Traister's thesis is that unlike the Miranda Priestly of the book, who was presented as a comic caricature of a demanding boss, the Miranda Priestly of the movie, played by Meryl Streep, is more nuanced and sympathetic, and is, in fact, "worth cheering for." Traister therefore sees the sexual politics of the movie as superior to those of the book, because the movie takes the side of Miranda, the powerful, successful woman, rather than the side of Andy, who's just young and whiny. (Vilifying young women who have conflicts with older women is not new for Salon's "feminists," one of whom recently blew off young professional women's frustrations with not being mentored on the fact that if they don't feel like they're being adequately supported, they must be spending all their time on IM.) In keeping with her dislike of Andy, Traister's contempt for Lauren Weisberger, who wrote the book, comes off as gratuitously hostile -- she grouses about how Weisberger "sold out" Anna Wintour by writing the book in the first place (what DO you owe to the boss who treats you like shit?), lectures imperiously about how Weisberger is probably too vain to realize that her writing is not responsible for the success of her novel, because it is Wintour's personality that sold it, and delights in flights of fancy about how horrified Weisberger must be to find everyone taking Miranda's side after seeing the movie. It becomes more than a little over-the-top. Weisberger didn't write a great book, but she wrote a very engaging book. Attempting to rob her of the credit for that, as if any old body who met a colorful character could sit down and pound out a best-selling novel about the experience, comes off as simple nastiness.

Her piece gets off to an even worse start by drawing on movies she doesn't seem to remember very well to support her lament about women bosses. She refers to Katharine, Sigourney Weaver's character in Working Girl, as being punished in the end for her "sins of ambition." If you have actually seen Working Girl, you know that Katharine is not guilty of "ambition." Katharine is guilty of stealing. She becomes a villain when she steals an idea from Tess (Melanie Griffith) after lying to Tess that it isn't worth pursuing. That's not the sin of "ambition." That's the sin of sucking, which is rightly the subject of comeuppance in every Cinderella story that Hollywood has ever produced. Tess, in fact, is enormously ambitious, and she wants to ascend to Katharine's very position. She just wants to do it while respecting other people she works with, especially women who work as secretaries. The most charming scene in that movie comes at the very end, when Tess explains to her new secretary (the divine, then-unknown Amy Aquino) that she does not expect a personal waitress, and she doesn't expect to be addressed as "Ms. McGill." "I expect you to call me Tess," she says. "And I don't expect you to fetch me coffee unless you're getting some for yourself." There are movies that reject the idea of ambition in women, but I don't think Working Girl is a good target, given its sweeping ending in which one tiny office window out of a million becomes the center of what Carly Simon's "Let The River Run" openly celebrates. There's a difference between making comic villains out of women because they're powerful and making comic villains out of women because of the way they choose to employ power.

Traister is right, of course, that the Miranda of the movie is more sympathetic than the Miranda of the book. Most of the book's darkest and funniest details about Miranda's psychotic demands are boiled down in the movie to two anecdotes: (1) Miranda gives Andy three hours to get the new unpublished Harry Potter manuscript for her children to read; and (2) Miranda demands that Andy get her a plane home from Miami in the middle of a hurricane. Of course, this doesn't make the movie more or less "fair" to a fictional character; it simply makes Miranda a different person. Miranda in the book forces Andy to spend days scouring Manhattan looking for an unnamed antique shop, only to reveal that she had the shop's business card the whole time. Miranda in the movie doesn't do that. It's not more or less "fair," it's just a story about a boss who isn't as bad.

Where Traister begins to lose me is in her conviction that Streep's Miranda should be cheered. Traister defends Miranda largely by defending Wintour (a rather unfair approach to begin with, given that Weisberger has never claimed that the book was factually perfect), citing a former male subordinate who pointed out that while Wintour was just as personally wretched as Miranda is in the movie, she was also "a brilliant and talented editor." Traister, of course, trots out the old saw that women have a tendency to be labeled "bitches" simply for being assertive and strong, implying that this is what has bedeviled Wintour's reputation and that it is what afflicts Miranda in the movie.

