The plot features disgruntled women taking revenge on their husbands in all sorts of ways, many of them illegal, and all of them immoral. Perhaps angry at themselves for not being unable to hold onto their men, these women begin a vicious campaign of harassment against their former husbands.

What have the husbands done to deserve this treatment? Little more than to have fallen out of love with their wives just as many wives fall out of love with their husbands. It’s certainly a common enough problem in the United States, where we have a divorce rate exceeding 50%--the highest in the world. This would hardly be an evil act, let alone a crime, deserving vigilante "punishment." Yet we see these men being punished by their first wives because the marriages didn’t work out.

Ladies, get over it! Divorce is hard on everyone involved. Men and children routinely suffer hurt and pain in divorce just as women do. This is not really a pro-feminist movie. The women in the story seem to perpetuate an outmoded view of marriage in which the woman’s contribution to a marriage is her body for sex and domestic service, while the man must provide money, status, and protection, or be seen as a failure. This is the old inequality, where both partners are tied to restrictive sex roles that early feminists railed against. Modern women cannot identify with the "first wives" in this movie. The reality for most women is that they will not marry rich and successful men who will keep them in luxury. Instead, they will go out to work just as their husbands do. And if they hold even a fraction of the contempt for their husbands as these "first wives" do, they had better start planning a new life anyway because divorce is inevitable.

The First Wives' Club is a deeply sexist movie. It portrays men as louts, who deserve what they get when they don’t come through as providers to their pampered wives, despite the legal and moral fact that a divorced man has a right to live his life. This movie perpetuates the idea that his rights to live and to love hinge on the say-so of his ex-wife. Would women want the same standard applied by their ex-husbands? The contempt for men that is so prevalent in today’s society has its effects. We see the effects of this sexism every day in our high rate of divorce, domestic violence and emotional distress. Sexism such as that portrayed in this movie is demeaning to women as well as to men, and it must be opposed.

If we substituted any other group for the men who are victims in this movie, we would quickly see that this movie propagates hate. If the victims in this movie were any other group besides ex-husbands, Hollywood’s favorite punching bag, they would have never made this movie. The First Wives' Club documents the extraordinary levels of anti-male sexism that we have reached in contemporary society. The women in the movie lament the breakdown of their marriages, yet at the same time exude contempt for all men that would leave any marriage for any reason. This rampant sexism is a source of many of the problems between men and women today, and must be acknowledged. It’s nothing to celebrate, nor to laugh about.

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