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 21st 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!
