Wicker's Anti-Male Fantasy Suggests Women Trade Men for Baskets

A few weeks ago, you were casually scrolling through Instagram when, in a flash, you saw a disturbing series of images. A movie trailer featuring The Crown ’s Queen Elizabeth, Olivia Colman, in a medieval setting, lying on a bed and making sex noises. As if it could get any worse, you realize she’s in the throes of coitus with—who?—not a man but—wait, is that… anthropomorphized furniture? Is this a sick parody? I regret to inform you that the cinematic crime against culture you witnessed on Instagram is, in fact, real. And now, it is in theaters coast to coast across the United States. Fifty Shades of Hay The movie Wicker , or as it’s being satirized online, “Fifty Shades of Hay,” drops the audience into a dystopian village where all the townspeople lead small, prescribed lives. The bakers, the tailors, the barkeepers, and the like. But among all the simpletons, one complicated figure stands a cut above the rest: the fisherwoman. She’s middle-aged, unmarried, and unimpressed by the town’s traditions. A feminist rebel. So, naturally, this movie makes her the hero. Her resistance is righteous, you see. In her town, every woman is expected to marry and wear the “matrimonial collar.” Instead of a ring, each man places a doglike collar around his bride’s neck to mark his territory. And instead of tossing a bouquet, wicker eggs are handed out to the town’s virgins to shake—a veiled representation of reproductive eggs. By happenstance, one egg rolls to the fisherwoman’s feet. She shakes it and becomes the next eligible bride. Of course, all the townspeople find this absurd. They mock and ridicule her. But she decides she’ll show them all. She’ll have a husband, and he’ll be made in her perfect image. That’s when she commissions the town’s basket maker to handcraft a “wicker man.” The Ideal Man Is Apparently Made of Sticks Unlike the red-blooded, piggish men of the village, the expertly made wicker man is perfect. He marries the fisherwoman without making her don a “matrimonial collar.” His physique is tall, broad, and strong. The movie also insists on telling us how hard and large his genitalia are. He never runs out of stamina for sex, which we get to watch repeatedly, scene after scene. Outwardly, he’s portrayed as strong; inwardly, he’s gentle. He hardly speaks unless spoken to by his wife. And when he does, he whispers sweet affirmations in her ear. He never complains. He’s a stay-at-home husband. When he asks his wife a question, it’s to find out what she needs repaired around the house. He’s devoted to her every move. We see the perfect man isn’t one who’s learned to be a good partner, or a red-blooded human with agency, but an object who’s designed to have no needs that might inconvenience his wife. Naturally, all the wives start turning on their own husbands, and a village-wide feminist awakening breaks out. Men and Traditional Marriage Are the Villains There is absolutely nothing subtle, witty, or nuanced about this movie. The entire film is based on the townswomen waking up to realize that their patriarchal society—and all the actual human men in it—is irredeemable. Men are the problem , and marriage as they know it is the shackle . As famous feminist Betty Friedan once put it, married women are in a “comfortable concentration camp.” Ultimately, the only two men in this entire film who prove worthy of the women’s time and affection are the basket weaver (a gay artisan) and the artificial man he creates. At no point in this movie does any wife fully reconcile with her husband. The women either remain in loveless, abusive marriages, open their marriages to a possible throuple—I’m not even kidding—or leave their husbands and children altogether to pursue a better life in the big city. The latter two options are presented as worthy pursuits. There is absolutely nothing subtle, witty, or nuanced about this movie. When I tell you this movie is one big cliché, I mean it. It’s replete with debased locker-room humor, but with a female spin. At times, its hyper-crass, American Pie -style humor feels like it was written by middle school boys. At other times, its militant feminism feels like it was written by the reporters at Jezebel. Cluttered With Contradictions Just a thought experiment: Imagine if this movie had reversed the roles. We enter a village where every woman is reduced to her worst stereotypes. Every wife is a raging witch, a nag, or a cheater. Naturally, our movie’s hero, an outsider—a middle-aged, dowdy man—decides to have his own perfect wife crafted out of wood. The wooden wife shows all the other women up because she’s gorgeous, has a firm body, is always sexually available to her husband, stays at home, never complains, and asks what she can clean. How do we think this would be received in our culture? The double standard becomes easier to see if we reverse the roles. So why are we supposed to applaud this film? I recognize it’s supposed to be a comedy, but its foundational message is clear as a bell, even if it’s wrapped in gutter humor. As The Atlantic reports, Wicker “shows just how suffocating being married can be.” Message received and rejected. The double standard becomes easier to see if we reverse the roles. The contradictions in this movie, and in the more militant strains of contemporary feminism it reflects, are what’s suffocating. First, marriage is a patriarchal system, unless the man is perfectly female-coded. Second, women are complex and seek to be fully understood, yet men are one-dimensional misogynists. Third, women don’t need men, unless those men can stay at home, fix things, and have sex whenever they’re asked. This movie feels like it’s aggressively moving the culture backward, not bringing it forward. Fairy Tale Ending? For all its insistence that women are better off without men, the heroine’s happily-ever-after looks remarkably familiar. She wants a devoted husband, a baby, a family. There’s nothing radical about that. The radical part, apparently, is that to find a good partner, she has to manufacture one. Of course, women deserve better than selfishness, cruelty, or an abusive marriage. But that doesn’t mean men, marriage, or romance are the problem. The real lesson isn’t that women can build the perfect man out of inanimate objects. It should be that we can learn to appreciate the flesh-and-blood men who are actually worth building a life with .