Here's the problem: If people are saying you're a bitch because you tell them honestly what you want and expect them to do their jobs, then your problem is gender politics. If people are saying you're a bitch because every morning, you fling your coat and your giant bag down on your assistant's desk without any regard for what she might be doing or working on, as if she is a lesser being than you, then your problem is that you're a bitch. The fact that someone is a brilliant and talented editor doesn't excuse atrocious treatment of subordinates. Why would talented people be more entitled to be assholes than other people? That makes no sense. After all, the Miranda of the movie threatens Andy with being fired if she doesn't come up with that unpublished Harry Potter manuscript in three hours, just to please Miranda's spoiled children -- an errand having nothing to do with the business that is employing Andy, and an errand that may or may not even be possible. Am I supposed to cheer for that? Am I supposed to cheer for the fact that Miranda can't be bothered to learn Andy's name, or that she expects Andy to do her children's science projects for them?

Traister is particularly infatuated with a speech that Miranda gives after the supposedly bookish Andy disrespectfully chortles at the seriousness with which Miranda goes about choosing a belt for a photo layout. The movie nails the fact that Andy is being just awful at this moment -- walking into someone else's business and acting too smarty-pants for it. The dynamic that Weisberger didn't (unsurprisingly) address as effectively in the book is her own arrogance in entering a real workplace where people are working their asses off and expecting to float above it. The movie is smart to emphasize that hard work goes on at a fashion magazine, and you can choose to find it interesting or you can choose to think it's sort of stupid, but if you take a job there, you need to be respectful of other people's work. So far, so good.

Of course, the way Miranda approaches it is by insisting that Andy is a hypocrite, because the blue sweater she is wearing probably came from Casual Corner (horrors!), which only carried that color because a couple of seasons ago, Miranda and company showed it in their magazine. Therefore, Miranda argues, Andy is in fact enmeshed in the fashion world whether she likes it or not. This, of course, is beside the point, and bullshit. Under Miranda's theory, she is the master of everyone, and everyone is part of her domain, because even cheap clothes are influenced by runway fashions. That's fine, of course, but the problem is that you can still not care. Andy can still legitimately not care about fashion. If you pick out the blue sweater and you wouldn't give a shit whether it was this color blue or another color blue, you can still legitimately argue you don't care and you don't think the difference between one blue and another is important. Miranda calls out Andy for entirely the wrong thing -- "You do too care; you just don't know it because you're ignorant," rather than "this is a place of business, and if you're too good for it, you can damn well leave, but you're not going to chortle contemptuously at the work that goes on."

Just as Traister says, the movie heavily tilts the scene in Miranda's favor to get the audience to cheer the speech. (You don't get Meryl Streep for your movie if her character is going to be a caricature.) It's like one of those episodes of Designing Women where Dixie Carter would give an impossibly articulate rant about sexism, and the audience would scream with applause. It is a tribute indeed to how amazingly good Streep is in this movie that she makes the speech seem positively withering. The thing about the scene, though, is that it's one of those where the delivery of the speech is so intimidating that you feel yourself wilt under its power, and it isn't until later that you look back on it and realize that the entire thing was bullshit. What Miranda is saying ultimately makes no sense, but the movie -- and Streep -- are exactly right that people like Miranda can make bullshit sound like gold. That's what makes them who they are.

But what fascinated me even more is that the fact that Miranda is more nuanced in the movie seems to have blinded Traister to the ways in which the movie's sexual politics are far more troubling to those in the book. To begin with, she seems unconcerned with the fact that while Miranda is more human, Andy is less so. Gone from the movie are the touches of rebellion -- maybe self-indulgent, maybe not -- in which Andy delivers Starbucks to the homeless on the company tab, the complications of her relationship with her closest female friend (essentially supplanted in the movie with a stereotypical gay male confidante who gives her clothes, as seen in every other chick movie you have ever seen), and all of her often biting and observant inner monologues. The Andy of the movie is almost entirely devoid of insight about anything; the Andy of the book may be unduly hard on Miranda, but she does have smart thoughts.

