forcefully into the world.  It is women who eagerly pore over Cosmopolitan and every other species of shallow, superstitious women’s magazine to learn how to make themselves a more irresistible sex object.  No one prevents women from subscribing to The Economist instead of to Cosmo; few, however, do. 

For her next devastating satire of feminist self-delusion, Dargis might turn her attention to why modern women, loudly committed to absolute equality between the sexes and utter liberation from pre-marital sexual inhibitions, still eagerly associate themselves with an institution historically grounded in pre-marital female chastity and still based overwhelmingly on the convention of the male chivalric proposal.  There’s plenty there for Dargis’s brilliantly devised Take Back the Night persona to get angry at.