But these days, the women’s gym first franchised in 1995 by Waco, Texas, fitness entrepreneur and born-again Christian Gary Heavin is not just doing battle with the saturated-fat-mongers across the parking lot. The past month has seen a whirlwind of confusing press about how much — if any — of Curves’ profits Heavin gives to anti-abortion groups, and what kind of anti-abortion groups. The storm has left Heavin, franchise owners, gym members and the media locked in a battle that illustrates the confusing powers of the press, the Internet, and political and religious conviction. What seems clear is that Heavin is a committed foe of abortion who has contributed his own money to health agencies that discourage terminating pregnancies; he even blasted a local chapter of the Girl Scouts in print for its associations with Planned Parenthood. But Texas Planned Parenthood leaders have praised some of the health centers Heavin funds, and some feminists continue to defend Curves as one of the most pro-woman health and business ventures in the country. The fracas, which has included imprecise reporting and a scattershot boycott, prompts the question: What does it mean for a business to be good for women?

Until a month ago, Curves felt like one of the most female-friendly businesses around. The Curves program (three 30-minute sessions a week; no more, no less) is created specifically for big women, middle-aged women, elderly women, women who haven’t exercised in years — women who haven’t exactly felt the love in expensive gyms that offer kickboxing and Yogilates classes. The 30-minute circuit involves a series of stations and combines a cardiovascular workout with hydraulic weight-training, designed to grow with a body’s capabilities. The gyms are designed for women, too: There are no mirrors, patrons are encouraged to come with friends, and machines are arranged in one down-to-earth circle. Membership prices vary from $29 to $59 a month, depending on location. Until this year, the proliferation of Curves has been entirely due to word-of-mouth business; the company had no national ad campaign.

The chain has drawn hopeful small-business owners — most of them women. The price to purchase a location is under $30,000, and an additional monthly royalty fee hovers around $400, plus approximately $200 a month for international advertising. Rents tend to be manageable because of Curves’ minimal square-footage requirements. With branches everywhere, from New York and Los Angeles to North Pole, Alaska, the chain is supposed to top out at the end of 2004 with 9,000 locations. All in all, Curves’ history had read like a business chapter from “Our Bodies, Our Selves.”

Until April 20, when San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll published a brief item alleging that 49-year-old Heavin “is a heavy contributor to several organizations allied with Operation Save America, the rather more muscular successor to Operation Rescue, the anti-choice group.” Carroll’s piece also mentioned an interview with Heavin in Christianity Today, and implied that in it, the fitness guru had boasted about giving away “10 percent of Curves’ profits” to anti-choice groups.

A week later, Chronicle columnist Ruth Rosen wrote a longer follow-up to Carroll’s piece. In it, she extolled Curves’ seemingly feminist virtues, and then identified Heavin as a former deadbeat dad who last year gave “at least $5 million of his profits to some of the most militant anti-abortion groups in the country.” Again referencing an interview in Christianity Today, Rosen wrote of Heavin’s pride in his anti-abortion activism. She pointed out that half of the $10 million (which she called “10 percent of their company’s gross revenues”) the Heavins doled out to charity last year went to “three Texas organizations to fund ‘pregnancy crisis centers’ supported by Operation Save America — the same organization that blamed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on God’s retribution for abortions.” Rosen also interviewed several Curves members who had quit the gym because of Heavin’s reported donations. “Here, then, is a feminist dilemma,” concluded Rosen. “What to do? Your decision. There are alternatives, including just plain walking.”

It was a sharper battle cry than Carroll’s, and no sooner had both pieces been published than they were burning their way across the blogosphere with the speed of the Paris Hilton sex tape, hopping from in box to in box and being referenced in gender and fitness chat rooms. “Here’s a guy making money off women, and he’s donating money to undermine women’s rights. I am so not ever going to set foot in one of those places,” wrote Gaiagurl in a comment that summed up many of the Web exchanges on the subject. Ten years ago, I had probably already scarfed my weight in Domino’s pizza when someone hazily mentioned to me, in my sophomore year of college, that the company’s owner was a vocal and wealthy supporter of anti-abortion groups. The story, which was true and inspired a Domino’s boycott by the National Organization for Women, had been passed by word of mouth for years. Now, it only takes minutes to make sure that every wired, politically conscious consumer knows where not to spend their money.

Except that in this case, some of the information may not have been accurate.

