Amy Schumer has been crowned the feminist queen of the modern rom-com. Her new movie, Trainwreck, is packing the theatres. People love her chipmunk cheeks, her pudgy arms and her really dirty funny mouth. They love the way she turns the tables on men, and discards them like tissue. Her character, also named Amy, flaunts her sexual freedom and scorns the bourgeois life of dull monogamy. In one scene, she brings a suburban baby shower to a crashing halt when she describes the time a condom got stuck to her cervix.
The Amy in the movie draws heavily from the Amy in real life. "I'm sluttier than the average bear," the real Ms. Schumer has proclaimed. Her message is that women should refuse to let anybody judge their appearance or their appetites. When she got the Trailblazer Award at the Glamour UK Women of the Year event, she bragged, "I'm probably like 160 pounds right now, and I can catch a dick whenever I want." No wonder she has been called the comedy voice of the Tinder age.
Despite the raunchy jokes, Trainwreck is actually a completely conventional, deeply conservative movie. The booze-soaked Amy, we discover, is not so much liberated as she is terrifically screwed up. She runs from intimacy because she can't believe that anyone could truly love her. She cringes at her sister's happy domestic life and nebbishy good-guy spouse because she's terrified of commitment. When she finally meets Mr. Right – who is very sincere indeed– she does everything she can to drive him away. But he loves her anyway. She finally acquires some self-respect, renounces her life as a drunken slut, and wins him back. In other words, she grows up.
Feminists and movie critics scarcely know what to make of all this. Some see it as a sellout. The film "slowly deflates in a turn for the reactionary," frowned Huffpo's Helen Eisenbach. And online commentator Ryan Lattanzio wondered: "Why, as the film slogs toward its touchy-feely conclusion, does the script have to force her to relinquish her wanton femininity and pull down the freak flag in favor of the safer, comfier structures of family, togetherness and coupledom?"
In these readings, Amy's enthusiastic embrace of hookup culture is actually an affirmation of feminist empowerment. Women are entitled to meaningless, promiscuous sex, just like men! Other commentators, however, argue that hookup culture is just the latest iteration of female oppression. "It's not her fault she's a wreck – after all, the train tracks are rigged," wrote Buzzfeed's Anne Helen Petersen. "Like so many women of her generation, she grew up surrounded by the ideology of postfeminism, which suggests that now that the 'work' of feminism has been achieved we can all focus on having fun. The problem, however, is that 'fun' is still circumscribed by patriarchy, and a woman's worth is determined by her ability to hew to expectations of desirability."
Other critics get around this problem by ignoring it. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times, who evidently saw a completely different movie than the rest of us, writes, "What's energizing and exciting about Amy… is that her erotic appetites aren't problems that she needs to narratively solve and vanquish." In fact, the movie pivots on exactly that.
It is, to put it mildly, a deeply confusing cultural moment. It is a moment when talented, highly educated women from privileged backgrounds (Lena Dunham also comes to mind) are celebrated as feminists and behave like trailer trash. Somehow I do not think this is what Gloria Steinem had in mind.
Back in the misty dawn of time, sexual liberation was a rallying cry for women, and rightly so. No one owned our bodies except us. No one could condemn our behaviour because it didn't conform to the rules established by (and for) men. And no one believed more fervently in sexual liberation, as I recall, than the men who wanted to sleep with us. "Why are you so up tight?" they'd say when we demurred. And so, to prove how liberated we were, we often did. In the 1970s, guys thought feminism was the best thing that ever happened to them.
I can tell you how this movie ends because I was in it. Sex with different guys is sometimes fun and sometimes not. The problem is that male and female desire are so asymmetrical. A lot of men are happy to have sex with any woman who says yes. They have approximately the same attachment to their partner as to a pepperoni pizza. Women generally want something more, such as, say, a second date, or at least a text message the next day. You can try to have uncommitted sex like men do, but it won't work. Your emotions keep getting in the way. I'm sure there are a few sexual adventurers like Sex and the City's Samantha, but I've never met one.
By their early- to mid-30s, most women who despise the bourgeois life – monogamy, commitment and all that – are more than ready to embrace it. They also begin to realize that soon their sexual currency will be on the wane. Unless they get their act together they could wind up as alcoholics, or cat ladies, or both.
Some feminists may not like that picture, but it's the truth. The truth is that sexual restraint is far more empowering than sleeping around with whoever catches your eye. That goes for men, too. That's what adults know.
As for blaming men for the emptiness and degradation of hookup culture, forget it. Sisters, we did it to ourselves.