S/He’s Just Not that Into You

“You are SO hot! Want to prop up some sexist, racist, and heteronormative stereotypes together?”
This weekend I girded my feminist loins and bought a ticket to see He’s Just Not That Into You. You’ve probably heard the basic criticisms of this movie already. Yes, the film pretty unequivocally portrays women as vapid, needy, and weak. (At one point I whispered to my theater-going companion that the film was making a misogynist out of me because I was identifying with all the male characters, and rolling my eyes at the women.) Yes, it portrays gay people as hollow stereotypes who only exist to provide commentary about heterosexual dating. Yes, it’s all high-income white people giving gentrification their best shot. All of this is entirely unsurprising.
To me, the most striking thing was how easy it would have been to make this movie not sexist. In my experience, every relationship scenario experienced by the female characters in the film — from being cheated on, to getting overly fixated on someone they just met, to misreading “let’s be friends” signals as “I love you” — is a situation that I’ve known to apply to just as many men as women. (And to just as many queer people and people of color, for that matter.) These stories still would have been compelling if you’d switched the gender on any number of characters in any number of scenes.
Ah, but that’s not how media/movie powerhouses are built. As Rebecca Traister writes,

People writing about the “HJNTIY” phenomenon (still No. 2 at the box office, by the way) often make the point that the powerful phrase could have been, “You’re just not that into him.” But it wasn’t, and the Behrendt media rocketship helps to demonstrate why.
Imagine a world in which a person had an opinion that a problem with modern dating could be boiled down to women just not wanting men enough — maybe “she just doesn’t find you attractive,” “she’s not going to call you,” “she doesn’t want to go home with you” or something like that. Then imagine that that person was a woman, and imagine her getting a talk show and a couples counseling deal and a book and a movie, all based on whatever vaguely emasculating generalization she’d happen to score with.

Like Latoya, I laughed at all the wrong parts of the movie. Maybe because that’s the only way to deal with a gender trainwreck like this.
A few random comments/spoilers after the jump.

I loved Ben Affleck’s speech about why he doesn’t want to get married, but he DOES want to be in a committed relationship. Yes! Of course, it’s implied that he’s only saying this because he is a dude. (We all know EVERY woman wants to get married!) And he caves and ends up marrying Jennifer Aniston on a sailboat. Barf.
One of the cardboard-cutout gay stereotypes is played by the dude who was Ricky on My So-Called Life!
During the “heartwarming” scene in which Ginnifer Goodwin and that Apple computer guy finally get together, he says a bunch of stuff about how he was so hellbent on being in control of his life that he couldn’t fall in love. *Insert commentary about patriarchy hurting men, too.*
The one plot line in which a male character is way more clingy and let’s-get-serious-right-away than his female partners is with Connor, the real-estate agent. But rather than functioning as an acknowledgment that dating roles don’t always break cleanly along gender lines, he’s sort of implied to be the exception and, in many cases, a joke.
Again, like Latoya, I thought they were going to have at least a few of the female characters end on a note of “who cares about dudes when you have your career and your girlfriends and your renovated house in a gentrifying neighborhood!” However, they really go out of their way to portray the women who are single at the end as either wet blankets or sluts who are basically unhappy with their single status. How very Sex and the City.