In Ladies First, The Opposite Of Patriarchy…. Is More Patriarchy

You know those movies where it feels like a bunch of older millennials got together to make a movie on Gen Z? And so after every two seconds, all you see are these overblown stereotypes about how the generation, which, in most cases, aren't even true. Ladies First tells you what happens if this phenomenon happened with gender instead of generation.

This is because, on paper, Ladies First is a story about what would happen if men faced the discrimination that women face on a daily basis (spoiler: they come out of it being better). In Thea Sharrock's Netflix comedy, a chauvinistic ad executive, Damien Sachs (Sasha Baron Cohen), is on his way to be crowned CEO, when he is informed that the company needs at least one female creative director to go ahead. He promotes Alex Fox (Rosamund Pike) to the role, genuinely believing that she has it better because she got promoted for being a woman. But Alex is a creative director “just for the optics”: her opinions are sidelined, her ideas unheard, and she exists only to sit in the meeting room like a fly on the wall. When Alex finally walks out of the office after a fight with Damien, he follows behind her and hits his head on a pole, knocking himself unconscious, only to wake up in a world ruled by women. Alex must now set things right and earn the CEO title despite all the discrimination to return to the real world.

It's supposed to motivate you to be a better man, kind of like how some men say that having a daughter made them realise what the world is like for women (*side eyes*). Except, this is a movie that wasn't made for a male audience in the first place. 

The gender-reversed world of Ladies First should feel like a female utopia: women getting promotions without even working much for it, lying on the couch after office with a can of beer watching their favourite sitcom while the men work in the kitchen, and boys braid each others’ hair while girls break their teeth while skating. Women order the men around them, scratch their genitals, fart freely and have a laugh about it, sexually abuse the men underneath them under false promises of a promotion… It's meant to feel like one of those movies women watch with their friends at a sleepover, laughing at all the inconspicuous freedoms that men can't even imagine they are granted.

It's supposed to be funny, in the kind of way where not laughing along would suggest that you're a part of the problem (and the film tries to succeed at this). But Ladies First imagines a world where, even in the reverse of patriarchy (which technically should be a matriarchy), the world is just as patriarchal. In this gender-reversed world that Damien is sent to, women dress in very structured suits, while men are shown to be “effeminate” just because they wear the kind of cardigans Ryan Gosling’s Ryland Grace dons in Project Hail Mary. Damien undergoes a makeover, the kind you'd see in a 90s chick lit movie, to make himself look more appealing to his female bosses. And yet his makeover results in him wearing a burgundy suit like his bosses. 

His main competitor, Alex Fox (played by Rosamund Pike), is, in this world, the successful ad exec in line to become CEO, like he was in the real one. In a final showdown where the two are supposed to pitch their case for the promotion, Alex wears her hair as men did in the ‘20s. Even in a female-led world, femininity is considered weak and undesirable.

You could say here that the point of the movie is to show what happens when men go through the effects that patriarchy has on women, but even then, the argument falls flat, because the movie conveniently brushes over how patriarchy harms men in the real world. The lack of emotional support, the extreme expectations to seem “manly”, movements like the red pill or looksmaxxing just don't have any equivalents in this fictional world. 

It's a very 90s, stereotypical look at a problem that looks very different today, 30 years beyond the period Ladies First seems made for. Female CEOs and Chairwomen aren't quite as rare or unheard of now. If anything, the idea of the glass ceiling has given way to the glass cliff - female CEOs are brought in to take the fall when boards know that the company is on a freefall. The absurd economy and dating scene around the world have led to the rise of men who spend their entire lives making themselves more attractive in the hopes that pretty privilege will help them out of dire situations.

Sure, Ladies First is a comedy, and maybe it's too much to expect nuance from a movie where you're supposed to turn your brain off and just enjoy the ride. But good comedy is also one that makes you roll on the floor laughing while forcing you to look into your actions and prejudices. Besides, if a movie could go to the length of creating a female Radiohead and a female Pope, turn Harry Potter into Harriet Potter, is nuance really a lot to ask?