Female trouble

Spike Lee talks about porn, sperm donors, baby-hungry lesbians, and how male sex fantasies can become nightmares.

By Rebecca Walker

Aug 19, 2004 | Spike Lee and I have had a contentious relationship. In the years between our first meeting at an early screening of "She's Gotta Have It" in the mid-'80s, and going in on an ill-fated business venture together in the mid-'90s, we ran into each other at parties and on street corners, at which point I pretty consistently gave him a piece of my newly Ivy League-educated mind. I found "School Daze" sexist, "Jungle Fever" exploitative, "Girl Six" a departure, and so on. Lee never asked for my opinion, mind you. Flashing the impish smile of a provocateur, he seemed to enjoy my unsolicited comments, the more critical the better.

When we reconnected after a few years at a recent New York screening of his new film, "She Hate Me," we had both mellowed. I had left my arrogant, critical-to-the-point-of-alienation persona back in the '90s where it belonged, and he was shepherding yet another of his celluloid children into the world. I was happy to see him and, because of my interest in the changing face of contemporary masculinity, intrigued by the premise of the movie, which goes a little something like this: Jack Armstrong, a highly paid executive at a pharmaceutical company, is fired for blowing the whistle on his boss' wrongdoings. Broke and shut out of the conventional economy, he accepts an offer from his ex-girlfriend, Fatima, to impregnate lesbians at $10,000 a pop. Mayhem ensues, resulting in, among other things, Jack fathering 19 children. With Kerry Washington, Q-Tip and Bai Ling in the cast, and the inimitable sex guru Tristan Taormino behind the scenes as the "lesbian technical consultant," who could resist?

Many reviewers have been harsh, and the film has been denounced by several prominent black lesbians, but I found "She Hate Me" fascinating and entertaining. As a bisexual woman, I had a few mixed feelings about the way lesbians are portrayed and many more about Jack's ambivalence about his role as a daddy donor, but ultimately think, again, Lee has pushed some of the hottest buttons in the culture and asked some critical questions about what it means to be a man in America today. What happens to the men who can't stomach corporate America because their own integrity won't allow it? What happens to them when the feminine "soft landing" that used to be there with support and love in times of duress is as cold and opportunistic as the men back at the office? What happens when men are objectified by women who only need them for the sexual pleasure and sperm they can provide? And perhaps most pressing, on what basis can men cultivate intimacy when the external configurations, like traditional marriage and implicit heterosexuality, seem to be in a state of open-ended flux?

Of course, I had to talk to Lee about the film, only this time, I had a tape recorder. He called me in San Francisco from New York, where he was busy doing press for the film.

Let's start with the title, "She Hate Me." Who is hating who?

Rod Smart, a football player, came up with his own nickname, "He Hate Me." And in my estimate that's one of the greatest nicknames of all times. "She Hate Me" is a play on that.

I still don't get it. Who hates Rod Smart?

That's what journalists and everyone else would ask him, and he would say, "He." And they'd say, "Who's He?" He'd say, "The people that hate me." They'd say, "Why do they hate you?" And he would say, "They just hate; they're haters."

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