I want to be him so bad
Envy isn't a pretty feeling - it implies looking up at someone, and being below the person you look up to. Envy doesn't know any other way upwards than through the someone else going down, and a lot of the times, it's just irrational. Envy is biblically hierarchichal, even when there's no point in being so.
... and I'm so envious of Timothée Chalament's Willy Wonka, I want to literally be him.
I don't think women today, generally, are envious of men, at least I'm not. If I see a man living up to some type of masculine ideal, there's just nothing to be envious of. It's like a pear being envious of an apple. Clearly, me and him were made for different things. Sometimes, I think this can be a bad thing. Celebrating maleness, as a woman, can almost be easier than celebrating femaleness. Envy is a vicious, maladaptive thing, but at least it invites for competition. And this lack of envy towards men but fullblown envy towards women, just makes the cat-fighting-bitches-trope a reality. And I'm also not sure this not-envying-the-other-sex-thing goes both ways, because men seem to envy women all the time.
Envy isn't rational, it's emotional, and like a lot of negative emotions (ignorance, hatred) it expands in darkness. A good example of the absolute irrationality of envy, is when a guy on a podcast is asked to guess how often women are flown out to Saudi Arabia via Instagram DM's, and how there's a whole other genre of absurd podcasting where a guy invites a group of only fans-girls to his podcast so they can talk about the insane amount of money they make for being young and gorgeous while the male viewers send in morally superior messages about how the girls are big whores with no future. There's just such a breeding rage over the persieved power in female sexuality, that's not completely imagined, but often snowballs into a complete lunacy of misogyny. The most accurate portrayal of this sexually fueled morally righteous envy gone bizarre is in of course Always Sunny when Mac explains to his trans woman-ex and her husband in a gym that they're commiting sodomy and then asks the woman in question why she never called him. And any sexual power of a female body can just as well be turned into sexual vulnerability. When men are envious of women, and women are envious of women, there's just a double negative effect. It's almost preferable that women are envious of men, just to spread the envy out a bit. Envy is at heart a personal feeling, but if you're envious enough that men have a room of their own, the collective feeling might spur the making of that room. But when women stop envying men, but men keep envying women, I don't know what the results will be.
But there's something in the androgyny of Chalament and men like him that makes them almost graspable for envious feelings, and I cannot help but grasp. Especially not when these type of guys are portrayed as certainly aloof, but in the end applaudable individuals. The envy wants to bite in and say it's because this celebration of engigmaticism and eccentriality is often limited to men, but honestly I'm too deep in wanting to literally be Timothee Chalament to know if that's even true or not. I don't know if it's easier to be an eccentric guy than an eccentric woman, just because in a movie for literal children a guy manages to build a chocolate factory to torture kids in. But I also end up thinking of James Acaster, another classic whimiscal little guy, on Bake-off being a complete disaster. While Acaster himself described suffocating anxiety around the entire thing, maybe feeling the depth of this stupid type of personality I think we both have, in reality he was the star of the show. An absent minded man is a potential genius, or at least a funny guy; an absent minded woman is a bimbo. A woman that can't bake, that would be a failure would be a failure, a man that can't is heartwarming. But writing all this doesn't really feel true, it just feels emotionally true. In reality, the things I find difficult in being a engigmatic personality - loneliness, scattered thoughts, disastrous personal planning, naivité joined with outlandish thinking making the foundation of ones subjective, valued, world nausesly close to nonsense - aren't really gendered: maybe, just like female envy, envying people in the same position as you with just a slight possible advantage, just takes away the possibility of recognition and community to replace it with viciousness and irrational competetion. In fact, while I would've said at 15 that this feeling was more black-pilled (yes I've felt this way since I was 15, you're on my website so you're not allowed to judge me) as an adult woman, I am filled with more chidish joy and, yes, kinship watching Wonka (2023), than I am with a burning rage to be a ficticious chocolatier.
I am still a little envious of Willy Wonka, though.
me but if there was a wonka-pill