Even more unfortunate, the movie eliminates the far more interesting relationship in the book between Andy and Emily, Miranda's first assistant. In the book, Andy and Emily are eventually able to overcome the competition and tension that Miranda's demanding bullshit creates between them long enough to occasionally find minor comfort in commiserating. Emily in the movie is nearly as unforgivably awful as Miranda in the book. There are wonderful moments in the book in which the blindingly efficient, unflappable Emily -- who has told Andy over and over that she should be grateful just to be working for Miranda -- breaks down and admits that Miranda's demands have exhausted and frustrated her as well, and in which she and Andy are able to create little threads of understanding. There is almost none of that in the movie. Perhaps the movie is more "fair" about Miranda; the book is more "fair" about Emily.

A few other problems in no particular order:

1. The most offensive involves the matter of Christian. In the book, Andy meets a glamorous writer named Christian, who flirts with her and tempts her, and with whom she ultimately does a little dirty dancing and so forth that she finds kind of seductive, but who ultimately amounts to little more than a shallow, harmless flirtation that's part of the entire superficial Runway experience she eventually rejects. In the movie -- and it makes me gag just thinking about it, honestly -- Andy sleeps with Christian and wakes up to find that he is a monstrous, betraying asshole, making the movie just one more goddamn Good Girls Don't cautionary tale in which girls who have sex for fun in Paris are immediately punished with a karmic wallop of some sort. This phenomenon is at least as insidious as anything that Hollywood has ever done to female businesswomen, and the fact that Traister could praise the gender politics of the movie without apparently noticing this aspect is disappointing, to say the least.

2. It does not serve women to conflate being abusive to other people and being intelligent and assertive. It does not serve women, because it does not serve anyone. Miranda is abusive. That is not praiseworthy. The fact that she is a woman and she is powerful does not excuse anything and everything she does.

3. In the book, Andy bounces back from her bad experience with Miranda by finding a mentor who is a woman. A supportive, plus-size woman who's an editor at Seventeen, who agrees to read some of Andy's writing and ultimately works connections and pulls strings on her behalf. In the book, Andy is ultimately pulled up by networking with women. In the movie, the rescuing mentor is inexplicably replaced with a newspaper editor who is -- for no apparent reason -- a man instead. Why is the next boss, the boss who bails her out, changed from a heavy woman working in a traditionally female-oriented publication to a neatly dressed man working in traditional newspaper publishing?

4. In the book, Andy's relatively happy ending does not rely on getting back together with her boyfriend, because she doesn't. Instead, it relies primarily on her finding a measure of professional success. In the movie, Andy's happy ending is primarily about getting back together with her boyfriend.

5. The movie includes an invented scene, late in the proceedings, in which long after Andy has quit, Miranda and Andy spot each other on the street as Miranda is getting into her car. Andy waves gamely. Miranda coolly gets into her car. But then, in the secret sanctuary of her back seat, Miranda stares after Andy with love and then smiles to herself. Along the same lines, the movie adds a preposterous scene in which Andy learns that Miranda has been telling people who call that they simply must give Andy a job. See? All that time she was berating Andy and threatening her over preposterous demands and forcing her to compete with Emily, she secretly loved her. This ridiculous notion that people who mistreat you secretly want what's best for you -- they beat you because they love you -- is exactly what at least half the world's women need to stop telling themselves. People don't treat you like shit because they want you to be a better person. They may have high expectations of you because they want you to be better, but they don't refuse to learn your name or refuse to call you by your name or make every remark to you sarcastic and insulting because they care about you. They don't throw their coats at you or ridicule you or demand a steak and then berate you for giving it to them because they want what's best for you. It is only women who are expected to adopt this kind of bullshit mentality, and the idea that a movie that so embraces it would somehow be interpreted as feminist just burns my bacon.

Most shocking is Traister's reaction to the final scene. After quite correctly dissing Weisberger's silly ending, in which Andy has to flee Miranda after her best friend is in a life-threatening accident, Traister inexplicably expresses her preference for the movie's equally silly ending, in which Andy witnesses Miranda executing a brutal double-cross of her most loyal friend and supporter -- probably the person who has done the most to defend and support her for many years. He backs up Miranda, works for her, and remains loyal to her, only to find the handle of her knife in his back. It is after this awful, painful scene unfolds that Andy sits, shell-shocked, thinking that perhaps she doesn't want Miranda's life. This is the moment when Miranda tells Andy that they are very much alike. Andy reacts with discomfort, because she's thinking that perhaps someone who has no friends, is universally feared, and has no one but her assistant to confide in when she gets a divorce -- apparently because it is her assistant's job to sit there and listen -- is not the person Andy is looking to emulate.

