Oh, Hollywood. How much cocaine did it take to make you think that's how you address that issue? In the Ghostbusters remake, the primary purpose of Chris Hemsworth's secretary character is apparently to be openly ogled by the busters of ghosts, even though that element isn't in the original. Because that's ... empowerment, I guess? "But see, he wouldn't be made uncomfortable by that, because he has huge muscles! That's how it works, right?"
But no, even after taking a pass at the script to water it down, it's not cute for Anna Faris to kidnap and deceive an amnesiac. It's possibly the only thing it's not cute for her to do.
Related: 6 Obnoxious Assumptions Hollywood Makes About Women
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The Message Doesn't Translate
Obviously, the reason you can't just plop a woman into a man's role and expect the same outcome is that there are centuries of social context there that you can't ignore. A prime example of this is the recently released What Men Want.
Even the title is insulting. In case you don't remember the 2000 instant classic What Women Want for some reason, Mel Gibson plays a brilliant advertising executive who finds himself in need of a crash course in understanding women in order to land The Big Account. The title comes from a question famously posed by Sigmund Freud, who then famously never gave it another thought.
The reality is that no historical figure has ever asked the same question about men. And that's because women have to understand what the men in their lives want if they ever want to get anywhere, especially in the male-dominated field (a sports agency) that What Men Want's protagonist works in. Prior to the events of the movie, Gibson's character never had to think about what women want in order to be successful. For a woman, it just about consumes her every waking moment. Besides, what lesson is she going to learn? That she needs to be more sensitive to the needs of men? In this, the year of our Beyonce 2019?
Amanda Mannen
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