Think LIke a Man... Or just think!

I recently viewed the new rom-com movie starring mostly black actors/actresses based on a self-help book by Steve Harvey, and boy oh boy did it really manage to push my buttons. Admittedly anything involving some unspoken intrinsic difference between man and woman that forces them to deceit or being unable to coexist the way they are just always manages to anger me. I hate that people believe that you can't be open and honest with your partners, that you have to lie or deceive or do anything other than be honest with them, and that women have to trick their men into doing what they want them to do, as if men are just animals they have to train using their intimate parts as rewards.

I intended this to be a bit of a review, but honestly the movie isn't worth the effort. It's funny in places, but you know the routine by now. Four guys are fit into a stereotype of men: the dreamer, the non-committal, the player, and the Momma's boy; and get a girl partner who has her own stereotype to bounce off of: the woman who's her own man, the woman who just wants a ring already, the 90-day rule girl (hate this kind of thing with a passion, putting a number of days on how long you won't have sex with a person is ridiculous), and the single mom. Hey, just a quick question, can you guess which of those four women will actually turn out to be the 'wrong' one? Anyway, the women are abiding by Steve Harvey's book, because thinking for your self is a waste of time, and have the men on the ropes, trying to change them for the better (except the woman who's her own man, who doesn't follow the book much and ends up being the 'wrong' person in the couple), until the guys find a copy of the book, and start turning the tide of war.

Yes, war. They make this comparison a bunch of times in the movie, they are at war with each other, sex is a weapon and they are essentially enemies. Because that's what a relationship should be like, a constant battle with your partner! God, I have been single my whole life and I can tell you that is not how things should be! Oh, and in the background we've got two other guys, the Happily married man (a 'clear'(white) guy who doesn't quite get how to relate to his black friends but espouses the bliss of being married) and the Happily Divorced man (stand-up comic Keven Hart, who spends the majority of the movie giving awful advice and generally being a dick), who each try to advise and guide the other men through their relaitonship problems, with the divorced guy getting listened to more (mostly by virtue of being around more often, the married guy is, y'know, married), not that they really follow his advice anyway (good thing, the guys is divorced, he obviously didn't do it right and his example isn't the one you should follow).

So, I'll just go and describe each couple and how much I dislike them. Fun times, right? First up, we have the Player and the 90-Day girl. Okay, to be fair, this couple might bug me the least, because it's pretty clear from the start, once she rejects his advances, he really does start to care for her, even after he finds the book it doesn't seem like he's insincere at any point after.He was in it for the sex at first, but he genuinely changed pretty quick, even though he bitched about her rejections to his friends, he still made dates with her even though it clearly annoyed him. That rule, on the other hand, is frankly ridiculous. Now, I agree that women shouldn't let a guy sleep with them unless they're comfortable in knowing that he will stick around after that happens. You don't need to set up a time frame though! It's not like you're on a time limit or anything, like your reproductive organs will go bad if you don't "do it" in a certain period of time. You should take as long as you need to in order to size a partner up. I also get that people like having sex, but unless both parties are looking for something quick and without too much emotional attachment, then both parties should be willing to wait until they're sure that they are with a person they can see a future with. So a date rule or day rule is kind of silly, and ultimately at least this woman didn't adhere to it completely. Anyway, after they have sex, the woman finds the book she had been reading and he had been reading to know how to circumvent her, and she gets pissed about it. Y'know, because he had a copy of a book sold everywhere that had gotten major publicity and that she had been using tips from without telling him. You fucking said this was war, and you get upset when the opposing side gets your playbook? It's hypocrisy, inserted so the guy could make up for it in a romantic way, because it's a rom-com and all the people who like that don't want complicated ideas in their movies, like maybe both of them could have been a little wrong and both could have to apologize! Or maybe Hollywood just thinks you're too stupid to understand something like that!

Next up, the Momma's boy and the Single mom. Honestly, this should have been the perfect couple, since it was a man who grew up having a single mother now in a relationship with a single mom, I mean that practically writes itself! So, despite both women being in similar positions, they don't get along, mostly because his mother is a bitch to all the girls he brings home, and he's too devoted to her to put anyone else before her. Which is a legit concern for the single mom, who needs a man to support her since she's got her own kid to worry about. What happens here is that, instead of actually stepping up and putting his new woman as a priority, the guy pretends he's doing that, except he's got his mom's business masquerading as 'work' so whenever he has a mom-thing to do it's a 'work' thing to his woman, which for some reason isn't as bad as neglecting her for his mom, even though he's still leaving her high and dry at times. The guy really just doesn't make much sense though in the context of the book, it really only told the woman that he wouldn't put her first as a priority, and he just faked that, but it's not like he wouldn't have done that even if she had gotten the chance to tell him that before he 'pretended' to step up anyway. It really just made the lies come up a bit earlier. But he finds out his mom is doing a deacon and doesn't really need him around anymore so he's free to be with his woman now. Woo. Why were they in this movie?