The day after Rosen’s column, Curves issued a press release headlined “Curves Founders’ Make Large Charitable Donations — But Not to Radical Pro-Life Groups.” The release quoted Heavin as saying “Neither Curves International Inc., nor my wife, nor I gave money to Operation Save America or any other radical pro-life group.” It went on to explain that the Heavins “support organizations that contribute to the overall health and wellness of women and their families” by donating to three specific health charities in central Texas: Care Net, the Family Practice Center of McLennan County, and the McLennan County Collaborative Abstinence Project. The release also detailed the Heavins’ other contributions, to Shriners Hospitals, the Natchez Children’s Home in Mississippi, the American Cancer Society, the Arthritis Foundation and the American Heart Association. According to the press release, the couple created a $2 million endowment at Thomas Edison State University in New Jersey, and funded a five-year, $5 million medical study on methods of improving women’s health at Baylor University.

On May 13, the San Francisco Chronicle published a lengthy correction to both Carroll’s and Rosen’s stories. The correction refuted Rosen’s description of Heavin’s chosen charities as “some of the most militant anti-abortion groups in the country,” stating: “That characterization is not accurate.” Neither, according to the correction, was Rosen’s assertion that the donations fund pregnancy crisis centers: “Only one of the recipients, Care Net, operates pregnancy centers that are designed to dissuade pregnant women from having abortions while offering other support services to encourage adoption.” The paper specified that Heavin has pledged $1 million to Care Net over the next five years. His largest contribution, $3.75 million, is to the Family Practice Center of McLennan County, which provides health care to many uninsured Texans, and “does not provide abortions but is not actively involved in the anti-abortion movement.” Heavin’s third Texas charity, the McLennan County Abstinence Project, which will receive $250,000 over five years, does not mention abortion or birth control as options when counseling teens on their sexual health. The correction clarified that contrary to both Carroll’s and Rosen’s pieces, Heavin’s contributions were not any percentage of Curves’ revenues, but part of Heavin’s “personal wealth.” It also corrected both Rosen and Carroll by noting that quotes they attributed to Heavin’s Christianity Today interview actually came from Today’s Christian, a magazine affiliated with Christianity Today. And, the correction stated, contrary to both journalists’ suggestions, Heavin is not allied with Operation Save America, but had been praised by its members for his donations to the above groups.

In an e-mail to Salon, Rosen, a former historian at the University of California at Davis who has been with the Chronicle for four years, wrote, “Before I wrote my column, I called the public relations officer at Curves, who verified all the information I had gathered. After my column appeared, however, a new public relations officer sent out a press release saying that there were several errors in my column, including that Gary Heavin, who has said and written that he opposes abortion, did not give $5 million to three crisis pregnancy centers. That turns out to be true. He gave $5 million to three different nonprofit groups in Waco, Texas, all of whom are anti-choice and do not discuss or provide birth control. One is a pregnancy crisis center, another is an abstinence-only promotion collaborative and the third is a Catholic family practice center.” Carroll, who is currently traveling across the country, could not be reached for comment.

It looked as though the charges against Heavin were not as distressing as they had appeared: He had given his own private money to anti-abortion groups, but not the kind that picket and hold bloody fetus posters or encourage violence. Some would argue that for pro-choice activists, these kinds of institutions are even more invidious, since they are more rational and try to take the place of groups like Planned Parenthood; others say that they simply provide another choice for women. A philosophical question had been raised about what it means to be militant, what it means to be anti-abortion, and what it means to patronize a company whose CEO may have radically different beliefs than many of his clientele.

But there were other questions as well, specifically about the legions of women who had not been paying close attention to every twist and turn of the reporting. No matter what details the correction clarified, the original alarm had been raised across the country, and members were dropping out of Curves. Charylu Roberts, who, with her business partner, Cinnamon, owns two San Francisco franchises, lost 16 clients in the weeks following Carroll’s column. Only two new members joined her gym during a period in which she had been averaging 10; she estimated her losses at around $10,000. Anne Marx, a lawyer who owns two Bay Area Curves locations with her husband, said that her Rockridge franchise was hit the hardest, fastest. In a matter of days, Marx said, she had lost six customers, and her total climbed to 13. “There was something about being in a slightly wealthier area where women felt more empowered,” said Marx, noting that one of her customers actually told her, “I know I can go somewhere else that will cost more money. Not all women have that option, but I do.” Then there was the fear that pro-life activists, who had surely heard the call of a fellow traveler running a business they could support, would join the gym.

Franchise owners — many of whom had been aware of their boss’s religious convictions and his pro-life stance, but considered it a quiet reality unrelated to Curves’ business practices — were poring over information and talking to Curves executives to determine where Heavin really stood in relation to radical anti-abortion groups.

