4 ‘Sexist’ Movies That Everyone Gets Wrong

4 ‘Shallow Hal’ Offers a Useful Message, and It’s Not the One Everyone Remembers

You might remember 2001’s Shallow Hal as “that film where Jack Black’s character learns fat people can be beautiful — on the inside.” That sort of message might set your eyes rolling for being both patronizing and insulting. 

Sure enough, the movie has a guru accuse Hal of judging people by their appearances, and he hypnotizes Hal into now only seeing what’s inside, to perceive people’s “true beauty.” As a result, when he meets 300-pound Rosemary, he sees her as a svelte Gwyneth Paltrow. But to set this up, we get a scene of Hal rattling off flaws he perceives in some famous women, and when you watch it again, you might notice one thing conspicuously missing:

He calls out Rebecca Romijn for being too thin. He assesses other stuff in other celebs — one’s teeth doesn’t meet his standards, while other’s accent grates on him. But he doesn’t call any fat. He calls Britney Spears “muscular,” which might sound out-of-context like a euphemism for “fat,” but it’s not because he’s definitely being explicit. This shallow guy neglecting to list weight as a flaw is downright unrealistic, and that’s even if his thoughts on the subject weren’t going to end up being the premise of the whole movie. 

“So,” you might say, “they’re making clear that his problem is judging all kinds of physical features, not just size.” Weird thing, though: The movie also establishes that Hal will sometimes very much judge people for their character rather than their appearance. One of his friends walks on his hands because he has spina bifida (he’s played by Rene Kirby, who really does have that condition), which disgusts Jason Alexander’s character but which Hal explains is no big deal. 

The logical move would be the opposite: Establish Hal as the one disgusted by this guy, so he can evolve later. But they went out of their way not to do that.

It’s like in the second draft, the writers went back and added details to ensure that the movie was not, in fact, about Hal learning the virtues of inner beauty, despite what the plot would make you think. That's because the real message is something else, which is articulated to him by his coworkers in a scene early on. 

Hal’s been pursuing women with whom he has no chance. Hal isn’t very attractive (never mind your personal opinion of Black’s looks; this is what the movie tells us). If he tries instead for someone in his league, he’ll land a girlfriend, whom he actually will like. By the end of the movie, he does that and finds happiness.

His big epiphany moment isn’t him saying, “You know, it turns out this woman I’d never be attracted to normally has a lovable soul. I’d never have predicted that!” It’s him (having learned of his hypnosis for the first time, and having yet to see what Rosemary really looks like) speculating that, now that he does have feelings for this woman, maybe he will also feel sexually attracted to the real her. Surprisingly, he gives the example of a man discovering his girlfriend has a penis. Hal assumes the attraction could plausibly remain after that, and maybe he’d be lucky enough to similarly stay attracted. 

That message — “get a satisfactory mate by changing your target” — may come off as a little, well, shallow. But it’s a more humble message than the guy having his pick of any woman and learning to bestow himself on one he’s less attracted to for the sake of justice. You could picture an alternate version of this movie starring Adam Sandler or Dane Cook, opening with Hal bedding a series of partners effortlessly before finding someone who means more to him. In the movie we got, Hal pursues lots of women but doesn’t get any until his expands his scope. 

The real-life sexists who critique women online the way Hal does celebs are more likely to fall into that category of guys who manage to get no dates at all. If they follow the advice of the movie and end up attached and happy, that could save the world. 

If this is a defense of Shallow Hal, I should probably also say something about all the fat jokes. Now, if you find those jokes terrible, I’m not going to say you’re wrong. But let’s note that, almost without exception, the joke comes from Hal’s obliviousness to Rosemary’s real size. The joke can never simply be that Rosemary is so huge that she drinks a giant milkshake or makes a huge splash in the pool. The joke is always that Hal is utterly baffled about how that’s happening. When Paltrow finally comes out in full prosthetics, including on her face, nothing in those scenes is a joke.

Some evidence for this comes from an unusual source: the closing credits. The credits, like with many comedies from the time, show clips of the people who made the movie. But these aren’t bloopers. They don’t show Paltrow trying on the fat suit and everyone laughing, even though you know that had to have happened. Instead, they’re just video clips of everyone who made the film but didn’t act in it. And I mean everyone — set dressers, camera operators, painters, accountants. It’s weirdly touching, considering these names mean nothing to us.

