- YEAR: 2003
- DIRECTOR: Donald Petrie
- KEY ACTORS: Kate Hudson, Matthew McConaughey
- CERTIFICATE: 12A
- IMDB SCORE: 6.5
- ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE: 42%
SEX SCORE: 3/5
✔️ It is cringeworthy and dated, but it remains surprisingly rewatchable!
✔️ And I would fuck the cast. They’re so 00s and definitely flawed, but both stars are undoubtedly at their hotness peak!
✔️ Incredibly, it does pass the Bechdel Test, which I was not expecting!
❌ It didn’t inspire fantasies though, except perhaps of owning a yellow dress and having that figure!
❌ But it’s not sex positive. It’s not explicitly said that having casual sex means you won’t have a meaningful relationship but it is definitely implied, and I can’t get over the gender stereotypes.
As always, this contains spoilers so watch the film before you read on…
STREAMING: Paramount Plus, Amazon Prime (rent £3.49, buy £5.99), YouTube (from £2.49). For a full list of streaming options, check out JustWatch.com
Can you believe that How to Lose A Guy in Ten Days is twenty one years old? How has this happened?! This came out in 2003 when I was finishing my A-levels and is so completely tied to being 18 and leaving school and discovering how to be a grown up that I was a bit afraid to watch it again. Because I loved this film! Just like I wanted to be Keira Knightley in That Green Dress in Atonement, I wanted to be Kate Hudson in That Yellow Dress in this movie, and I wanted to be cool and beautiful and live in New York and have a beautiful man like Matthew McConaughey fall in love with me. I wanted to grow up and have a life just like that.
But I hadn’t seen How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days since about 2005 and I was really unsure how well it would have aged. The entire premise of the movie is based around the misogynistic trope that women in love are needy and annoying, and men are loveable when they tolerate this craziness, and my feminism will just not allow that anymore. Urgh. This is not going to be good…
How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days is also a movie about a bet – another tired movie trope – but this time, the bet and deception goes both ways. Andie (Hudson) is a journalist in a Cosmo-esque women’s magazine called Composure who wants to be a Real Journalist (score one against feminism – women’s interests are not inferior to other interests. She is a real journalist working for a national magazine!) so she agrees to write one more ‘How To’ article in exchange for more freedom in her writing topics. As the title suggests, she writes about trying to date and then lose a guy in ten days by being that needy and crazy girl that everyone hates. Unbeknownst to her, the man she dates, Ben (McConaughey), is also working on his own bet – to make a woman fall in love with him in ten days so that he can win an advertising campaign for diamonds. So she tries to push him away by being super-intense and girly, and he tolerates and absorbs her ‘craziness’ without running away, and they fall in love for real. Until their respective bets are discovered, they fight and break up…and get back together for a happy ending! Obviously.
This plot structure is so typical of romcoms – some form of deception brings two unlikely partners together before a crisis breaks them up and they get back together after a heartfelt speech – that the Hot and Bothered podcast team have chosen it as the basis of their series on romantic comedies, analysing all the key features of this movie genre and discussing what makes them work, such as the music, cinematography and production design. It’s a fascinating series and I’d strongly recommend it! Their first episode was an introduction to romcoms in general and, in particular, the postfeminist romcoms of the 2000s.
Postfeminism is a concept that I was aware of but How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days really helped me see exactly what it means and what impact it has on our society. This was a sort of anti-feminist movement that overlapped with third-wave feminism of the late 1980s and 1990s, which championed intersectionality, Girl Power, and riot grrrl punk feminism, and led to the fourth wave of the 2010-2020s where there was a greater focus on intersectionality, particularly for LGBTQ+ people, and empowerment, as exemplified by the #MeToo movements. Postfeminism was an extension of the backlash to second wave feminism that I wrote about when discussing Indecent Proposal, and suggested that feminism had ‘gone too far’, that women had achieved everything they needed to achieve and didn’t ‘need’ feminism any more. Worse, feminism became a negative concept again. ‘These women need to stop complaining. What more do they want?!’ sort of attitudes.
