I was chatting with some friends about Tim Hunt, the Nobel laureate who lost his jobs after saying “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls … three things happen when they are in the lab … You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry.” I hadn’t appreciated one parallel with that masterpiece of 21st Century cinema: The Other Guys. One of the disgraced scientist’s core points was that at least some women reacted badly to criticism. To demonstrate just how wrong Hunt was, i.e., that women can in fact handle harsh words, he needed to be packed off into a quiet retirement so as to avoid the risk of any additional women being exposed to potentially upsetting statements.
Corresponding scene in the Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg movie:
- Allen Gamble (after watching his partner dance ballet): “Hey, I didn’t know you could dance.”
- Terry Hoitz: “We used to do those dance moves to make fun of guys when we were kids to show them how queer they were.”
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