Robots in disguise. Misogyny, not so much.

I saw the new Transformers movie. Whether this was a good thing or not is kind of up in the air.

The good things about the movie: Lots of stuff blows up, Chicago gets pretty much destroyed. If you like to see giant robots destroying things - and you can tolerate Michael Bay's deeply chaotic style - it's not awful.

The bad things: Shia LeBeouf continues to be himself - an insipid, uninteresting whiny brat. The plot is completely incoherent - the bad guys want to...bring their planet to Earth, because...I don't even know. And then there's an entirely obnoxious subplot in which Shia LeBeouf's girlfriend exists and his parents want him to get married and blah blah blah. Which brings me to...

The ugly: Oh, Mr. Bay. Have you ever met a woman? Like, actually conversed with a real, live female?

There's this theoretical 'test' out there, the Bechdel test. What it amounts to is three questions: are there at least two female characters in a film? Do they talk to each other? About something other than men? It's not meant as an assessment of how anti-feminist/misogynistic/etc a work is, but more of something applied to track trends (a *huge* number of modern movies fail this test). For example: the new Transformers film passes. There are three female characters. Two of them talk to each other. They do not talk about men (well, they do, but they also have about ten seconds of dialogue on another topic).

Female Character A exists purely as sex appeal. She has precisely zero personality. We don't know what she likes or dislikes, we don't know anything about her history or how she ended up where she is, we don't know anything about her friends or family. The first time we see her in the movie? Literally a panty shot of her ass, barely covered, as she walks up the stairs and then goes and straddles her boyfriend in bed. Her further contributions to the plot include creating conflict by having another man interested in her, and being taken hostage and waiting helplessly for rescue.

Female Character B is a career woman in the intelligence community who comes across as a shrill harpy. She's a cold-hearted bitch. We can tell because she treats her assistant with absolute disdain, and walks into situations and attempts to take control when the (male) people who are already there are rapidly losing control and messing everything up. The first time we see her, she has her flunky carrying her multiple designer purses and an extra pair of shoes around for her.

Female Character C is the main characters mother, who makes reference to her son's being a loser and says he can't expect to get another girlfriend as hot as Female Character A unless he has a big penis.

97% of the movie is divided between the useful characters fighting the bad guys, and Shia LeBeouf whining about being unemployed while his super hot girlfriend has a job, which of course makes him feel emasculated. His girlfriend overtly says she loves having him around the house as a "boy toy"; the implication is that the fact that he's unemployed and she's not is (and should be) inherently bad. The issue isn't so much that he's unemployed and feels bad about it (understandable) but his girlfriend has a job and he doesn't (haha look at the looooser!).

The thing about movies like this is that it in and of itself isn't deeply problematic. Of course a Michael Bay movie is stupid and worthless in the moments when it's not about blowing stuff up*. The thing is it's indicative of the society that not only creates movies like this but embraces them - that not only sees nothing wrong with but downright enjoys a movie where our introduction to the first female character is literally a tracking shot of her ass as she goes up a flight of stairs. It's not a cause but a symptom of a huge problem with our culture - women are objects meant to be looked at, not people with meaningful lives.

*I also seriously question the way that Michael Bay thinks the military works, by the way.