Girlbosses of old wanted to take the financial crown from men. But here, too, they faced a rigged system — and instead of charging after the broader structural imbalances keeping one gender poorer than the other, they championed the climbing of corporate ladders by individual women. Sánchez certainly makes no claims to challenge systemic inequality. Yet at the least, she is honest about what she represents: nothing more than her own interests.
Though this free-for-all moment is already being deemed “post-feminist,” we are lacking a clear vision of what economic dynamic, exactly, men and women should each be fighting for — which is leading everyone to feel slightly in the wrong, cheated of something they were initially promised. Men fear gold diggers, but women fear being gold diggers, too. One friend of mine recently married a wealthy man, quit her job and now grapples daily with both relief and guilt. “I’m choosing to be comfortable and not struggle, and there is agency in that choice,” she told me. “But am I just repeating my mother and grandmother’s behavior? I came to professional consciousness under Sheryl Sandberg, who told me my job was my calling card. I guess I’m an uneasy trophy wife.”
It’s no wonder that the rom-com genre has died out. Jane Austen declared that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife — but the reality of today’s world is that men and women are each in want of a good fortune, and neither party is totally sure how to reconcile their desire for riches with their desire for the other.
In the recent film “Materialists,” a valiant but oversimplistic attempt to tussle with this modern conundrum, the female protagonist is asked to make an explicit choice between a man with money and a man she loves. This, the movie claims, is a binary: She cannot have both. “Anora,” a grimmer yet truer study on the same subject, understands that it isn’t a binary so much as a Russian doll — here, the protagonist falls in love with a man for his money, showing us an exciting conjugal setup in which capital can broker passion and vice versa. But it’s her growing refusal to accept the transactional nature of things that later leads to heartbreak.
Bleak as they are, what the two films get right is that the quixotic, lovey-dovey view of marriage spoon-fed through culture from Austen all the way into modern Hollywood is no longer satisfying. Boombox serenades and cheesy pickup lines, in this economy? Perhaps the best way out of the morass would be to reset the marital paradigm entirely.
Source photographs for illustration above: Alexander_DG/Shutterstock; Picture Partners/Shutterstock.
