The (Bad) Taste Test: Do Girls Just Wanna Have Fun in Sex Comedies?
For decades, the great rite-of-passage for the American male in cinema has been to lose their virginity. From the pastry-penetrating profanity of American Pie (1999) – which ended the millennium with a blueprint for so many comedies that would come after it – to the latest in this cinematic lineage, No Hard Feelings (2023), a whole genre of coming-of-age sex comedies are rooted in the fact that, in order for male characters to take the next step in life (which is almost always going from high school to college), they need to have sex.
No Hard Feelings, which stars Jennifer Lawrence, is aware of how strange its premise is from the very beginning. In the film, Lawrence plays Maddie, a drifting 30-something who badly needs cash, and sees an offer being put forward by a pair of wealthy, helicopter to parents (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti, both wonderfully strange and cringe-inducing here): they’ll give her a car if she can try and help their introverted, socially-awkward son become “experienced” before college (this means exactly what you think it does.)
The eyebrow-raising premise, and the film’s willingness to acknowledge that it’s bizarre and slightly unsettling, captures a genre that’s been in flux throughout the 21st century, as it constantly grapples with how to represent female characters. Going back to the beginning, the women in American Pie feel like distinct characters, but as the film unfolds it’s difficult to shake the fact that their whole purpose seems to be as objects of desire for the film’s lovelorn, desperately horny male protagonists.
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Equally, however, what’s most interesting about American Pie is its willingness to poke fun at the desires of its male characters, especially the various sexual misfortunes of Jim (Jason Biggs). But the great legacy of American Pie is its positioning of the woman as object of desire; the launching of Jennifer’s Coolidge’s screen image through her casting as Stifler’s Mom, a woman christened a MILF by a young John Cho (credited as “MILF Guy”) in one of the film’s first scenes.
The sexual politics of a film like American Pie are all about reflecting a status quo that exists in both gender and culture. Men pursue and women are pursued - lacrosse player Oz (Chris Klein) often compares courtship with sports, and is full of anxiety when it comes to stepping out of the jock mould that he’s in at the beginning of the film - and the idea of being a virgin at college is unthinkable. American Pie is a film that leverages the anxiety of the end of high school and gives it a stark sexual component.
This trope, this moment in time where one chapter ends and another begins, is where so many of these sex comedies find themselves. And even in more contemporary rite-of-passage films that are willing to foreground female characters and desires, these tropes remain. In Blockers (2018), the three female protagonists enter into a “sex pact” for each of them to lose their virginity on prom night: there’s the level-headed Julie (Kathryn Newton) in a committed relationship, the over-parented Kayla (Geraldine Viswanathan), and the queer, closeted Sam (Gideon Adlon). When Julie confides in her friends about her plan to have sex with her boyfriend before the end of high school she says, in a moment of seeming self-awareness in the film: “I know it sounds corny or whatever, but, prom night, you know? It just seems perfect.”
“No Hard Feelings shows, like Blockers before it, that there’s plenty of room for these films to have female leads that are just as brash, bawdy, and funny as the young men that always used to take starring roles.”
But what makes Blockers work so well - as comedy, and as an empathetic look at trying to understand what you want and why you want it - is that nothing is perfect; from the escalating ridiculousness of the humour, to conflict that feels rooted in well-written characters, Blockers might be playing from the same songbook as American Pie, but it’s more than willing to challenge expectations about the genre. And chief among its methods of doing so are its female characters. It would be an oversimplification to say that this simply comes from making the leads women instead of men; instead it does what so many other films of the genre struggle to do: make them fully-formed, and compelling beyond their relationship to male desire. Even other contemporary films like Superbad (2007), which also plays on coming-of-age tropes, struggle to do this: both of Superbad’s major female characters exist only through the eyes of the male leads that the film follows around: as objects of desire, and symbols of a sexually active life after high school.
To begin with, it feels like No Hard Feelings will fall into this trap. As refreshing as it is for the film to acknowledge just how strange its premise is, it’s still fraught with the possibility that Lawrence simply becomes an object of desire throughout the film. But what makes the film so surprising is how much it subverts this; from a skinny-dipping disaster that takes a shocking turn, to one of the most awkward lap dances caught on camera. The more the story unfolds, the less interested it is in sex at all.
More than any of the sex comedies that have come before it, No Hard Feelings tries to balance the arcs and inner lives of male and female characters, with each one stuck in a form of arrested development - even though Lawrence’s Maddie is over a decade older than Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). But what makes No Hard Feelings feel like such a change for the genre is the fact that it challenges one of the biggest signifiers of the films that came before it: the idea that the ultimate goal of sex before college is another step on the road to normalcy. Whenever the characters attempt to have sex, they’re either interrupted by comedy, or - in one surprisingly powerful scene - the simple sad reality and discomfort that has gotten under the skin of a relationship that, for all its strangeness, is earnest.
Lawrence’s performance is what this film lives and dies on, and it does so much to subvert the ways in which women are often seen in these movies. Her incredibly forward sexual advances are one thing, but their lack of success is something else entirely. She’s clearly an object of desire in this film, but her attempts to embrace being one end in comic failure, from an awkward lap dance, to one of the film’s set pieces: an outburst of violence set to ‘Maneater’ by Nelly Furtado. The song becomes a motif in No Hard Feelings, a way of showing the nuances of Maddie’s character, and the kind of flattening down of someone’s personality when you see them only as an object of desire.
No Hard Feelings shows, like Blockers before it, that there’s plenty of room for these films to have female leads that are just as brash, bawdy, and funny as the young men that always used to take starring roles. But more than that, it asks the question of why these characters act like they do, and if the lengths they so often go to, and the shapes into which they contort themselves, for one night of pleasure, is really the be all and end all of coming of age.
