I Am Not an Easy Man Tackles Not an Easy Subject

Women in power suits might not be going far enough

One of the challenges of advocating feminism to men is explaining the significance of its necessity. For example, men have a hard time seeing anything wrong with a student-teacher affair; after all, in our heads, sex, however bad, is never a threatening thing. So how do you get men to walk in the shoes of women to understand sexist problems? (Not, of course, that it’s anyone’s job to explain these things to would-be abusers).

Director Éléonore Pourriat attempts to take on this task in her film I Am Not An Easy Man, in which chauvinist Damien is transported — via head trauma — into an alternate reality where women are the dominant, oppressive sex. He spends the rest of the film wrangling with this alien land, while navigating a relationship with a female chauvinist, Alexandre.

There’s a lot of striking things about this female-dominated world that bring contemporary gender issues into stronger relief than usual: butt-hugging shorts on men, eye cream on men, flowery shirts on men, pole-dancing on men, secretarial jobs on men, menial labor jobs on men, bulk parenting on men… you get the drift.

And in that sense, it does a fantastic job. Once the beauty, work, and social standards of our world gets transplanted onto men, it seems suddenly absurd. In one of the film’s sobering moment, Damien’s aging father talks about the abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother, who’d cheated on him, and forced sex on him. He resigns himself to a reality in which “this is how women are.” Damien’s friend consoles the father. “You’re so strong.” Damien himself finds himself suddenly emotionally vulnerable and abused by Alexandre, leading him to run down the all-too-familiar rabbit hole of trashing her office when he discovers her infidelity.

On the other hand, I find it rather hard to make this sort of argument productive: simply switching roles can only achieve so much. In Éléonore Pourriat’s 2010 short film Oppressed Majority, the male protagonist in a similarly inverted world is sexually assaulted by a group of street-roaming female thugs. In the aftermath, he is slut-shamed by both the police and his irritated wife. While sobering, the visuals inhabit some sort of uncanny valley. Sure, the women seemingly dominate the social and physical narrative here, but they’re still all smaller on average than men. As tough as Alexandre tries to seem, her arms are still skinny little things next to Damien. And while unspeakable and inhumane acts are hardly the sole property of men, there’s biological traits that trend us towards higher average levels of aggression and lower levels of social and emotional competence. Sure, a great deal of this is exacerbated by our gendered social narratives, but the small biological differences between men and women should lead to a significantly different world should women be the ones in power.

It’s clear from my previous works I’m a fan of Science Fiction and Fantasy; any sort of what-if fiction, really. And if you’ve read any of it, you’ll notice I’m rather particular about world-building quality. If women dominated our world, let’s really dig into what that might mean, and how it would manifest. We’d have to consider questions of economics, fashion, city planning, linguistics, social structures, architecture, and so on and so forth. You know, like, a Wakanda-level of research into alternate realities. Would we even be living in cities? Would we even have gone the route of agriculture to begin with? Would we have capitalist systems, governed under democracies? I’m not saying it’d end up with a utopia or a dystopia, but certainly there’d be some interesting social observations to made from the exercise when considering what the world could look like without men stomping on women all the time. If all we do is reverse roles, it becomes hard to buy what’s happening on screen, because the socially-programmed part of us can’t accept it: “this wouldn’t really happen.”

Obviously, that’s not what Éléonore Pourriat is trying to do. I Am Not an Easy Man is, at the end of the day, a narrative tool for showing how absurd, problematic, and exploitative our man-driven world is; so everything boils down to directly inverted visual metaphors. Either way, the message is clear at the end of the day: Damien’s alternate world therapist says, rather matter-of-factly (and rather thickly): “Maybe there’s another way? A world where men and women help each other.”