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Amy (Amy Schumer) and Aaron (Bill Hader).
Universal Pictures
When we meet Trainwreck's Amy (Amy Schumer), it seems like she's living her best life: She has a ton of sex, a well-muscled guy who takes her to the movies, a fantastic ponytail, and great legs. “I have a great job and my apartment is sick,” she says in voiceover, a montage of her fabulous Manhattan life playing in the background.
But after 15 minutes in this world, the cracks in Amy's fabulous life start to show. She has a lot of sex, but that sex largely sucks; she has a well-paying job, but it’s at a magazine that unironically pitches “You Call Those Tits?” as a cover story. She drinks not because she loves it, but because she’s frightened of the emotions that surface when she doesn’t. She’s promiscuous not because she loves sex, but because she’s internalized her father’s message that emotional unavailability is preferable to rejection. Like her father, she’s a total misogynist.
Sure, Amy screws, drinks, and writes like a man, but none of those things actually empowers her, or vaults her to a position of equality, or even makes her feel awesome, or competent, or in control. We laugh when she hobbles home from Staten Island in a miniskirt and stilettos that have cut her heels into oblivion, but it’s a laugh tinged with shame: She’s a hot mess, a train wreck, and every other word we use to describe women who don't mind the very fine line of “just a fun, easygoing, cool girl!” and “total drunken whore.”
But it’s not her fault she’s a wreck — after all, the train tracks are rigged. Like so many women of her generation, she grew up surrounded by the ideology of postfeminism, which suggests that now that the “work” of feminism has been achieved we can all focus on having fun. The problem, however, is that “fun” is still circumscribed by patriarchy, and a woman’s worth is determined by her ability to hew to expectations of desirability. You can have a job, in other words, but actual success is only measured in your ability to simultaneously attract a man, maintain an ideal domestic space, and preserve your body.
And as manifest in Pretty Woman, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Sex and the City, and dozens of other pop culture artifacts of the time, postfeminism suggested that empowerment was best achieved through self-objectification, shopping, and sublimating anything that resembling engaged feminist politics. Feminism was the f-word. It turned women into humorless unfuckables, arguing over whether wearing lipstick makes you a traitor to your gender.
That was the postfeminism of the ‘90s — and easy, in hindsight, to disavow. Today, pop culture has embraced the term “feminism,” but that doesn’t mean that the ideologies of postfeminism are any less robust: They’ve simply changed forms. You can see it most visibly in American Apparel billboards and Vice, but it’s also in the cults of domesticity and motherhood, and the Pinterest-amplified fetishization of the baby/engagement/bridal shower.
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The postfeminist baby shower dystopia.
Universal Pictures
That’s the dystopia that afflicts Amy’s sister’s friends: At the baby shower held in her sister's honor, their words, actions, even their posture hint at the deep sadness that undergirds the regression to quasi-Victorian conceptions of entertainment, adventure, and fulfillment. They’ve fulfilled the fantasy, but that fantasy is festering from within.
But Amy, like her fellow train wrecks on The Mindy Project, Girls, Bachelorette, Young Adult, and Bridesmaids, manifests a darker shade of postfeminism. Traditionally, sluttiness and self-objectification are the means to domestic end: Prostitute Julia Roberts becomes wifey Julia Roberts; Sex and the City becomes Married Sex and the City. But like The Mindy Project's Mindy Lahiri (Mindy Kaling), and Girls' Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham), Amy gets stuck in a slutty, boozy holding pattern. They’re all disrespected at work and treated as objects on the street, so it’s no wonder they regard themselves and their bodies the same way.
The demands of the mainstream network sitcom necessitated that Mindy extricate herself from her holding pattern and into the arms of a suitable husband, but her character, like Dunham’s, has weathered