I was shocked to discover that three women wrote this screenplay. (Or that, more accurately, two women wrote and a third re-wrote it.)  I do not harbour any illusions of women being the “fairer” sex. I recognize that women are just as likely (or unlikely) to enjoy dick, fart and sex jokes as men. However, some idealistic part of me still believed a woman was above writing something like The Ugly Truth.

I more or less saw this movie three months ago, under the title Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Like that Matthew McConaughey vehicle, The Ugly Truth revels in juvenile stereotypes about men and women, with Gerard Butler’s Howard Stern-like cretin more or less encouraging control freak Katherine Heigl to pick up a man the same way McConaughey’s cad kept picking up women: by playing to their baser instincts.

Romantic comedies live or die based on two things: their central gimmick, and the viewer’s willingness to buy into said gimmick, which is often affected by their own experience with romance. My experience has left me angry at anything which frames the difference between the sexes as a battle between Martians and Venusians, since by my observation both men and women are essentially attracted to the same things (confidence, a sense of mystery and, if they’re popular, someone they like who apparently doesn’t care about them) and would like a partner who will essentially act as a parent, protecting them (women) or feeding them (men). Both like sex, but since most men will sleep with almost anyone who approaches them, women usually hold the power.

Anyway. Follow the rules like Katherine Heigl does in The Ugly Truth, and you may eventually land your dream man. Of course, once he discovers you’re not his dream woman but have only been acting like her, he’ll walk away. The Ugly Truth knows this – but fear not, ladies, because that Howard Stern type will, like the real Howard Stern, ultimately reveal that his shtick is all an act and in fact he’s a kind, caring human being whose heart was simply hardened by too many nasty women.

Come to think of it, maybe it isn’t hard to believe this film was written by women after all.

I realize that romantic comedies are all about wish fulfillment, that a large percentage of the audience agrees with the movie’s take on men and women, and that said audience likes it that way. I will not be shocked if The Ugly Truth is a hit; at the screening I attended, there was plenty of laughter, including my own, but (for me, at least) it was soon followed by uncomfortable squirming. Not because the movie was depicting the ugly truth, but because it was perpetuating ugly stereotypes. To its credit, I bought almost every decision the characters made until the 80-minute mark (the movie is 97 minutes long). The exception is a When Harry Met Sally sequence involving a pair of vibrating panties; it’s not immediately clear why Heigl decides to wear them (though it sort of makes sense in retrospect), nor is it clear why she leaves them on.

Reader, I did not want to see this movie. For Katherine Heigl to appear in this sexist garbage after publicly berating Judd Apatow for Knocked Up’s depiction of women (nevermind that Knocked Up’s message was to grow the fuck up, and that the main women were depicted as grown up already) struck me as the definition of hypocrisy. Not to mention it rips off one of the genre’s few genuine modern classics.

You, like the audience I saw it with, may feel differently about the subject, and if so you are welcome to it.

Related posts:

1. If 2012 Oscar Nominated Movie Posters Told the Truth
2. Rosie Huntington-Whitely Says She Used To Be Ugly
3. Ferrera Pleased Ugly Betty Stars ‘Normal’ Woman

Read more at andPOP. andPOP - POP Culture with Substance