In her e-mail, Rosen referenced an editorial Heaven wrote for the Waco-Tribune Herald on Feb. 28, 2004, in response to a local boycott of the Girl Scouts for having named Planned Parenthood of Central Texas executive director Pam Smallwood a “Woman of Distinction.” In it, Heavin derides Planned Parenthood literature, asserting, “I have a 10-year-old daughter. I would absolutely not allow her to be exposed to this material. I don’t want her being taught masturbation and told that homosexuality is normal.” Heavin identifies his $5 million gifts to the three Texas health charities as a venture called “the Women’s Health Collaborative Project.”

It’s this umbrella organization that has created the most confusion about Heavin’s alleged ties to Operation Save America. The confusion stems from a letter posted on the Operation Save America Web site by Rusty Lee Thomas, an assistant director at Operation Rescue/Operation Save America. In the letter, Thomas describes telephoning Heavin last year for support in his mission to destroy Planned Parenthood; his letter asserts that Heavin was supportive. He then reports on Heavin’s formation of the Women’s Health Collaborative Project and commends Heavin’s three charities as worthy participants in the anti-abortion crusade. Thomas concludes that “Mr. Heavin has removed the mask of legitimacy from Planned Parenthood and is helping to make their ‘services’ obsolete.” Thomas’ letter, which was signed “In King Jesus’ Service,” was headlined “Women’s Collaborative Effort” — close enough to Heavin’s “Women’s Health Collaborative Project” that it looked like there was a link between the men, and thus between their organizations.

But even Planned Parenthood’s Smallwood drew a very sharp line between the fuzzy Operation Save America connections and the charities to which Heavin has actually contributed. By phone, she emphasized that there has been a lot of “misinformation” on the Web regarding the Curves founder. The Heavin-supported Family Practice Center, she said, “is a very necessary and worthwhile organization in Waco. They don’t practice abortions, but they are a primary care facility for indigent populations and people who are uninsured. Without it, thousands of people would not be able to receive medical care.” As for the Care Net Pregnancy Crisis Center, Smallwood said, “Although we don’t agree certainly on abortion, they do not participate in demonstrations against our organization, as some other groups do.” And about the McLennan County Abstinence Project, Smallwood said, “Again, we don’t agree with each other’s approaches regarding sex education. But they are not in the business of attacking us or demonstrating in front of Planned Parenthood, as are some of the organizations it was initially suggested Mr. Heavin was connected to. I have no idea how that information got started,” she said.

“I had a 40-minute phone call with Gary Heavin,” said lawyer and franchise owner Marx. “I asked him questions like a lawyer asks questions, so that I could go back to my customers and tell them the truth: that he had no relationship to Rusty Lee Thomas, no relationship with Save America, no relationship with Operation Rescue.” Why does she believe him? “He’s not backing away from what his beliefs are,” Marx said. “He’s not apologizing for what he does believe but he is clearing up things that are not accurate.”

Indeed, in a letter sent to franchisees on Friday, May 14, the day after the Chronicle correction, and obtained by Salon, Heavin expressed his concern about the fallout from the story at the same time that he underlined the strength of his beliefs. “Imagine having to defend a five million dollar gift that went primarily to our local county health clinic that simply cares for the indigent,” wrote Heavin. “Or having to defend a gift to a crisis pregnancy center that provides health care and adoption services so that women who choose to keep their babies might be able to do so.” The letter went on, “I will be careful to support organizations that are responsible and reasonable. Unfortunately, the experiences of the past two weeks have shown us that being pro-life and Christian are qualities seen as unreasonable by certain groups. I will not compromise what I believe in just because there’s a chance someone may choose to distort it.” Heavin signed the letter, “God bless you and your Curves.”

Of course none of this answers the question of how pro-choice women should digest all this news. For some, the argument revolves around the way the franchise owners and Curves customers — many of them lifelong feminists — have been hurt.

Charylu Roberts, who bought her Curves locations in June 2003, said she knew from the start that she and Heavin didn’t have a lot in common. “I found out right away that Gary Heavin was a Christian and that Curves was out of Texas; that set off red flags, and so I did further research,” she said. “I worked for Planned Parenthood for two years; I’ve had an abortion. I’m one of the strongest pro-choice people in the universe. You better believe I did my homework.” But, she said, she was satisfied enough with what she found — that her CEO was a Christian fundamentalist, but that he did not contribute to causes that she radically opposed. “For me this was a dream come true,” said Roberts, who has owned a music publishing business for 17 years. “It was a chance to give back and work with women and women’s health issues, and it was a good thing for women first getting into new businesses.”

