Every now and then, my husband and I finish all the binge-watching shows on our list and are left asking each other, “Well, what’s on Netflix?” after the kids go to bed. One of these nights, we decided to watch Ladies First, a comedy starring Sacha Baron Cohen playing a middle-aged, chauvinistic ad executive who bonks his head and wakes up in a world where women are in charge.
In this world, men are expected to be beautiful, svelte, hairless and young, and they aren’t taken seriously on the merit of their work. They are forced to compete for the sexual attention of elderly female executives (none of whom are terribly concerned with their own looks) in order to get promotions.
This premise felt, somehow, very 2005 and very 2020, but very not 2026. It had all the 2005 notes of, “Just imagine if women openly farted, haha” while retaining a great deal of 2020 “the confidence of a mediocre white man” vibes. Perhaps predictably, the movie currently stands at 26% on Rotten Tomatoes.
I have several logistical gripes with this movie, including but not limited to the fact that Sacha Baron Cohen’s character lives a life of luxury more befitting Elon Musk himself than a creative director at an ad agency in London, who would typically make £83,000 to £102,000 a year. But my biggest gripe, perhaps, was more of a question: is this really how women would behave if they were in charge?
No matter what the antifeminists say, we do still live in a patriarchy (a far more egalitarian one than in the past, surely, but definitely not a matriarchy.) Men still hold most positions of power in our government, leading American CEOs are overwhelmingly male, and the sex objects used to sell products are almost always women, while the default consumer of these products is male (this is the actual definition of “the male gaze,” not to be confused with “trying to look attractive for men,” which is just part of being attracted to men.)
So, in keeping with my series of investigative research into bizarre questions, such as “What happens to male gorillas who can’t get pussy?” or “What happened to picky eaters in olden times?” I will attempt to answer the question: What would attraction, sex and dating really look like if women were in charge?
