Just as there are certain high-powered male directors (Michael Mann, Oliver Stone, Paul Verhoeven) who’ve been accused of not writing fleshed-out female characters — objectifying women by portraying them as sassy hotties, madonna-whores or out-and-out vipers — there are female directors and writers who also prefer opposite-gender fantasy characters, and so they write these sensitive-wimp males for women’s-market movies like The Nanny Diaries, The Jane Austen Book Club, Friends with Money, The Holiday, etc.

I’m saying that “chick-movie guys” are romanticized bullshit projections of men that certain female filmmakers would like to meet and fall in love with in real life. Males who are the polar opposite of Vince Vaughn in The Wedding Crashers or The Break-Up or Thomas Haden Church in Sideways. Tenderness, perceptiveness and sensitivity are admirable traits in any person, but there’s something almost other-wordly about those gentle, supersensitive guys in mature chick flicks. There’s something deballed about them. They’re just not “guys.”