Have you seen Crazy Stupid Love?

Basically the wife and HS sweetheart of the husband protagonist cheats on him, and wants a divorce. The husband then goes through a journey of bettering himself and making himself more attractive. He eventually becomes a lady killer and sleeps with a handful of women while they are separated (not sure if they officially divorced) and then eventually him and his wife reconcile. The message being that she cheated because he was boring and therefore their marriage was boring. He had to improve himself in order to win her back.

Imagine a movie where a guy cheats, it is painted as her fault, and then she has to go on some great journey of growth in order to prove her worth and win back the person that cheated on her. Women would lose it if someone made a movie like this could you imagine the backlash? By simply flipping the genders the narrative and tone completely change.

The look on my GFs face when I told her the movie doesn’t work if genders are flipped was priceless. It went from “no that’s not true” and then a couple seconds later it hit her how fucked up that is. She even brought this realization up at a dinner party with friends and all the women had the exact same reaction she did. Initial doubt followed by realization. None of them could explain why that was the case.

This is a cherry picked example of a popular movie (movie is actually entertaining) that send a weird message but that’s how subtle it can be.