Beware the Alfie

I happened to watch the Jude Law movie “Alfie” the other night.

While I can’t recommend it based on its merits as a movie (especially if you have as little time as I do), I found the message in it to be very disturbing and worth noting.

Basically, the film is about a young British guy (good looking, of course) who is a limo driver in New York City. He’s a ladies man, and pulls action all the time. Over the course of the movie, you see his cocky and confident facade pulled down by a series of events that make him re-think his approach to life and women.

Now, on the surface, this seems like the standard cautionary tale about not using people and thinking of other people’s feelings. After all, Alfie is just using these poor women and being a real jerk.

But wait a minute here….

IS he?

He actually is very straightforward about his intentions from the start. He explains that he doesn’t want to stick with one woman. He doesn’t mistreat any of his ladies, and they all enjoy his company. And while these women all act hurt from time to time about the fact that Alfie isn’t likely to settle down with any of them, they all knew the deal from the beginning.

The danger that this movie presents is that it portrays these women as helpless victims, women who we are supposed to believe were tricked into Alfie’s bed under false pretenses. Alfie was a Bad Man because he has sex with many women, and he doesn’t conform to modern beliefs of monogamy.

Here’s the dangerous and incorrect message that the movie tries to get you to believe:

“Women are helpless creatures who can’t make their own decisions, and the men that seduce them are BAD.”

Oh, and one more related message is underneath that one:

“Guys who seduce or sleep with more than one woman, OR who don’t want to be tied down, are JERKS.”

And one more that’s even more disturbing:

“Women aren’t responsible for their decisions.”

This is the faulty message that the media is trying to send us. It’s a dangerous message for men, and quite honestly, it’s more insulting to women if you look at it in the right light – the light of Truth.

Every one of the women in the movie knew what she was doing. It’s not the man’s responsibility to sit her down and have her sign a disclosure before she sleeps with him so that she acknowledges the reality of what she’s getting into.

The real truth is that women often put on romantic blinders when dealing with men. (Men even do this.) We see and believe what we WANT to so that we can DO what we want to. Today’s men and women are brought up to be more and more impulsive and less self-controlled.

Unless you have a gun held to your head, you CHOOSE to do everything that you do. No one is pulling your strings. Everyone makes the choices that they WANT to make.

Don’t believe this garbage that men are the cads and womanizers. (“Cad”? Who uses this term anymore? Well, it’s the description of the movie on the sleeve, believe it or not.) This is the kind of crap that creates the bad programming of the “Nice Guy,” and takes years to undo. I should know – I was one of them.

Women – and men – everywhere actually need MORE guys like Alfie to demonstrate the real Alpha Man traits that are sorely lacking in our world today. In fact, I’m thinking Jude Law’s character should have been called “Alphie.”

Many times all a woman wants is a guy she can have a good time with, no matter how long it lasts. And if you asked her how she felt about most of the guys she’s had her “fun” with, she’d tell you she’d gladly do it all over again, knowing exactly how it would have to end.

I think “Alfie” is an example of the kind of mindless counter-programming that AFC’s just accept as true. After all, Hollywood is saying it, so it must be true. We also get movies like “Bridget Jones” that glorify all the neurotic traits of women. And, unfortunately, movies like “Alfie” are becoming more of the norm. They cater to the female “chick-flick” watching public because that’s where the money is, not the Truth.

I want to warn you right now about the bad programming that’s infected the U.K. as well. Shows like “Coupling” send us the message that guys are dopes and incompetent fools who need women to keep them in line. There was even a preview on one of the “Coupling” DVDs of a new show about “Men, and the women who put up with them.” Un-be-phuquing-lievable.

That really sums up this new attitude: Men are now perceived as a necessary evil.

In the movie, Alfie even tries to make a go of a long-term relationship. Somehow, in the twisted logic of this screenplay, they even make him look bad for dumping this woman because she’s a psycho who freaks out without her medication. Huh. Go figure. Can’t imagine why he wouldn’t keep that winner around.

I do believe that – eventually – a guy wants to stay with a woman he can trust and confide in. Someone he can invest some time and emotion into. But in order to find ONE good woman out there we have to sift through a ton of bad ones. So be it.

Power to the PUA.