Now she is scared for her business, and nervous about the media machine that set the ball rolling. “Quite truthfully, if I had read just Ruth Rosen’s article before buying the franchise I would not have done it,” said Roberts. “But I’m in a position now where I need to defend my small business. I’m trying to help women.” Roberts said that her six months of Curves ownership have left her satisfied that she is doing good work. “Every day I walk into that place I know I’m helping women. It’s frustrating to look at a whole organization as one person, and sort of erroneous. The only people they’re hurting are the franchise owners.”

Marx, who described herself as pro-choice, agreed, pointing out that franchise owners pay Curves a flat fee, regardless of whether they have 400 members or 10 members. “So the only way our members could try to harm Gary Heavin is if Michael and I went out of business,” said Marx. Marx also said that she believes individualized boycott is not effective and is irresponsible, but that collective organization can make a change. As a result, she and her husband have been on the phone with Planned Parenthood and other women’s organizations supportive of reproductive choice, trying to devise a way in which Curves members could make donations and be counted as a group.

It’s an endeavor that one local San Francisco Curves member has also undertaken on her Web site, Curvers for Choice, on which she encourages women who want to stay at Curves to wear pro-choice gear to the gym and make donations to pro-choice organizations in Gary Heavin’s name. Teresa, a 45-year-old Web designer who asked to be identified only by her first name, has loved her six months at Curves. When a friend e-mailed her Rosen’s column, she said, “I immediately thought: What can I do in this situation? Do I have to quit?” So she reasoned a way out of giving up her healthiest habit: “I thought I could do something positive for the other side in terms of encouraging other people to give contributions to pro-choice groups.”

The director of development for Planned Parenthood of Central Texas confirmed that the organization has received contributions in Heavin’s name since the press ruckus. A representative for NOW said there have been no such contributions made yet to that organization. The NOW spokeswoman also said that the organization has been researching Heavin, but has no official position on him. She added that one lobbyist had already pointed out that since Heavin supports groups that advise women who are contemplating abortions — and NOW advocates choice, not abortion — that there may well not be any action against him.

For some, the troubling part of the story lies in the speed with which careless information got disseminated. “This is about how easily we believe the press,” said Teresa, who said she has gotten e-mails about Curvers for Choice from Boston, Chicago, Atlanta and Seattle. “Because Jon Carroll says it’s true, it’s true.” Random calls by Salon to Curves branches around the country — in Maine, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Massachusetts, Montana and Los Angeles — turned up no discernible pattern of locations that had been affected by the press vs. those where managers had no idea of the controversy.

Many are upset about the arguments that are springing up between women who disagree about how to react to the information. “There’s this idea out there that anyone who is pro-choice enough will quit Curves,” said Teresa. “It’s sad that people feel they have to make a choice in that way.”

One blogger who posted the initial round of news on Heavin’s donations and advocated a boycott, disagreed. Pineapplegirl, a 30-year-old Austin, Texas, political consultant who asked not to be identified by her real name, said that she is unmoved by stories of the franchisees being forced out of business. “The franchisee doesn’t have the right to say, ‘It’s not me, I’m different.’ If that business owner chooses to get in bed with this CEO, you don’t get to benefit from the positive branding and marketing that Curves has built and then turn around and say, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t be held responsible for the things I don’t agree with.’” But Pineapplegirl had not yet received word of the Chronicle’s correction. When informed by Salon that some of the facts had been confused, she said, “Well maybe it’s much ado about nothing, then.”

For some, the corrected facts don’t change their resistance to the idea of supporting Curves. A letter sent to the Chronicle by two doctors at the Center for Reproductive Health Research & Policy at the University of California at San Francisco in response to the correction, reads in part: “These corrections obscured the ideological agenda of the individuals and organizations highlighted. This agenda includes preventing women from obtaining abortions and censoring and distorting information about birth control and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases.” It goes on to lambaste the three organizations Heavin funds, which they claim “restrict services and distort information. They also endanger health.” The letter concludes by thanking Rosen, who they claim “has enabled her readers to make a better-informed decision about whether to support an organization whose owner has an ideological agenda counter to their own values.”

It’s the kind of intra-movement argument that has feminists on edge. “I have never experienced quite as much intolerance from the liberal side, of which I am one,” said Roberts, returning on Saturday from a meeting of Bay Area Curves owners where they tried to hash out how they would get their new, corrected image out and rebuild their lost business. “For some it’s enough that he’s pro-life. I guess that pisses them off enough to stop right there.” But, she said, “I’m still proud I’m part of this company and want to get back to helping women with their health.”