3 ‘Annie Get Your Gun’ Accepts Second Place Only Because She’s the Best

1950’s Annie Get Your Gun features Annie Oakley as the best shooter around, but her skills aren’t enough to get her everything she wants. “You can’t get a man with a gun,” she laments, in one of her songs. 

You might have seen that style of song made fun of in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and it was also a joke even in 1950. But then comes the very last scene, in which Annie competes in a shooting contest against love interest Frank Butler. Her friends convince her to use a sabotaged gun that guarantees she loses. Frank, thinking he won for real, now agrees to become her partner — both her showbiz partner and her husband.

People soon would laugh at this ending as hopelessly outdated. You can’t do an ending saying the heroine should give up her talents to get a man. That’s the exact opposite of what you’re supposed to do.

However, when people told women to set everything aside to get married, they were never saying that’s because women were more skilled than men and need to hide it. Annie Get Your Gun is saying this about its lead character, while saying the love interest needs to be seduced this way only because he’s so insecure.

When deciding whether the movie is being sexist here, try imagining the genders flipped. A man is the lead character, he’s the best at everything, and in the end, he throws a game to snag a woman who rejects anyone who can best her. People might indeed accuse that movie of being sexist — but they wouldn’t say it’s sexist against the main character. They’d say it’s sexist against the love interest. 

Though, keep in mind that in real life, it’s possible to fall in love without anyone lying. The historical Annie Oakley marred the real Frank Butler after beating him in the shooting contest. They were married for 50 years, till they died within two weeks of each other. 

2 ‘The Little Mermaid’ Teaches Couples About Consent

Speaking of characters giving it all up for a man, you’ve surely heard that accusation levied against Ariel from The Little Mermaid. You’ve also perhaps heard the counter to that. No, she doesn’t give everything up for a man, as she simply stops living in one place because she wants to live somewhere bigger. Bagging Eric is a challenge that Ursula includes as part of the deal. Eric isn’t the prize in this agreement. If anything, he’s the cost. 

So, with that taken care of already, I’d like to talk about something a little different — about how the story is secretly designed to teach the importance of affirmative consent in intimate relations.

Ariel must get her true love’s kiss within three days, despite not being able to speak. The true love part turns out to be easy, but the kiss is harder, for reasons we’d start to question if the movie didn’t cover this whole period in just 15 breezy minutes. Many viewers have pointed out that she could have written stuff down to communicate with Eric, but even aside from that, couldn’t she have just kissed him herself, and that way gotten him to kiss her back?

Or, she could have initiated physical contact in any other fashion. Right this second, there are two people somewhere in the world who just met and don’t speak the same language but are kissing anyway and enjoying it. We see a couple shots of Ariel leaning in and getting interrupted, but that explains why she’s unable to kiss in those few seconds, not why she doesn’t try again and succeed on the drive home. 

No, the movie works because of the assumption that you can’t kiss until you’ve talked, and it therefore teaches this assumption to the viewer. The one character who tells us how it’s possible to hook someone using just “body language” is the villain.

“But wait,” you say. “Another character says you should just lean and ‘kiss the girl,’ without any words being necessary. It’s sidekick Sebastian. He has an entire song about it!” That’s true, he does. But there’s a difference between a song saying something and the movie saying it. 

The sidekicks in The Lion King sing that you should live a carefree life, but that’s not the message of the movie, and Simba learns he must face his responsibilities. The genie in Aladdin sings that magic is going to fix his boy’s life, but the movie ends by assuring us he must drop magic and come clean. The gargoyles in The Hunchback of Notre Dame sing to Quasimodo that he can totally get with Esmeralda, but the movie ultimately tells us he can’t. One of these gargoyles is played by Jason Alexander, so maybe Quasimodo should take a lesson from Hal and expand his scope to hook up in the sequel.

Within The Little Mermaid itself, Sebastian has a second song, about how Ariel should stay under the sea. The movie doesn’t want you to agree with this in the end. No, when a Disney sidekick sings about some fun and tempting prospect, the movie will end up saying you must not do that thing.

