Important context: this article was written for an assignment where we had to review the movie “Easy A” from the perspective of a feminist journalist. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect my own.
A few months ago, a guy I was seeing invited me to his place for a movie night. I’m not usually one to say yes to these things; the last few movie night dates I’ve been on involved the guy picking out a movie that “I can’t believe you haven’t seen” and then spending the following two hours laughing at the sexist jokes and leering at the all-white and traditionally beautiful actresses. But after some too-persistent convincing on his end, I reluctantly agreed.
After arriving at his place, though, I must say I was pleasantly surprised: the guy in question told me he wasn’t much of a movie guy, and asked me to choose what to watch. Hallelujah! No more sitting through hours of comedy that’s cringe-worthy at best and downright offensive at worst. I decided to take advantage of the situation and watch something empowering, progressive, and maybe even educational, because what better way to start a relationship than by making your guy socially aware? After some consideration, I settled on a movie that has been highly praised by fellow activist women in the online community: Easy A.
Featuring Hollywood’s sweetheart Emma Stone, Easy A has all the makings of a progressive wonderland. Olive Pendergast is a smart and down-to-earth teenager from Ojai, California. After a rumour about her losing her virginity spreads like wildfire across her high school, she decides to embrace her identity as the “school tramp” rather than succumbing to the harassment. She starts wearing promiscuous clothing and stitching an A to everything she wears, inspired by The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In exchange for gift cards, she allows guys to tell their friends that they slept with her, boosting their reputations and popularity. Things get out of hand when a religious clique begins harassing her in order to get her to leave school and a guy tries to pay her to actually have sex with him. Olive decides to come clean over a live webcast to the entire school, telling her story and ending it with a message that her sex life is “nobody’s goddamn business”.
Now, that date shouldn’t have been particularly memorable; the guy was nothing special, the vibe was awkward, and we didn’t end up seeing each other again. But nevertheless, I couldn’t stop thinking about that night, not because of the guy but because I couldn’t get over the uneasy feeling that Easy A put in my gut.
On the surface, the movie seems like the wet dream of every feminist, from its strong female lead and the message that women shouldn’t be shamed for what they do in the bedroom. Encouraging young girls to be strong in the face of harassment and not being afraid to tell guys to screw off? It’s a refreshing message to see in our current slut-shaming and victim-blaming culture.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that what could have been a feminist paradise was anything but. Easy A has some deeply troubling and problematic aspects to it that completely undermined and discredited the message it was trying to put forward. I’m talking just about everything about the movie’s execution, from its portrayal of female friendships to the way it completely ignored the double standards surrounding the perceptions of promiscuous men and women. It quickly became clear to me that Easy A was just another money-making attempt by a white Hollywood producer to appeal to the growing social justice movement without any real steps to address difficult and uncomfortable social issues.
Let’s start with the big one: Easy A did absolutely nothing to address and counter the deep-rooted double standards and hypocrisy surrounding the contrasting ways that promiscuous men and women are percieved. It isn’t exactly a novel idea that a man who sleeps around (and who, quite often, does it in a deceptive and emotionally harmful way) is praised and made even more desirable to women, while a woman who does the same will be called a slut, looked down upon, and be seen as “used goods”. You’d think that a movie about a girl who gets paid to lie about having sex with guys to boost their images would address how obviously two-sided this issue is; the boys who pay her become well-liked and popular while Olive’s reputation as the school slut only grows bigger. But does the movie ever question these double standards? Does anyone deign to point them out and say “hey, maybe this isn’t right”?
Of course not, because addressing the harmful and damaging treatment of promiscuous women won’t make you money in Hollywood. It's a hell of a lot riskier to fight a problem that men won’t admit to in the first place than to “stand up” to a problem that most of the American population will agree with you on anyway. Why risk isolating a portion of your audience by questioning their actions when you could just say what everyone else is saying and stay safe? I guess standing up for women isn’t worth it if it means making men uncomfortable.