Today, Obama doubled down on his disregard for the concerns of these groups, claiming that while Sebelius made her decision without his counsel, he agreed with it. Obama pooh-poohed the findings of the FDA, which had concluded that Plan B pills posed no medical hazard and supported Sebelius’ official argument, citing a lack of confidence that “a 10-year-old or 11-year-old going to a drugstore would be able to, alongside bubble gum or batteries, be able to buy a medication that potentially if not used properly can have an adverse effect.” The logic expressed today by the president, and yesterday by Sebelius, is ludicrous: Medicines like Tylenol – which have been proven to have adverse effects in high doses – are available by the truckload on drugstore shelves, at prices far cheaper than the $30 to $50 it would cost a preteen to purchase just one dose of Plan B, let alone go wild with it.

But part of what was most disturbing about Obama’s statement was his reliance on language that reveals his paternalistic approach to women and their health.

“As the father of two daughters,” Obama told reporters, “I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine.”

First of all, the president was not talking about “various rules.” He was supporting a very specific rule, one that prevents young women from easily obtaining a drug that can help them control their reproductive lives, at an age when their economic, educational, familial and professional futures are perhaps most at risk of being derailed by an unplanned pregnancy. “As the father of two daughters,” Obama might want to reconsider his position on preventing young women from being able to exercise this form of responsibility over their own bodies and lives.

But as an American, I think it is important for my president not to turn to paternalistic claptrap and enfeebling references to the imagined ineptitude and irresponsibility of his daughters – and young women around the country – to justify a curtailment of access to medically safe contraceptives. The notion that in aggressively conscribing women’s abilities to protect themselves against unplanned pregnancy Obama is just laying down some Olde Fashioned Dad Sense diminishes an issue of gender equality, sexual health and medical access. Recasting this debate as an episode of “Father Knows Best” reaffirms hoary attitudes about young women and sex that had their repressive heyday in the era whence that program sprang.

A question of who should be allowed access to a safe form of contraception is at its root a question of how badly we want to, or believe that we can, police young women’s sexuality. When Obama is talking about his daughters, we know he’s not really basing his opinion on an anxiety that they might suffer the adverse effects of drinking a whole jug of Pepto-Bismol or swallowing 50 Advil, things that any 11-year-old who walks into a CVS with a wad of cash could theoretically do. When he says that he wants to “apply common sense” to questions of young women’s access to emergency contraception, he is telegraphing his discomfort with the idea of young women’s sexual agency, or more simply, with the idea of them having sex lives at all. This discomfort might be  comprehensible from an emotional, parental point of view. But these are not familial discussions; this is a public-health policy debate, and at a time when “16 and Pregnant” airs on MTV, the fact that a daddy feels funny about his little girls becoming grown-ups has no place in a discussion of healthcare options for America’s young women. It is also nearly impossible to imagine a similar use of language or logic to justify a ban of condom sales.

Moreover, Obama’s invocation of his role as a father is an insult to the commitments and priorities of those on the other side of this issue. Are we to believe that those who support the increased availability of emergency contraception do not have daughters? That if they do, they care less about those daughters than Barack Obama does about his? And that if they do not, they cannot possibly know better than a father of daughters what is best for young women? Why should we be asked to believe that Obama’s paternity imbues him with more moral authority on the subject of women’s health and reproductive lives than the investments of doctors, researchers and advocates who – regardless of their parental status – have dedicated their lives to working on behalf of increased reproductive health options. This line of argument is no better than the Mama Grizzly argument developed by Sarah Palin during 2010′s midterm elections, in which she asserted that her band of super-conservative mothers were qualified for office because “moms just know when there’s something wrong.”

Barack Obama has long had a tin ear for language that has anything to do with women and even more specifically with women’s rights. While on the campaign trail for president in 2008, he waved off a female reporter who asked a question about the future of the auto industry, referring to her diminutively as “sweetie.” The same year, attempting to play both sides on the issue of reproductive freedom, he gave an interview with a religious magazine in which he asserted his support for states’ restrictions on late-term abortions as long as there was an exception for the health of the mother, but added that he didn’t “think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother.” Attempting to recover from that line and reassert his pro-choice bona fides, Obama later clarified that of course he believed in a medical exemption for “serious clinical mental health diseases,” just not when seeking a late-term abortion is “a matter of feeling blue,” perpetuating a wildly irresponsible vision of the rare and difficult late-term abortion as a moody impulse-buy.