But what How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days highlighted was how the equality that women were supposed to have already achieved only applied to some women in some very specific circumstances. The cis white heterosexual masculine norm was still firmly accepted as the ideal with any variation from this remaining firmly inferior – being girly was a bad thing, hyperfemininity was encouraged but devalued, Lolita-esque young women were treated as sexual objects and destroyed for it (sorry Britney), chick lit and similar ‘women’s interests’ became more defined and more established but were increasingly seen as a lesser art form.
Also, women had to be ‘one of the boys’ to be truly accepted – Gillian Flynn’s vicious takedown of the Cool Girl in Gone Girl was a few years away in 2012 and ladette culture from the 90s hadn’t fully gone away – and finding a boyfriend remained women’s primary goal. Think Sex in the City and Bridget Jones’s Diary. Working women who may have careers but they are secondary to their need for someone to love them. To steal an extended quote from Adriana’s Medium article on career women in romcoms, ‘the career woman is a recurrent character that the 2000’s romantic comedies have used to attract women who truly are strong and independent in their everyday lives…The idea that women who have given their best at their jobs are secretly waiting for a man—a rather douchey one—to come and woo them so they can feel “complete,” is pretty much the same stereotype that we have been fighting against for decades.’ It is meant to look feminist – yay for career women – but it undermines this message by reminding us that we’re nothing without a man. All of these social advances don’t mean anything if we don’t have someone to love us; don’t have the family and home life that the patriarchy insists are what women are made for.
Far more than this, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days really goes out of its way to establish that being masculine is superior to being feminine. A contemporary Guardian review from 2003 literally states that Andie attempts to ‘repulse a boyfriend by being classically girlie and needy.’ Because, of course, you couldn’t be one without being the other…
I also absolutely hate that this movie emphasises that heterosexual relationships are made or destroyed by the action of female person. What does Ben actually do to make him so irresistible and worth of Andie’s love? Think about it. What are his moves? He tolerates her. That’s it. That’s how low the bar is. He doesn’t run when she gets needy; he agrees to all of her date suggestions; he accepts her ‘crazy.’ He is clearly frustrated by her, he clearly thinks she really is crazy, but he sticks around and that makes him worthy. Or something. I know their timeline is compressed into one week but during that time he only plans one date – dinner at his place – and expects it to be such a winning movie that she’ll absolutely fall in love with him, but he cooks lamb without asking if she’s a vegetarian and he intends to watch a Knicks game throughout the meal. Cool date bro. (I’m not a basketball fan so maybe I’m being too dismissive of this date idea but it doesn’t strike me as romantic!) I think we’re supposed to be impressed that he cooks for her? Ben gets to be cool and loveable by doing nothing; Andie becomes a nightmare by trying too hard.
It is pretty devastating how much humour is generated in How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days from the characters expressing their emotions without hesitation or filter. Even Kathryn Hahn who played Andie’s best friend, Michelle, now says that ‘as much fun as that movie was, it does feel a little dirty.‘ Her character is portrayed as a joke for falling in love with someone in seven days and having the gall to tell them. And I remember laughing at how cringeworthy she was – she cried when they had sex, she called him more than once without waiting for him to call back, she was devastated when he dumped her after only seven days. But why is that really so bad? (And I type this knowing full well that I would still judge myself for acting like that, such is the indoctrination of the Patriarchy.) We complain so often about the games and confusion and mixed messages. Maybe we should be more like Michelle and just say what we feel when we feel it; to have our hearts open to possibility. Is it really that awful?