Speaking of the portrayal of promiscuous women, I want to talk about Olive’s mother. Towards the end of the movie, there’s a scene where Olive and her mother have a touching heart-to-heart, and it’s clear that this is supposed to be a powerful and encouraging moment for young girls to draw inspiration from. Throughout the scene, I was thrilled: finally, something with a positive and empowering message for us to look up to...that is, until Olive’s mother said that she slept around in high school solely because she was insecure.
This isn’t shocking. Disappointing, sure, but the idea that girls sleep around out of insecurity and to get attention is so deep-rooted in our entertainment that seeing it reinforced here wasn’t surprising, it was just plain old upsetting. A movie that was supposed to be something for young girls to be inspired by is telling them that if they sleep around, that inevitably means that they don’t respect themselves and that there can’t possibly be a good reason for promiscuity other than personal weakness. Really, Hollywood? In an age where we’re finally starting to embrace sexual openness and telling women that they don’t need to feel shame for these kinds of choices, you turn around and tell us that women sleeping around is a sign of insecurity? You should know better.
Moving on from the blatant, in-your-face sexism, let’s talk about the relationship between Olive and her love interest, Todd. Todd is the all-around nice guy, liked by everyone without being douchey or sexist, which I’ll admit is kind of refreshing. As her romantic interest, I really didn’t have a problem with him as a person, but more so with the role that he played in Olive’s growth. At the end of the movie, when she performs at her school pep rally in order to convince people to watch her webcast, Olive ended up having to rely on Todd’s status and popularity to get people to listen to her. A girl needing to rely on a man to get her voice heard? I’m floored.
Of course, Olive’s dependence on Todd isn’t questioned whatsoever and we’re meant to see her whole performance as empowering. Not to mention the fact that if it wasn’t for her run-in with Todd after her disastrous date with Anson, Olive wouldn’t have set her whole revelation in motion to begin with, further reinforcing the idea that girls are nothing without their male supporters. I know I don’t only speak for myself when I say that if I saw this movie as a teen girl, the notion that I was nothing if I didn’t have a boyfriend would only be further embedded into my impressionable brain.
On the topic of Olive’s relationships with people, her “friendship” with Rhiannon and how female friendships overall are portrayed in Easy A needs to be addressed. From the very beginning, we see that Olive and Rhiannon’s friendship is entirely based on gossiping while secretly wanting to undermine the other. Even while being “best friends” with Rhiannon, she resented her and was constantly jealous of the attention she got from guys, which is why she lied to her about losing her virginity. It seems that she had very little emotional attachment to her, seeing as she split off from her with just about no remorse whatsoever. Rhiannon almost instantly abandons Olive once she embraces her “slut” status and even tries to get her to leave school by participating in a protest. And then we wonder why men see us as catty.
It’s not just Rhiannon, though; Olive seems to have difficulty maintaining female friendships overall. In the brief period that she was friends with Marianne, the leader of the religious clique at school, she was fake and shallow, and the audience can see that she doesn’t actually have respect for her as a fellow woman. In fact, we don’t see Olive having any successful female friendships, which only reinforces the disturbing trend in modern entertainment where the strong female lead relies only on male friendships because she “isn’t like other girls”. The fact that this movie is meant to be seen as empowering to women is astonishing when you consider that it portrays our relationships with each other as nothing but shallow and catty.
These subliminal messages, values, and assumptions are what took a movie that could have sent a powerful, refreshing, and important message and turned it into just another piece of supposed Holywood “activism” that in reality is anything but. Easy A does a hell of a lot more damage than good, and I’m truly disappointed in my fellow journalists for giving it such high praise and therefore promoting its disturbing messages. When you combine these deeply reinforced and unquestioned messages with the overwhelmingly white cast and traditionally beautiful and skinny actresses, Easy A becomes nothing but a promoter of outdated perceptions of women and social values as a whole.
Girls, let’s stop praising this movie for it’s supposed “bravery” and instead focus on films made by women, for women. I’m tired of seeing this shallow “activism” being praised and upheld as the pinnacle of social progress when there is so much empowering content out there that doesn’t see the light of day. Instead of supporting this Hollywood money-making scheme, let’s start promoting real films with real messages. Give us entertainment that’s representative and powerful, or give us nothing at all.
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