Spike Lee's new movie She Hate Me is more of a fantasy than a comedy, and not a very funny one.

Opening this week in theaters in New York and L.A., the film tells the story of Jack Armstrong (Anthony Mackie), a corporate whistle-blower suddenly out of a job who ends up becoming a one-man sperm bank for wealthy lesbians, who pay him $10,000 each for the privilege of allowing him to impregnate them--the old-fashioned way. And naturally, they enjoy it. All nineteen of them.

At the end of the film, two of the lesbians--both women of color--create an unusual family arrangement by living with Jack as a threesome of sorts.

First, on the positive side, She Hate Me is a well-acted film, and one that finally includes lesbians of color (played by Kerry Washington, Dania Ramirez, and Ling Bai, among others). And on a theoretical level, the ending is interesting and unique; I wish more films reflected the diversity of family structures that exist in America today.

But the positive aspects of the film are far outweighed by numerous negative ones, which include confusing bisexual women with lesbians, reinforcing the idea that lesbians want to sleep with men, and bringing to the big screen the lesbian-motherhood storyline that has been played to death on television.

Spike Lee has done numerous interviews to sell this film to the gay community, asking us to be open minded about it because "it was done in the right spirit," (BTL June 24th), but this movie was never intended to appeal to a gay audience. It was made for a straight (male) audience that likes to think lesbians secretly enjoy, or at least don't mind, sleeping with men. That doesn't mean lesbian representation in the film is all bad--many of the lesbians are interesting and sympathetic characters--but let's not pretend it's a good portrayal of lesbians overall. Or even women, for that matter.

You know the sexism and lesbian stereotyping in a film has to be painfully obvious when even non-gay newspapers are commenting on it, as The Hollywood Reporter does in its review of the film:

Hard to imagine anything more tasteless or tacky than these scenes of supposedly gay women screaming in erotic ecstasy while having sex with a well-endowed stud. But there are other problems with this male fantasy. It may be news to Lee and Genet, but the preferred method of achieving motherhood by most gay women is artificial insemination. Furthermore, multiple sessions of sexual intercourse by a single male, assuming the man can even achieve arousal that many times, would virtually ensure that his sperm count would be too low to accomplish the desired results for most of the women. Finally, what woman would want to be last in line for a male who has just had a dozen bouts of unprotected sex?

Lee's defense? Artificial insemination isn't cinematic enough. Let's see if he remembers that the next time a white director wants to include some black thugs in his film to make it more "cinematic."

If She Hate Me was just one mainstream cinematic representation of lesbianism among many, it would still be disappointing, but easy to ignore. But She Hate Me is one of the few representations of lesbians in a mainstream film in the last year, and one of the only mainstream representations of lesbians of color in years; in the larger context of the overall invisibility of lesbian and bisexual women in film, She Hate Me veers on irresponsible, especially coming from a man who understands far too well the harmful effects of propagating negative stereotypes.

Fortunately, She Hate Me is so off-base, outdated, and silly in its portrayal of lesbianism that it makes itself unbelievable even to most straight viewers, which limits the damage it can truly inflict on lesbian visibility.

For someone who has spent so much time and energy trying to counter narrow-minded stereotypes of African Americans, however, it's discouraging that Lee can't expand his scope to counteract stereotypes of black lesbians--who are black women, after all. “I think that if anybody has a right to be angry, it’s African Americans in this country," Lee told The Advocate in a recent interview. With this film, he's just added to the list of things for black women to be angry about.

For an alternative take on the film, see this review.