Today also isn’t the first time he’s used references to members of his family to make a larger offensive point about women. Back in 2009, when charges that his officially female-friendly administration included some boys’ club tendencies hit the front of the New York Times, Obama dismissed the claims as “bunk.” Reporter Mark Leibovich noted at the time that the president “often points out that he is surrounded by strong females at home,” an argument that not only mimics an old saw about how being henpecked by women is equivalent to respecting them, but reflects a dynamic as old as patriarchal power itself and sidesteps the question of how strong females are treated at work. In 2010, while appearing on “The View,” Obama made a creaky Take-My-Wife-Please joke about how he wanted to appear on “a show that Michelle actually watched” as opposed to the news shows she usually flips past. The joke being that his missus, the one he met when she mentored him at a high-powered law firm, just doesn’t have a head for news delivered by anyone other than Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

It should no longer come as a surprise that the president of the United States is, on perhaps an unconscious level, an old-school patriarch. What’s startling is the degree to which Obama seems not to have learned from any of his past gaffes, how no one seems to have told him – or told him in a way that he’s absorbed – that the best way to address a question of women’s health and rights is probably not by making it about his role as a father.

This might be an especially valuable chat to have with the president as he moves into 2012 and toward an election in which he is going to be relying on the support of people he has just managed to anger, offend and speak down to — women. The least he could do is learn to address them with respect.

But has it actually whetted the film business’s appetite for more female-driven projects? Salon called Lynda Obst, producer of movies like “Sleepless in Seattle,” “Contact” and “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” the television show “Hot in Cleveland,” the author of “Hello, He Lied” and all-around movie sage, to see what, if anything, has changed in her town this summer.

Did the success of “Bridesmaids” make a difference to your business?

Yes. It had the biggest impact of any women’s movie that I can remember in my career.

In your whole career, which began with “Flashdance” in 1983?

Yeah. It came at a moment when any movies for women, women’s comedies — forget dramas, there are no dramas for anybody — but women’s comedies, women’s thrillers were going to get put by the wayside forever. Women’s projects were dying everywhere. That’s why the opening of “Bridesmaids” was so critical for every woman in features, why its success was attended with such profound interest by every woman writer, producer and director in town.

The second important factor was that there were no stars in the movie and it wasn’t tracking in advance.

And that matters because it means that it was the material, not a movie star, that drew people to theaters?

Yes. Its success wasn’t automatic. A star opens a movie. Sandra Bullock opens a movie. But there was nobody in this movie who had ever been in a movie before, so it’s the hardest kind of movie to open.

It means that its success was due to the fact that people enjoyed it, and gave it good word of mouth once the movie started screening. Which leads us to the gigantic thing, which was the revelation that women can open a movie, and also, that this [women's movie] crossed over. Men came. It drew women of all ages and it drew guys and was a major hit. And not just domestically, which is part two of this gigantic thing, because the movie business right now is being driven by international box office.

Comedy doesn’t usually travel well. Movies that travel are movies with very little dialogue, usually dependent on action or family content or big international stars. But “Bridesmaids” did very well internationally. The concept was easy to understand in all languages. It gave us a clue as to what movies will work internationally with women in them. So what we learned is: Broad comedies will sell abroad, even with broads.

What are the immediate effects of this?

There are suddenly projects for women! I’m pitching one right now that is a female-based comedy and people are really responsive to it. And then my directing debut, which was dead in the water at New Line, went from having no momentum to having momentum, the weekend right after “Bridesmaids” opened. “Bridesmaids” meant that the idea of being able to make a movie about women was resuscitated.

Well, for now. What if the next female comedy flops?

If the next one flops, who knows? Two action movies flop and it means nothing; one women’s movie flops and it’s the end. But “Bridesmaids” was followed immediately by the success of “The Help,” which was terrific because that was driven by women too.

So what we’re finding in the American market is that younger male eyeballs are disappearing in large numbers, going to video games, going to the Internet. But women are going to the movies, if you make movies for them.

Now, does this mean we will stop making movies for the younger male quadrant? No, because the young male quadrant likes the same movies as international audiences — action movies, man movies.

Man movies?

“Ironman,” “Spider-Man,” “Batman.” Man movies.

Are studios pursuing women’s projects or are people just feeling like they can pitch them again?

I think the latter. But I think studios were suddenly receptive to them.

This is not the first time in recent memory that a woman’s movie has done well and studios have failed to notice in any permanent way. “The Devil Wears Prada,” your movie “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” “Sex and the City” have all been big women-driven hits, and yet women’s movies were on the brink of extinction.

Studios have institutionally short memories when it comes to women’s movies. “Sex and the City II” did better internationally than it did domestically, which would have made you think that they would have noticed it. I mean, that’s what inclines Fox to make “Ice Ages”; sequels do so well internationally. But studios don’t seem to generalize by the same rules in women’s movies as they do for other movies.

