To understand the specific gravity of What Women Want (2000), one must ignore the 2020s lens of #MeToo and look squarely at the year 2000.

What Women Want (2000) is not a great film. It is a fascinatingly flawed, deeply problematic, sincerely sentimental artifact. For any student of gender studies or pop culture, the keyword unlocks a specific data set: the anxieties of men who feared obsolescence and the hopes of women who demanded consideration.