Women aren't funny

Meghan O'Rourke has an exceedingly dumb analysis of Knocked Up, prompted by co-star Katherine Heigl's thought-provoking comment that the movie was "a little sexist," because it painted "the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight," while the men were portrayed as "lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys." O'Rourke basically reinforces the notion that women are humorless and uptight in her deconstruction of the funniest scene in the movie, in which Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen are shrooming in a Vegas hotel room, and Rudd, after a long monologue about what he fears in his marriage, suddenly sticks his fist in his mouth and says wonderingly, "It tastes like a rainbow!":

It is hard not to read his statement as a metaphor for the film's ambivalent view of the message "women" are trying to render unto "men": that a caring, sharing domestic life is a "rainbow" men are crazy not to accept wholesale. Poor Pete's dilemma, the tension he is trying to drive at, is that he can't swallow the rainbow (so to speak) however much he tries—and has made his wife into a disappointed micromanager in the process.

Um, or it's a hilariously accurate description of something someone would say after they've eaten mushrooms. It was obviously a non-sequitur comic moment designed to lighten the serious tone of the speech that had just gone before. Maybe if female Slate writers did more mushrooms and less third-rate grad student cultural criticism, we women wouldn't have the reputation of always sucking the fun out of the room.