MOVIE REVIEW - I Am Not an Easy Man

[ahunter3]

It's been done before, but rarely if ever so well: a guy deserving of a comeuppance about gender privileges gets his situation inverted and has to cope with what women have to deal with, and learns some lessons.

What makes Eléonore Pourriat's I Am Not an Easy Man outstanding is that it goes far beyond the thought-experiment level and delves into

Comments

A thought experiment

[ext_3728435]

I finally watched this movie. I enjoyed it, too. Like you said, the attention to detail was great, down to the poker scene where a pair of queens beats a pair of kings.

I wonder if it would be possible to make a movie where the power and prestige associated with gender roles were inverted, but females were still expected to be “feminine” and males were expected to be “masculine.” For example, what if instead of women dominating sports and men doing ballet (as in this movie), it was women doing ballet and men dominating sports- BUT ballet had the greater prestige and popularity, while sports were viewed as a silly “boy thing.” Or as another example, what if childcare was a very high-status job, and men were fighting for their right to participate in it?

I don’t know if that would make sense, though. Maybe there are some aspects of traditional feminity that would never make sense in a world where women had privilege over men. Would women still wax their body hair, diet obsessively, and wear high heels in a such a world? I tend to think not, or at least it’s hard for me to imagine why they would.

Re: A thought experiment

[ahunter3]

Some of what you're describing was done by author Marion Zimmer Bradley in her one-off (i.e., NOT part of her Darkover series) science fiction book THE RUINS OF ISIS. The males still mostly have masculine characteristics attributed to them and the females are feminine, but feminine *characteristics* are valorized and masculine ones denigrated. Leadership is considered a feminine virtue, and power is vested in the women, but there are scenes like one where a female academic hears the main character's husband speaking knowledgably and she freaks a little because she's unused to hearing an educated male -- she finds him to be "rather left brained" (and this of course is akin to a man in THIS world saying a woman's rhetoric was "rather emotional") but she acknowledges that he's actually speaking like a scholar would!