Every time a woman’s movie does well, it’s a brand-new fact. Every time we rediscover the female audience, it’s astonishing.

So it’s possible that despite “Bridesmaids’” success, four years from now you and I will be having the same conversation about the death of women’s comedy?

Yes.

That’s depressing. But back to the success of “Bridesmaids.” There was a certain amount of social awareness around going to the movie. Because of the press it got, women seemed to be aware that going to see the movie was not just about enjoying it, but about sending a message to Hollywood. Do you think that had an impact on its box office?

Well, I know there was tremendous awareness in Los Angeles that we had to open this movie. I believe it happened in New York too, but I don’t know that that happened nationally.

What happened nationally was that there was a hunger for something for women to relate to, because there’s usually nothing out there for them. It’s what happens with an urban audience with Tyler Perry.

I had a sense from friends in other cities that they were going with their girlfriends and that they knew it was made for them.  It’s so rare that there’s a movie made for them. It generated such excitement.

You would think that that excitement alone would send a message that there is an eager audience out there for material about women.

Well, I think you can see a lot of that reaction on television. It is the year of women on television. Television is much more female-friendly than Hollywood. There are a tremendous number of female executives, and when they see something like “Bridesmaids,” it’s much easier to react fast to it, and there’s less institutional resistance. They love the zeitgeist.

But timing-wise, this season of television was already a done deal before “Bridesmaids” opened, so it can’t have been a reaction, can it?

Well, the [final] decisions about this current fall season were made at the upfronts, which roughly coincided [Editor's note: actually, directly coincided in mid-May] with the opening of “Bridesmaids,” so there actually could have been a connection.

But also, I have just been through the next season of creative development and let me tell you it’s just as female-friendly as the one that’s on air now. There are shows about women and girlfriends and not just couples. There is television about women, for women. Real women.

“Hey A Lot Of Ladies,” began a mass email I received on Wednesday from Emily Bracken, a writer and acquaintance. She was forwarding a message from Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith, a producer and the screenwriter of “Legally Blonde” and “The House Bunny,” who has no professional connection with “Bridesmaids” but is nonetheless agitating on its behalf. “I know you get a lot of emails about donating money to worthy causes, but I’d like to draw your attention to one in particular: The Chick Flick,” Smith wrote. “It is currently on the Motion Picture Association of America’s list of Endangered Species and it faces extinction if we don’t act now.”

Urging everyone to buy tickets to the movie, Smith continued, “Let’s show the planet we are capable of queefing out some major box-office lady-power.”

Bracken added her own message on top of Smith’s. It read, in part, “I encourage each and every one of you to see ‘Bridesmaids’ this weekend, not just because it’s hilarious, but because we MUST show Hollywood that women DO want movies that are not vapid romcoms or something about shopping … A lot is riding on this movie. So please bring your girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, and neighbors out in droves. And please, if you feel moved, encourage others to do so, as well.”

Yes we can … buy tickets to a Kristen Wiig movie in an effort to persuade Hollywood that multidimensional women exist, spend money and deserve to be represented on film.

What’s motivating this campaign is simple: Hollywood studios do not make comedies for or about women anymore. Yes, they used to. As recently as a few decades ago, when comedy stars like Lily Tomlin, Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn stalked through theaters alongside supporting players like Teri Garr, Carol Kane and Madeline Kahn, bringing us movies that were sometimes sublime and sometimes disposable, but which had women at their heart. Think “Private Benjamin,” “9 to 5,” “Outrageous Fortune,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills”…

Those days are long gone, and we now inhabit an entertainment universe in which everything male-centered is standard, and everything female-centered is female (yes, this dynamic extends into publishing, politics and professionalism, but for now, let’s keep it to Hollywood). What that means in practical terms is that women will plonk down dollars to see a male-dominated action movie, a girl-gobbling horror flick, or a dude-centric comedy just as easily as they’ll pay for the kind of female-fueled movie that is literally made for them. Men, meanwhile, have apparently been so conditioned to find anything female emasculating (notwithstanding the expectation that their girlfriends find anything male, including “Thor,” scintillating) that they cannot be moved to sit through any movie with a fully developed woman at its center. As Tad Friend recently put it in his New Yorker profile of the actress Anna Faris — in a sentence mentioned frequently by “Bridesmaids” activists — “Studio executives believe that male moviegoers would rather prep for a colonoscopy that experience a woman’s point of view, particularly if that woman drinks or swears or has a great job or an orgasm.”