What is awful is how this ‘crazy girl’ behaviour is so linked to femininity. Part of what turns Andie from the ‘sexy, cool, fun, smart, beautiful’ girl that Ben first meets is her dress sense, which becomes more feminine and girly as she acts more crazily. She’s wearing a simple but gorgeous grey dress when they meet, and jeans and a Knicks vest to their first date but, later, wears 50s style dresses with bows and ribbons, she matches her handbag to her clothes and shoes, she wears pastels and florals. She becomes hyper feminine and, apparently, that’s annoying! On Hot and Bothered, Vanessa Zoltan had an episode about the costuming of romcoms and asked how this change managed to communicate her ‘craziness’ and make her seem so annoying, how it made us sympathise with Ben. Their only conclusion was that imagining the kind of woman who had the time and inclination to move their belongings from one bag to another to fit their outfit was somehow in conflict with the easy-breezy impression that women were supposed to project.
So much of this reminded me of The Rules, a 1995 book by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, that was supposed to offer a set of rules to help women find ‘Mr Right.’ It’s main message was about remaining aloof, unavailable, and passive; never letting on how much you care so that the man would have to make the effort and chase you. The main message that stuck with me was that you should never accept a date on Saturday if you’re asked after Wednesday. You’re busy and important so will be busy, and he needs to learn to prioritise you. Or something. Which is truly ridiculous! If you want to see someone and you’re both free, you should see them! And remaining aloof and mysterious doesn’t last long term. Think of how much we (Andie and the viewer) fall in love with Ben when we meet his family and see him relaxed and comfortable with people who really know him. Andie doesn’t get to show us that. She doesn’t share anything real about herself at any point – she is supposed to be oversharing and oppressively needy but she remains ‘the impossible cool girl that we want to know but can’t know at the same time.‘
To me, none of this is feminist. Wearing pinks and pastels doesn’t make you any less worthy than wearing monochrome! Revelling in romance and being open with your emotions doesn’t make you ridiculous!! It’s fucking heroic! And I know that Andie is acting as she does on purpose and a lot of what she does is unacceptable – you don’t name someone’s penis without their permission, everyone needs space and private time so crashing his poker game was asking for trouble – but so much seems to be just wanting him to share in what she likes, rather than simply tag along with his interests. Why is taking him to a Celine Dion concert such an awful thing and why was it so heroic of him to go? Again, I know it’s not really what Andie likes, but what if it was? Why are we encouraged to judge her for her taste?
And it is interesting that How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days considers itself to be a feminist movie and one that has been an inspiration to the women who saw it. Kate Hudson has spoken about how her character inspired ‘new generation of journalists who would say “Andie Anderson made me want to be a journalist.”‘ IndieWire’s anniversary article even described how the ‘no-nonsense, non-conformist, feminine “guy’s girl” journalist trend was essentially Hollywood rubber-stamping a third wave feminist career path.’ It is endlessly sad that magazines no longer represent an inspirational and prosperous career with online writing (sorry) almost destroying this career path, and it is great to see women in positions of power at Composure with Bebe Neuwirth playing an early Anna Wintour/Miranda Priestley editor-in-chief. But only ever in women’s magazines. And it makes me skin itch a little that this success is only ever seen in these ‘safe’ careers for romcom characters that don’t threaten their male counterparts. A 2011 article for Mutant Reviewers lists journalism as the number one occupation for romcom protagonists, followed by law, arts management, personal assistant and working in culinary management. Nothing with big money involved – advertising accounts for a diamond house, for example. Not finance. Not medicine. Not architects. Nothing with real stakes or real responsibility.
After all this, I do still enjoy How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, but I don’t know anymore if I should. It’s surface is shiny and fun and beautiful, and it does remind me of being 20 and not yet seeing how unfair and stacked against me the world was. Ignorance is bliss, and all that! Now, it’s still shiny and fun and beautiful, but it’s just not the same hopeful message that I once saw, which makes me a little sad and a little angry. I wonder if I would have been more prepared for the reality of this movie if I had read Roger Ebert’s review back in 2003. Giving it only 1.5 stars out of 4, he wrote that he was ‘just about ready to write off movies in which people make bets about whether they will, or will not, fall in love. The premise is fundamentally unsound, since it subverts every love scene with a lying subtext…This is comedy only by dictionary definition. In life, it is unpleasant, and makes the audience sad.‘
I do still want that yellow dress though…
NEXT TIME… Wimbledon
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