“It’s the Pygmalion,” I say to myself, “an updated Pygmalion with a dash of Cyrano de Bergerac.” That’s all I’m thinking the whole time I’m watching the hyper-sexist The Ugly Truth starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler (newly released on DVD). In playwright George Bernard Shaw’s version of Pygmalion, better known as My Fair Lady among theater buffs, a strong-willed, Cockney gutter snipe is transformed into a proper (read: demure and “precious”) English lady. In the end, through a montage-worthy series of transformative lessons, is determined to be worthy of love by an arrogant, obnoxious middle-age bachelor. How’s Frazier for a grand prize? For all her work to become acceptable for marriage and society, our hard-working lady wins a Viagra-eligible curmudgeon who is verbally abusive and disrespectful at every turn. But, hey, at least he’s paid and can keep his upgrade out of the gutter, right?

The literal closing message of the Pygmalion and its offspring, The Ugly Truth, is that a strong, independent, working woman should be grateful an oaf could love her—as worthless as she is with all her neuroses—but only after being smoothed out by that jerk’s sanding hands. This has been the message women have fallen in love with since the Pygmalion myth was first created centuries ago by the story’s primary beneficiaries, men.

The play, musical, and countless movie vehicles are based on a Greek myth about a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he has carved, after deciding he is turned off by the morally questionable women of his day. Prior to the falling for the woman of his own creation, the sculptor is no longer interested in women. I say the artsy woman hater is gay or at least a transy chaser (a man who only loves a man’s idea of a woman, not an actual woman is what?), but what do I know? That the sculpted woman, hereafter bound to a married life of servitude to this misogynist, was granted the breath of life by the goddess Venus, another woman, means that either women really hate other women or that this is a story only a man could dream up. I’m choosing the latter with some admitted reservations. I’m also questioning why this a story that women have come to love, celebrate even, over a gazillion generations.

Not that the tale has consistently been sold as patriarchal bunk, there has been cosmetics applied to this pig over time. Through the ages, the Pygmalion myth has been updated to present the spitfire woman needing strong male guidance to be secretly present underneath the performance she’s mastered to secure the safety of a financially profitable marriage. In My Fair Lady, Henry Higgins is warned that Eliza Doolittle has been trained well enough to set-up shop as a florist in her own business, and that she has the radical option of supporting a sexy, albeit broke boy who offers to love and respect her unconditionally. We are sold her rejection of her own financial independence and the option of a caring man as a matter of course for the gold of love.

In The Ugly Truth, we’re not sure what Katherine Heigl wins exactly in the middle-age frat boy, Gerard Butler. In this new Pygmalion, Heigl goes through all of the machinations to win the social capital of landing a doctor, who is allergic to the real Heigl. To get the doc, Butler teaches her a testosterone driven version of The Rules, making Heigl lift her tits up and dumb herself down, get her to hide her eccentricities (which are so hyperbolically expressed that I know a man wrote and directed her character too), and literally puts words in her mouth vis-à-vis an earpiece (thus the Cyrano reference). Spoiler alert! Heigl gets the doc who buys the fake Heigl, but dumps him for her Svengali who still has managed to make Heigl less of who she was and more of who Butler wanted her to be.

When the sculpture asks the sculptor why he loves her, he responds, “I don’t know, but I do.” And this nothing, nearly offensive answer in the eyes of male mythmakers is enough for today’s beautiful, successful, highly educated professional woman (today’s loud Cockney gutter snipe), because until these moron losers come along to lend that woman value, to lend her his social capital, she is just a cold, unlovable block of stone desperately waiting a cocky man’s violently molding chisel. If that’s the ugly truth about what straight men want and think of you, ladies? If that’s your only choice, then the Taliban woman might not be the only one needing rescuing from a culture of low expectations and bad marital options. Over 100 million dollars in The Ugly Truth’s gross ticket sales says some women believe these are American women’s only option.  Sadly, here’s a bit of truth I kinda fudged: it wasn’t a man penning this refitted Pygmalion, but three Venus goddesses produced and wrote the screenplay for The Ugly Truth, breathing new life into old misogyny. Now that’s some ugly truth.