What Women Want was one of the three biggest movies of the year 2000, so it’s to be expected that I watched it a lot with my mum when it hit DVD. I used to really enjoy it! I stopped watching it when we learned Mel Gibson’s a trash fire of a human, and it’s skirted my romcom-watching periods since.
I’ve got a lotta work to do at my desk and Netflix is trying to push Hallmark romances on me, so I went for something familiar, easy, and old. What Women Want. I was prepared to loathe it. “This definitely aged badly,” I thought resentfully as I hit play.
Resentfully, I give it three stars because that’s all I can abide giving it. But I still pretty much enjoyed it.
This turns out to be one of those Stealth Queer movies I clung to in adolescence because of insufficient queer representation in media. Although it has extremely limited, binary ideas of what it is to be a Man and a Woman – and the whole movie hinges on “sociopath learns women are human” – the way that the main character moves through his understanding of gender is extremely queer.
At one point, he actually wishes aloud that he were a woman. If you hang out with trans people much, you’ll already know “I wish I were a woman” is enough to be a woman. Like…that’s it. If you want to be a woman, you can be. Gender is a social construct with different meanings at different times in different cultures with no basis in biology. Once you decide you want to be A Gender, you can Be The Gender.
Somehow this old romcom with Mel Gibson helped form my identity as a nonbinary afab. I always saw myself as a stereotypical masculine force, swaggering and aggressively sexual, but I also wanted to look like a hot woman. I was born into a rather blobby androgynous body. I look worse than Mel Gibson in pantyhose. Somehow Mel Gibson in pantyhose is getting pretty close to my personal visualization of my gender: someone who isn’t female enough messing around incompetently with the set dressing of femininity.
All the sexism in the movie – of which benevolent sexism upholding a specific form of femininity is narratively approved – still feels like the kind of silly genderfuckery that I just happen to love. I’d like to see a drag remake.
What Women Want is also interesting if you think about how neatly it fits into capitalism. It struck me how much studios must love movies about ad agencies because they get to do a lot of sponsored material in the movie. Half of this thing is a Nike ad appealing to third wave feminism. I’m gonna have to make a playlist of romcoms with different perspectives on American capitalism at this point – the way romcoms show success in capitalism as a failing (Pretty Woman), how capitalist success demands distancing from femininity (Kate & Leopold), and the inevitability of small business being crushed by corporations (You’ve Got Mail).
I’m glad I ended up appreciating this movie, warts and all. It’s easy to ignore all the crappy stuff when it gives me warm buzzy gender feelings. Now I’m going back to not watching Gibson movies anymore.
(image credit: Paramount Pictures)
