I live in NYC. On that morning I was getting ready for work. I had the television on as I stepped into the shower, a re-run of the Maury Povich Show where you had to guess who amongst the guests were born women and who were transvestites. When I got out of the shower, the tv was showing a burning World Trade Center tower. I called a friend and asked if we knew anyone working at the WTC, he said yes, and why, and I told him to turn on his tv. What channel? he asked. Doesn't matter, I told him. Thankfully of the three people we knew working in the Towers at that time, one was on vacation, one had a dentist's appointment, and the third had slept through her alarm and was running late for work. Sadly, someone else who didn't work at the Towers was at a breakfast event at Windows on the World and we lost her that day. I never went to work; I ended up at the gym running mile after mile on a treadmill while watching major equipment and refrigerated cars being trucked down Broadway to ground zero. I pretended I was running to the Towers to warn people. I couldn't stop running.
So the test doesn't mean that they are feminist movies or not or even if they are good movies, she says... so what's the point of this test. Just to prove that some people have too much time on their hands?
Who wants to go to the movies to watch two or more women sitting around talking anyway? I can do that at work and they pay me.
My father told me this story years ago. When he was a chemical engineer in college, he had a lab on Saturday mornings at 8am. It was so hard to get up for the lab that occasionally he and his lab partner had to do things to motivate themselves. When they were told at the end of a lab that in the next session the students would be testing their own urine, and given specimen jars, they had an idea. The next Saturday my dad and his lab partner showed up with full specimen jars and proceeded, along with the other students, to perform a number of tests on the contents, dutifully recording the findings. At the end of lab, my dad and his lab partner turned to each other with their now half-empty specimen jars, toasted, and drank the contents! After they could stop laughing at the other students' horrified expressions they explained that it was apple juice.
I can honestly say that article made me feel physically ill. As a 37 year old straight woman, who doesn't want a family, I can't imagine being chained to someone I don't love for the rest of my life. I'd rather be single. I think the author's view on life is seriously tinted by the fact that she's a single mother and dealing with the difficulties of raising a child alone. The whole thing is horrifying. I feel sorry for women like her.
Who wants to go to the movies to watch two or more women sitting around talking anyway? I can do that at work and they pay me.