Despite 2011 being an early year in the decade that feels strange to call the 10s (even if some people speculate that the 00s never really ended in the first place), it was still somehow a time when a rom-com like What’s Your Number? could be released. Starring Anna Faris in the role of “whorish” late twenty-something Ally Darling, who has been so busy having sex (a.k.a. living her life) that she’s started to lose count of how “high” the body count has gotten. “High” in Boston (and most other places outside of New York and L.A.) evidently means nineteen. A number that scandalizes her all the more when, after being fired from a nondescript job in “marketing,” she thumbs through an issue of Marie Claire while riding public transportation (ah yes, 2011, when it was still believable that people read tangible publications) and stumbles upon an article called “What’s Your Number?” (incidentally, the title of the movie was changed from the original source material’s, called 20 Times a Lady by Karyn Bosnak).
With the sub-headline, “The average number of lovers women have in their lifetime is 10.5,” Ally is sent into a panic–plagued far more by her own number being almost twice as high as the national average than the fact that she’s just lost her job. Because, after all, finding a man who will marry her (which means not coming across as a ho to him) is far more important than professional satisfaction, let alone worrying about how she’s going to pay for her large apartment (the kind Hollywood allows to exist in all rom-coms regardless of how expensive the city in question is). The large apartment across from which a far more openly promiscuous person, Colin Shea (Chris Evans), lives, frequently encountering Ally in the buff as he opens his door to pick up the paper after yet another one-night stand. The shamelessness with which Colin parades his sexual escapades is in direct contrast to Ally’s embarrassment and self-flagellation, which escalates the morning she wakes up next to her now ex-boss, Roger (Joel McHale), after having declared that she won’t sleep with another man until she’s sure he’s “the one” (at number twenty). Conveniently, in the midst of Ally’s turmoil over how to get rid of Roger, Colin knocks on her door with the excuse of locking himself out of his apartment and needing to use her phone.
As Roger tries to make plans with her for later, Colin picks up on her aura of feeling icky and comes to her rescue with the excuse that they have a tenants’ meeting that night. Grateful, Ally suddenly realizes that Colin didn’t lock himself out of his apartment at all–he was merely pretending to have left early so that the current one-night stand in his bed could be avoided. So it is that Ally realizes he’s a pig like all the rest. Even so, she still wants to marry one.
Directed by Mark Mylod (whose credits amount to Ali G in Da House and some episodes of Game of Thrones), it shouldn’t come as a shock that the perspective of this film is myopically misogynistic. The surprise comes when learning that the script was adapted by two women, Jennifer Crittenden (best known for writing episodes of Seinfeld and The Simpsons) and Gabrielle Allan (whose few subsequent writing credits to this movie have included, poetically, an episode of Divorce). And while this was pre-Harvey Weinstein “exposed” days and women in Hollywood still had to play the game of promoting antiquated notions of “ladylikeness” in order to get paid within the industry they should abhor, What’s Your Number? feels almost egregiously retro in perspective when considering the year it was released.
Perhaps this is because the book it’s based on was originally released in 2006, and its author was clearly writing from a point of view still saturated with the stain of the Carrie Bradshaw approach to “love” (Carrie Bradshaw, who, by the way, had a much higher number than twenty, hence the Sex and the City episode entitled “Are We Sluts?”). In point of fact, the book’s narrative takes place in New York, not Boston, and its protagonist (instead called Delilah Darling) does her best to ooze the requisite number of “witty puns” that proves she is very much a Person Who Lives in NY (e.g. “Talking to him about anything other than hair was like talking to a box of hair. He was dull, wrapped in a pretty package. He was a foxymoron”).
So perhaps somewhere in the translation of 2006 to 2011 and New York to Boston, something went incredibly haywire. That Anna Faris herself is an actress known for being open to getting the most comedic mileage out of a character is likely what also went awry in this instance in terms of her willingness to parody the “caricature” of a so-called slut–a woman who simply can’t say no to the “potential prospect” of love and, in so doing, says yes to a lot of jank dick. Including “Disgusting Donald” (played by then husband Chris Pratt). A guy who she states is the “reason I learned to cook” because she was so embarrassed to be seen in public with him that she would simply offer to make his favorite meals at home. Upon running into him in his new sleek and svelte state at the bakery where her sister, Daisy (Ari Graynor), is trying wedding cake, he pretends they were just friends to his new girlfriend/fiancée, much to Ally’s dismay.
She scoffs to Daisy, “I can’t believe that he said that we were just friends–like I was the embarrassment!” It does, however, give her the Lucy Ricardo-esque harebrained scheme to start tracking down all her old exes and seeing if any one of them are worth revisiting for the sake of not having to up her number. Because, yes, being slut-shamed while firmly in the twenty-first century should not be at all astonishing to females who readily went to watch this movie when it came out. And, speaking of Lucy Ricardo, What’s Your Number? essentially plops the 50s right into this story in terms of its male viewpoint on how women who have slept with more than two men should be treated. For instance, when Colin (who Ally has hired to help her do some investigative work in finding all these former flames) finds the guy at the top of her list for revisiting, Jake Adams (Dave Annable), and he’s all too willing to make her into his trophy wife (he comes from a moneyed family, after all), his tune briefly changes when Ally tries to tell him her real number while dancing with him at her sister’s wedding. His response, like most men’s would be even now, is: “Right. Like you’ve had sex with twenty guys. Yuck.” She then laughs it off with him as well, suddenly feeling more like a prostitute than ever (at which point we have to wonder if Julia Roberts as Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman ever really lived happily ever after with Richard Gere as Edward Lewis as there might have been a strategic reason for why the film didn’t include a scene of them together in the future).
Ultimately, of course, it takes a whorish man (also known simply as a regular man) like Colin to accept Ally in all of her “grossness.” Because, as Joe Goldberg recently said in You, “Damaged finds damaged.” And being damaged as a woman, evidently, still meant (and means)–at least in 2011–acting with as much freedom as a man. The same holds true in the present, to be sure, it’s just that women have chosen to believe that they’re not still being severely judged for said “liberalism.”