Andy asks Miranda, "What if I don't want to be like you?" Miranda confidently replies, "Don't be naive. Everyone wants this. Everyone wants to be us." Somehow, Traister reaches the remarkable conclusion that Miranda is right. That in fact, all women want to be incredibly powerful to the point where other people fear displeasing them. Or fear, as she puts it, the curl of their lip. Of course, the fact that this scene comes on the heels of a brutal betrayal of a friend is something Traister does not even see fit to mention, despite the fact that it is what Andy is reacting to. Instead, Traister mocks Andy for not being smart enough to see it as good news when a brilliant woman in your field tells you you're good at your job. Miranda, of course, didn't say Andy was good at her job. She said she saw a lot of herself in Andy. It is not professional compliment. It is a comment on character.

This isn't the only time that Traister simply changes the events of the movie to better fit the thesis. She insists that Miranda takes Andy to Paris in the movie because she "sees something in her junior charge," implying that the movie has Miranda somehow take Andy under her wing. This is flatly untrue. In the movie, Miranda takes Andy to Paris instead of Emily because a seriously ill Emily has made a minor misstep in front of her, and Miranda is being punishing and manipulative, just as she always is, playing the two of them against each other by requiring Andy to do the dirty work of passing the news to Emily that Emily won't be going on the trip -- something no ethical boss would require one employee to do to another. Ironically, in the book, Miranda comes much closer to beginning to offer Andy actual professional assistance -- perhaps a connection to The New Yorker, where she is dying to work -- although she makes it contingent on adequate ass-kissing for the requisite period of time.

Similarly, Traister somehow manages to blame Andy for the fact that Miranda (in another invented scene) starts spilling her guts about her miserable personal life, leaving Andy no choice but to ask if there's anything she can do. "Your job," Miranda says, a response that Traister cheers, accusing Andy of having "grasp[ed] at a social advantage," simply by asking a crying, obviously wrecked woman whether there's anything she can do. What? Seriously, WHAT? It's Andy's fault that her boss called her into a hotel room late at night and started dumping personal details? Traister's insistence that Miranda simply "informs" Andy of the divorce is, once again, a complete fiction. In fact, Miranda weeps over the consequences -- what the press will say, what it will do to the children, how it will look, what people will think. She does not inform. She cries on the shoulder of the assistant she has berated for months, and it's made clear that she does it because there simply isn't anyone else. None of this is an assistant's job. Andy's tentative "Is there anything I can do?" is not "grasping at a social advantage." It is literally the only thing she can do, and Miranda responds with a curt and insulting implication that Andy should be thinking about her job.

Traister similarly recasts Miranda's utter betrayal of her closest professional associate as "manipulating a colleague." Make no mistake: Miranda doesn't "manipulate" anyone. That's just not the truth of what happens. What happens is that she takes a job away from someone she knows wants it and has earned it, and she uses the sheer force of her own importance to take it from him.

Ultimately, Traister goes on to sarcastically and imperiously judge Andy for not liking behavior that isn't "warm and squidgy" because it's "traditionally feminine." This is flat-out bullshit. Knifing your friends in the back isn't objectionable because it's "not warm and squidgy," or because it's "not traditionally feminine." Plenty of people, both male and female, would find Miranda's actions equally disgusting if taken by either a man or a woman. This is the kind of defensive reinvention of facts that serves no one.

At the close of her piece, Traister makes the remarkable assertion that Miranda is enviable because "she likes herself." Yes, she has no friends, and there is no one who spends time with her for any reason other than that (1) she pays them to; or (2) they see an advantage in it. Yes, she has no one to tell about her divorce other than her assistant. But oh yes, she likes herself. She is one happy, happy lady. If you can watch this movie and walk away with the notion that that Miranda Priestly is right that everyone secretly wants to be feared as she is feared, then you are not my kind of feminist. You are, to my eye, no kind of feminist.