If you'd have told in 2012 that I'd be writing a piece praising a Channing Tatum film, and that the film in question was the sequel to the lurid, leather thong-filled Magic Mike, I'd have slapped you. But thing change, and in the past year, I've had the very sensible realisation that Channing, king of the potatoes, is a great actor. Probably a great guy too, a guy I can imagine being the best friend ever, buying me burgers and affectionately calling me "kid". But, until this dream becomes a reality, I digress. In 2012, I was also yet to have my feminist awakening. So it gives me great joy that in 2015, as a self-proclaimed and unashamed fat black feminist, I can give a feminist reading of a bro-tastic C-Tatz vehicle.
I'm not saying that Magic Mike XXL is a feminist masterpiece. (but also, I AM saying that it's a masterpiece. I really, really am.) It's only 2015. Only one woman has ever woman best director at the Oscars. Inequality, on many different scales, still runs rife in the film industry. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. But for mainstream cinema, particularly male-starring, male-directed cinema, it's a step in the right direction. While the first Magic Mike film was caught up with the guys doing the stripping, its sequel seeks to constantly draw attention to the girls that don't see nothing wrong with a little bump n grind.
There were so many moments in the film where my heart began to sink, fearing negative representations were looming. An early scene in the film, where Mike and his bros go to visit an ex-flame, Rome's (the luminous Jada Pinkett-Smith, convincing me to buy a suit and call everyone I know a queen) "country club" style strip club. As the boys pass through one of the rooms, they stop and watch a half-naked, oiled up lothario dancing for a fat black woman. Great, I thought, here we go again. A larger woman's sexual appetite is going to be played for laughs in a film. It wouldn't be the first time - just to look at Bridesmaids, where Melissa McCarthy's upfront sexually aggressive behaviour is played to be "disgusting". But then something small but amazing happened. Rome referred to the woman as "beautiful" and nobody in the film or the audience laughed. The stripper danced for the woman, lavishing her with attention, stroking her (large, black) thighs. The woman was beside herself with excitement, laughing and squealing as the stripper gyrated atop and around her. Then, at the end of the dance, they hugged and parted ways. It's easy, as a film student, to twist out and manipulate one tiny moment in a film, and call it feminist, or revolutionary. But this wasn't the only moment in XXL where women, particularly women of colour and fat women, were treated like they were beautiful and worthy of male attention.
On a car journey, Donald Glover's Andre and Matt Bomer's Ken passionately discuss how they're "healers", and how they're able to help women by just asking them what they want. The dialogue in this scene is hella cheesy, but it still underlines a message that runs through the film - these men love what they do because they love helping the women that they dance for. There is not a single moment in the film where they criticise their customers. They have nothing but love for them. This also, oddly enough, extends to the women that they sleep with in the film. While some of the language around sex in the film does veer into bro territory, ("Did you bang her?" is a question that's constantly asked) none of the men in the film shame any of the women they sleep with once the act's done and dusted. After "Big Dick" Ritchie sleeps with Andie MacDowell's sharp-tongued Southern housewife, Mike still has the courtesy and decency to call her a "nice, beautiful lady".
Why Magic Mike XXL works is that, like in all other facets of life, male filmmakers have only just caught up with how our lady brains work. We women know we're beautiful. We know, (most of the time, anyway) what we want, what we deserve, and how we should be treated. We're not looking for a male-dominated film to tell us we're beautiful because we don't already know it - hell, we've known it from the start. Female filmmakers have always tried to reassure us that we're queens. (Just think of the scene in Girlhood where Vic reminisces about a day spent with her friends in Disneyland - "I stopped and watched you, and you were so beautiful. It was a beautiful moment") What's endearing here is that the men seem to have thrown all their efforts into letting us know how great we are, like an overenthusiastic Bruno Mars song. And if male directors have finally made a film solely targeted at women that lets them know they're queens, whilst also giving us some of the most mind-blowing and ludicrous strip routines this side of Showgirls, then maybe things are slowly changing. For now, in reply to its bravado-filled tagline of "You're Welcome", I want to thank Magic Mike XXL for acknowledging in its own subtle way, that all women, regardless of shape size or race, or whether they even know it themselves yet, are beautiful.
