I like the article a lot but I think it really misses the boat on Bridesmaids, which to me is not only one of the best comedies that's come out in the past several years but also one of the most gender-more-breaking mainstream comedies *ever*. It takes every angle of a typical guys-doing-bad-things comedy and turns it completely on its head. The girl pursues the guy (and eventually gets him) (OMG SPOILER ALERT!!!!), the movie isn't afraid to show *all* the female characters in the movie being less than something that ought to be placed on a pedestal... because it's a feminine movie there aren't really obvious villains the way there are in, say, "Happy Gilmore" or "Anger Management" but in the end that I think is one of its biggest strengths because villains don't really exist in most peoples' lives (there was Maya Rudolph's high-society friend but, well, spoilers plx). Instead, the biggest antagonist to Kristen Wiig is... Kristen Wiig.
As for the Susan McCarthy character, isn't she pretty much *exactly* the flip side of Zach Galifinakis in The Hangover? Okay, you don't like some of the ways she breaks gender stereotypes. The problem is, this is more or less the *only* female-oriented comedy I can think of anyway which has a woman in this sort of role (maybe that Sandra Bullock movie where she plays the crossword puzzle maker with serious Aspberger's syndrome counts, although in fairness that movie completely bombed). And even there, she completely turns the whole thing on its head by a. being the vehicle which lifts Wiig out of her funk (isn't that role normally filled by a sassy gay man?) and b. getting her man at the end (itself a reversal of that "WTF HOW DID HE EVER END UP WITH HER??" thing you see at the end of so many guy comedies).
Okay, soabox is being stepped down from. Otherwise, this is a really good article which I think people ought to really consider. It's so, so easy to marginalize women.
