This is a Woman!

This is a woman: the intelligence analyst.

This is a woman: the CIA Director.

This is a woman: the head of the organized crime ring.

This is a woman: the field agent that brings her down.

Spy, the movie about these women, comes as a cool breeze in the stale troposphere of male-dominated comedy and action movies! Kudos to self-confessed "feminised geek", writer and director Paul Feig (also of Bridesmaids, The Heat and forthcoming female-cast Ghostbusters). But really this movie would be nothing without the wonderful cast led by the amazing and absolutely delightful Melissa McCarthy and the equally talented Rose Byrne, Miranda Hart and Allison Janney! The cast makes Spy the best comedy I’ve seen in a while and these women prove that comedy is totally a woman’s thing. Feig himself wrote, in a piece entitled “Why Men Aren’t Funny”:

Is modern society now ready to transition away from the Myth of Male Hilarity? After all, today's world has erased most of the survival needs that once required a woman to inflate the comedic self-worth of the men around her. Grocery stores, police departments and in vitro fertilization perform the functions once reserved for her Y-chromosome counterparts. The 21st-century woman is finally free to reveal her comedic superiority and inform her penised inferiors that they will never again be permitted to make that "in my pants" joke.

Rose Byrne and Melissa McCarthy in Spy

To answer Feig’s question, yes, we are more than ready to transition away from the myth and it’s been a long time coming. Frankly, the 3.52 billion women around the world are still patiently, non-riotously, not even in a protesting manner still waiting for equity, so being able to enjoy two hours of great, female-led comedy is water to this equity-thirsty crowd! This movie not only puts women in the front and center, it does so while very beautifully showing the absurdity of sexism. How even in our modern society, even in so called “developed” nations, women are all but invisible to the world unless they are beautiful and fulfill the roles our sexist society assigns them. It is thus that, in the movie, the brilliant analyst that has led the top Bond-like male spy, played by Jude Law, is called a lunch lady and given a rape whistle and hemorrhoid wipes as the, once again, Bond-like gadgets with which to thwart would-be assassins when she’s sent into the field. But with sparkling eyes, brilliant wit, and a dazzling smile, Melissa McCarthy’s Spy breaks that glass and we cheer and laugh her way out of the boxes created for women.

Great combat scene; Melissa McCarthy and Nargis Fakhri in Spy

It’s with a heart full of gratitude that we go to a movie like this, even if it is just a comedy (or maybe because it is). These are discouraging days for women, ones in which conservative men (and some self-hating women) try to take away even basic choices and push women back into nineteenth century situations. These are days where we painfully watch television commercials and shows that we thought, in our youth, would be things of the past in the 21^st century, not ones that glorify the most superficial and antiquated stereotypes about women, popular shows of the most sexist eras like Mad Men, The Astronaut Wives Club, Pan Am, The Playboy Club, to name but a tiny few. 

Melissa McCarthy and action actor Jason Statham in Spy.

These are days where women watch in astonishment how even gay and transgender men are forging ahead on issues of equity and respect at a time when it almost seems women are losing ground in both. (Well, not surprising, really. They are men, after all). With respect to the Supreme Court, for example, and as is stated in an article in the New York Time, Justices’ Rulings Advance Gays; Women Less So:

At the same time [as the gay agenda is advanced], legal scholars say, the [Supreme] court has delivered blows to women’s groups in cases involving equal pay, medical leave, abortion and contraception, culminating in a furious dissent last month from the court’s three female members (…) we live in a society that now seems more receptive to gay rights than women’s rights generally, so it is disheartening but not surprising to see that reflected in decisions like Hobby Lobby, which failed to see the link between contraception access and women’s equality.

More recently, referring to the case of transgender Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn Jenner, the feminist scholar Elinor Burkett writes in another New York Times piece, Do Women and Men Have Different Brains:

I have fought for many of my 68 years against efforts to put women — our brains, our hearts, our bodies, even our moods — into tidy boxes, to reduce us to hoary stereotypes. Suddenly, I find that many of the people I think of as being on my side — people who proudly call themselves progressive and fervently support the human need for self-determination — are buying into the notion that minor differences in male and female brains lead to major forks in the road and that some sort of gendered destiny is encoded in us.

That’s the kind of nonsense that was used to repress women for centuries. But the desire to support people like Ms. Jenner and their journey toward their truest selves has strangely and unwittingly brought it back.

People who haven’t lived their whole lives as women, whether Ms. Jenner or Mr. Summers, shouldn’t get to define us. That’s something men have been doing for much too long. And as much as I recognize and endorse the right of men to throw off the mantle of maleness, they cannot stake their claim to dignity as transgender people by trampling on mine as a woman.

All this is, really, no laughing matter. And yet, there are many ways to erode sexism and, yes, comedy is one of them.

Melisssa McCarthy and Jude Law in Spy.

It is our hope that men who see a movie like Spy will really see these women and observe the spectacle of absurdity that is a sexist man. It is our hope that they may even do a double take and begin to open their eyes to every woman that surrounds them and think: yes, this is a woman, a human, a unique and wonderful individual!