I don't think it's bashing at all, because it is very true. Especially if men still think the majority of us are in love with the color pink.lol
It's been a while since I've seen it, but this is an upcoming movie night pick I plan to avoid.

This 1958 movie has one of my all time favorite actors in it. Jimmy Stewart. That aside, I hate this movie. The acting isn't bad. The cinematography isn't bad. The directing isn't bad. On the whole, the writing wasn't bad.

I hate the message of the movie.

The female lead is a witch who meets Jimmy Stewart's character and wants him to fall in love with her. So she casts a spell. She wears slacks. She smokes. She owns an unusual art store, if I remember correctly.

In the course of the film, he falls in love with her, she feels guilty that it was a spell, she ends up confessing and he leaves. She gets him back in the end by giving up her powers, stops smoking, starts wearing dresses, and changes the content of her store to something so girly girly, pink and cutesy it makes me want to gag on the overload of pink and sugar.

To me, the message was that a woman has to do all the changing and become whatever it is the man wants in order to get the guy. That men are not expected to compromise in anyway and that a woman show know her place and keep to it. This last part is the part that really pisses me off the most, to be honest.

Look at the timing of the movie. 1958. The 60's are well know as the era of the civil rights movement and womens lib and the cultural revolution. The 70's are the second half of that revolution with the growing anti-establishment sentiment and the right to explore areas of freedom that were normally considered hush-hush and almost taboo.

But the baby steps in the Womens Lib movement were already happening. Ever since the end of WWII and women were told to go back to their kitchens and nurseries and steno pools. Women discovered they liked working for their own money, that they liked having more responsibilities, that they liked not being dependant on their husbands. So over the next decade, women were making the first steps in pushing through a deeply entrenched, male dominated society and demanding that they no longer be treated as a step above children. By they the 60's they were finally able to go from walking to running in this mission.

To me, this movie is a obvious attempt to remind women of their 'proper' roles and that that they are the ones that have to accommodate the men and not the other way around.