Ladies First has been panned. It’s still an essential watch
The Netflix gender-flip comedy film, in which Sacha Baron Cohen wakes to a world run by female chauvinists, is a valuable testimony to the enduring destructive force of gender bias
‘This Movie Is: Absurd.” That’s the descriptive label given to Thea Sharrock’s comedy film Ladies First on Netflix. Damien (Sacha Baron Cohen) is a male chauvinist who knocks his head and wakes up in a world run by women who are like him: ruthless in the boardroom and the bedroom, using and losing the opposite sex when it suits them. In this alternative reality, he sees what it’s like to be on the receiving end of sexism. It co-stars a terrific Rosamund Pike as his employee in one world, and his boss in another, and Fiona Shaw first as a secretary, then as a predatory boss.
Ladies First may seem absurd, but by flipping the script, it points out double standards and gendered language in a simple way. Men are talked over in meetings and expected to conform to unrealistic beauty goals; Victoria’s Secret becomes Victor’s Secret. The movie has had largely negative reviews, and as a film critic, I had my issues with it: for every scene that had me laughing, another had me cringing, and the largely binary, heteronormative world it depicts is not everyone’s reality.
But as a woman, I had an emotional response that should not be ignored. When the film acknowledged the casual ways in which we are routinely undermined, objectified and patronised, I felt a mixture of amusement, relief and validation. As the host of the Girls on Film podcast, I’ve seen many more nuanced feminist takes on the subject, but I am also keenly aware of the power of a message in a film with a huge mainstream reach. It is a broad, accessible comedy for a wide audience looking for an easy watch. It has the ability to help female audiences feel seen, and to help men empathise with their experiences.
The UK broadsheet reviews of Ladies First were all written by men (the gender imbalance in UK film criticism is also a reality). The review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes reveals a mixed response from a slightly broader range of writers, and while it is still branded “rotten” with an aggregate critics’ score of 26%, the audience rating “popcornometer” is 64%.
Other audience-led sites feature revealing reactions, such as a post on Reddit titled “I’m male and just watched Ladies First”. The writer states: “I’ve always considered myself a feminist, I believe women and men should be treated equally. But really, before watching this film, I thought we were…. The whole role reversal does not seem so shocking were it the original format, which got me thinking that maybe we as men don’t truly understand how women are treated in life.”
The writer went on to say that he posted this in both r/feminism and crossposted to any r/askmen, but that it was removed from the latter because there had been “enough reports” from the community. “Most of the replies were from guys that were trying to teach me that it’s not actually the case, that most guys aren’t like this.”
Of course, many men are far from Cohen’s character in real life. In the wake of #MeToo, some were horrified to hear what women had been going through: if they weren’t directly perpetuating sexist behaviour, perhaps they didn’t realise it existed, or to what extent they may have been responsible for microaggressions and bias. Other men simply did not believe it. I think this is what Ladies First is trying to tackle: the denial that there is a problem.
Farah Benis, founder of the campaign group Centre for Prevention of Violence Against Women and Girls, found Ladies First “deeply disappointing” and “muddled its own message”, but is concerned by suggestions that the workplace sexual harassment depicted isn’t realistic. “Dismissing those experiences because they make people uncomfortable doesn’t make them any less real. The excuse many men like to give is they’d “never behave like that”: every woman has experienced some sort of abuse, yet no man knows an abuser. If anything, it reinforces one of the biggest barriers women continue to face: not just the harassment itself, but the disbelief and minimisation that often follows when they speak about it,” she says, adding: “Sexual harassment remains a routine reality for many women in workplaces and public spaces. We have decades of research, countless personal testimonies, and official data demonstrating that.”
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Many critics have pointed out that Ladies First is dated, and in some ways that’s true – the French film it’s based on, I Am Not an Easy Man, was released in 2018, and it felt a little old fashioned then. But those in the corporate world will tell you that many scenes are still relevant today. Tanya Loeb, a human resources manager, says: “The scenes around workplace harassment and the pressure of appearance really stood out for me and showed how normalised those experiences can be for women. Flipping those situations around made them uncomfortable to watch, but that’s exactly why they were so effective.”
Ellen Pollak, emeritus professor of feminist theory at Michigan State University, says: “Hyperbole is a classic satiric strategy, and there’s some of it in the film. But do I think the gender asymmetries represented here are entirely exaggerated? I’m afraid I don’t. Nor do I think we live in a post-feminist world in which sexism is a thing of the past. Much of what’s depicted in the movie is still all too true.”
And as long as the absurdity of gender inequality continues, perhaps that message still needs to be hammered home.
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