Up next, the non-committal boyfriend and the woman who just wants a ring already. An interracial couple (white guy whose friends with the four other black guys and the 'clear' guy and a black woman) who've been together for nine years, since college, living together in an apartment that is basically a frat house. The man is a slacker, still has action figures/figurines and posters of all things nerdy, has a beaten up old couch from his college days and it's basically a mess. The woman has feigned interest in his nerdy pursuits because she's wanted to make him happy, and he's really content with the life he has, not trying to look for anything better (including a better job or upgrading his relationship status to married). The woman reads the book and decides that she has to trick her man into 'manning up', and she does this first by getting rid of all his decorations (which she does without discussing with him), and then redecorates their apartment (which he admittedly said he wanted no part in but she still made the decision to do it without him). Basically, my problem here is that we're never shown her trying to talk to him about her issues with their life together, she's silently holding it in until the magic book tells her to not even bother with that and just manipulate him into becoming a better person. And it works! At first he just pretends, like the other guys, but then when she finds out (by finding the damn book again, why is it that gives them away? it's not like owning a copy of that book is illegal or anything, and she's been using it to manipulate him, but I suppose since it's for his own good that doesn't matter?), he actually does it because "it's what he wants". Which is fine, I mean he was a pretty awful roommate to her (and that's all it did feel like they were at some points), but still it would have been better if at least it showed her trying to talk to him about stuff, and if he didn't listen than fine, try manipulation, it makes for good watching, but you don't get to take the moral high ground on this shit without trying some good things first.

Finally, we reach an irritating couple, the dreamer and the woman who's her own man. Why do successful women always get portrayed as completely incapable of finding a man? Is this a serious problem, or is it just something writers think is a relate-able problem for the single-female-CEOs out there? This is the couple where the woman is 'wrong', and she's portrayed as this cynical, high-standard holding female who wants an Adonis (or probably anyway) who makes six figures a year, or as she puts it, "her equal". The guy admittedly starts out being 'wrong' here, he lies to her about his job, since he's a chef but has been floating between jobs trying to find what he wants to do. However, it's sympathetic since she's stated pretty much every time she's on screen that anything less than her standards is immediate qualification for dumpsville, so he lies to see if maybe she'd like him for him, despite that he doesn't meet her standards. It's wrong, but not stupidly so like some of the other guys. What really bothers me though is that this couple had the perfect opportunity for both of them to be wrong and have to accept that he shouldn't have lied, but that without doing so she wouldn't have given him the time of day so maybe her standards were too high, and she should think outside the box. Maybe better, they could have broken up and stayed broken up at the end, but with each coming away with experience that will help them from that point on. But no, it's a rom-com, so the woman has to make up with the guy, since she was "wrong". They paint her being masculine and successful as something negative, that she should let the man "be a man" instead of trying to be the one in charge. If you're familiar with some of my rants, you'll know how well this goes over with me (not well).

But really, it's the fact that the movie thinks only one member of the couples were wrong really irritates me. If you're going to make a statement about relationships between men and women using stereotypes as a method of easily getting across what kinds of people they are, the least the movie could do would be to break conventional rom-com stereotypes. No one has to be completely wrong, both people in the relationship can make mistakes and have reason to be angry with one another, but the fact that all but one woman are treated as though she's completely justified in following a fucking self-help book religiously and is 'right' in her situation is just really aggravating. I get the feeling a lot of my hostility towards romance and rom-coms in particular is that the idea that in any given conflict, one member is going to be completely wrong, and that it's usually the man because women are just so fucking smart and know everything and men are dumb and mess up everything because they don't know how good they got it and women can do no wrong ever except when they don't think they need a man in which case they will be wrong and BLAH!

Look, I know women have had it rough through history, and to a large extent still do. The world we live in is one dominated by men, and not only that, but white men. Old white men who hate change. Were it up to me the world wouldn't be decided by who knows the most people, who's got the most favors owed them, who's the richest because they inherited stuff or exploited other people, it would be based on merit regardless of race or gender or sexual-orientation. So I'm sorry that so many people get the shaft when it comes to stuff like advancement in workplaces, there's a lot of sexism that still goes on that I'm sickened by, it's not right and I don't want anyone to stop fighting it. But there's just this trend in media that women are these perfect saints who have to put up with men who are obsessed with sex and are lazy and don't want to do anything else with women aside from that, so women have to manipulate their dumb men to get them to do what they want. It's rather frustrating because I'm not that guy, but I feel like I'm being told, "No you shithead, you are that guy, and whatever woman ends up with you is going to have to put up with your shit, so she's gonna be a lot smarter than you and trick you into doing what she wants." God, being gay has never looked so good! Communication people! Seriously, if you have problems communicating you need to find some way to do it, and if you can't then maybe you're just not in the right relationship!

Also, it's really unfortunate that black people can't seem to get a decent movie to relate to. Tyler Perry and Martin Lawrence in drag are really the only ones I can think of besides the odd Gangsta films, and while this movie is okay, it still is rather sad that we can even say there is such a thing as "black movies". I'm not black, so I don't really want to stick my foot in my mouth on this, but I honestly don't think there could be one movie that could encompass all that is 'black'. There's this idea that all black people are united in being black, at least here in the states, but you aren't all 'one people' any more than all white people are 'one people'. You are a diverse people, there don't need to be black movies, there need to be more black actors getting feature roles in Hollywood, movies that can speak to more than just a black audience, even though they star black actors/actresses (not saying that there shouldn't be movies celebrating cultures though, just not every movie starring a black cast has to be a black movie, that it should be a good movie that has black actors/actresses who do a damn fine job of saying something about the human condition). This could be another topic for another day, but I don't want to be accused of being racist or ignorant or a stupid ass white boy who don't know shit about the struggles of other races, so I'm just gonna stop here.

-Subtle