In the end, the couple never do need a magic kiss. They kiss eventually, but first, they defeat the witch’s magic by killing her, with a boat. That’s a solution for a lot of real-life problems, actually. 

1 Check Out the Women in ‘American Pie.’ Wait, No, I Don’t Mean Like That

When I think of The Little Mermaid, I, of course, think of 1999’s American Pie. This is both because Jason Biggs’ character admits watching the movie and finding Ariel hot and because when the boys make a pact to all lose their virginities, they stipulate that the sex must be consensual. 

I’ve got two observation about the actresses in American Pie, both of which change our idea of just what sort of a movie this really is. The first is that they don’t get naked.

Oh, the movie has one nude scene. It features Shannon Elizabeth and a webcam and has received much analysis. But none of the other actresses get naked, which is surprising since four of them have sex scenes. 

To clarify: These sex scenes aren’t merely filmed from discreet angles to avoid shots of nipples. Rather, the actresses are completely covered in blankets from the shoulders down, or are totally off-screen once the sex starts. In 1999, you could count on wild teen sex scenes showing more (though not showing nudity) and titillating the audience in network procedurals or WB dramas on TV. But not American Pie, which is rated R, and also has an unrated version with zero additional nudity. Here, the sex scenes are only there because they’re funny or because you’re invested in the couples.

More than that, if we look outside the sex, there’s not a single scene of sexiness (what’s sometimes called “fanservice”), beyond that one webcam scene. None of the scenes of girls talking are gratuitously set in a locker room; no one strips down for the pool in any of the multiple scenes set at parties. The promotional poster below features more skin than the entire movie does — again, other than that one famous scene.

The other surprising thing about the female characters in American Pie is that they exist.

Take a look at the poster below and you’ll see it’s almost perfectly gender-balanced. It misses out only because Sean William Scott scored a spot on the poster but Shannon Elizabeth didn’t, which is why other variants of the poster are totally balanced by messily editing her in. While the girls are all secondary to the guys, contrast it with most sex comedies. 

Usually, a sex comedy stars a bunch of guys. There will be women of course, but they won’t be actresses you can name, they likely won’t make it to the poster and they won’t come back for the sequel, the way the ones in American Pie do. At best, one actress (love interest to the main guy) will be a major character. 

That bikini poster above might look sleazy now, but most sex comedies don’t even have the cast to put together something comparable if they tried. And that poster doesn’t even feature the entire female cast — it leaves out Natasha Lyonne, not to mention Jennifer Coolidge. 

So, you might have trouble naming another sex comedy with a female cast like American Pie’s. Exceptions include ones where all the leads are women, like The Sweetest Thing or The To-Do List. But here’s a more surprising question: Are you able to name any movie with a female cast as big as American Pie’s — not just a sex comedy, but any kind of movie?

Hopefully, you can, but now try striking from that list any that are marketed as women-led movies. That means any movie where every single person on the poster is a woman (conveniently, the title will probably contain some variation of “women” or “girls”). The list suddenly becomes very small. There are never several major female characters, unless they’re all major female characters.

There is one type of movie that will have a bunch of major women and also some major men. It’s the ensemble romcom. The ensemble romcom genre (very fun to say aloud, if not to watch) includes movies like Valentine's Day or He’s Just Not Into You, and features an unwieldy number of couples carrying out concurrent plotlines and gradually getting together. Like all the movies you struck from your previous list, these are often marketed specifically to women, but you can also count on some guys significant enough to appear on the poster.

And now’s when it becomes clear. American Pie isn’t a sex comedy after all. It’s an ensemble romcom.

A sex comedy features a bunch of highly episodic sexual adventures, which could really be shuffled about and played in any order when you break them down. American Pie has a couple of those but not many (again: just one lone scene tries to turn the viewer on). It doesn’t have the time because it’s too busy following four separate guys and their four separate romantic arcs. 

American Pie is Love, Actually, except with fewer nude scenes and a greater focus on moral messaging. Getting young guys to think this was a movie made for them was a masterful piece of trickery and deserves applause.

Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for more stuff no one should see.