So studio executives simply don’t make movies, and especially comedies, from a woman’s point of view anymore. Which doesn’t even make that much economic sense, given the fact that even without a male audience, women are so powerful a consumer force that they can make the few movies that do focus on them successes — see “The Devil Wears Prada,” or “Sex and the City” and “Sex and the City 2.” (Actually, don’t see “Sex and the City 2,” but consider what its high grosses say about exactly how desperate women are to find themselves reflected on the screen in anything other than supporting, carelessly sketched nubile girlfriend roles.)

Enter “Bridesmaids,” a movie chock full of female talent, based on a script solicited from Wiig after she impressed bro-mantic comedy king Judd Apatow in her supporting role in “Knocked Up.” If this movie can win the box office (or, frankly, even get close) on its all-important opening weekend, the thinking goes, studio executives will have an economic incentive to make more female-friendly films like it.

The movie is being sold in the vein of Apatow’s boyish burp-fests: Trailers focus on a food poisoning scene that involves women in bridal gowns excreting from both ends. But the plot line — which centers on Wiig’s 30-something character, down on her luck professionally and personally, being put through the modern maid-of-honor mill by her best friend — offers the promise of something really good: an exploration of female social relationships, all the more complicated in an age when we do not all marry by 22 but create our adult lives alongside our girlfriends.

From the trailers, I have come to hope that “Bridesmaids” might in fact be a broader and more commercial take on the kind of relationship Nicole Holofcener painfully and hilariously picked apart in 1996′s “Walking and Talking,” one of the best movies about women ever made. (Holofcener has consistently made funny, stirring flicks about chicks, but they are by no stretch of the imagination blockbusters, or even major releases. It is a testament to their rarity that after her 2006 movie “Friends With Money” concluded, one of the two girlfriends I’d gone to see it with remained in her seat, staring at the screen. When I nudged her to move, she looked at me balefully and said, “I didn’t want it to end. I want it to keep going.”)

I have not seen “Bridesmaids,” though I know many people who have said good things about it, including Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams. And Tuesday night, before receiving the email from Bracken forwarded by Smith, I was moved to post on Facebook Melissa Silverstein’s explanation from “Women and Hollywood” of “Why Bridesmaids Matters,” after seeing a link to Silverstein’s post on the Facebook page of movie producer (“Sleepless in Seattle,” “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days”) Lynda Obst. Obst had written, “Seriously, we have to see this movie this weekend. If you are a woman, like women, or simply don’t hate them … if we don’t go, they won’t build them anymore.”

Just a few minutes later, Farrin Jacobs, an editorial director at HarperCollins Children’s books, commented on the link that though she had already seen the film, she had made a date to see it again this weekend with girlfriends, “because I want funny lady movies to keep existing.” Jacobs later told me that her determination was born of that New Yorker piece, and how sad she’d become thinking that men just won’t watch female characters. She’d been in Los Angeles and scored tickets to the “Bridesmaids” premiere, and she claims that at one point, the movie made her laugh so hard that she cried. “Seeing the movie and thinking about the Anna Faris article, and knowing that if this movie didn’t do well, that would be it for at least the next couple of years for the life of female comedies, I’m trying to get everybody I know to see it,” said Jacobs. “Also, it’s funny.”

So here is this movie. This movie that may be silly, may be gross, may be great, may be terrible, may have hidden under its flatulent exterior a nuanced and too rarely spied depiction of female connection. It seems that it really matters — to Hollywood and its press and its executives and its female moviemakers and storytellers and performers — how it does. As Obst, who has no professional involvement in “Bridesmaids,” told me when I contacted her about this story, “We are all watching it like we made it.” The film’s director, Paul Feig, who perhaps has copped an overly chivalrous tone recently, told the Onion’s AV club, “It’s not often that a studio will allow a movie that’s all driven by women to be made, so I felt the pressure of, ‘If I screw this up, it’s going to fuck things up for women.’”

I just keep thinking about Wiig, the driving creative force behind the existence of the film, having been thrust, apparently unwillingly, into the role of feminist figurehead. I imagine her holed up in a hotel room, Hillary Clinton style, waiting for the polls to close and the weekend box office numbers to be finalized.

Me, I’ve been wondering how I’m going to get out of the house to the movie theater. I am home on a maternity leave, a 6-week-old beside me, just beginning to figure out baby sitting. Perhaps I will try to take my daughter to the earliest neighborhood matinee, provided she’s not fussing. She’s in the only stage of a woman’s life in which she’s actively encouraged to do what the ladies in this movie apparently are doing: belching, farting, barfing. More than that, maybe it will be an investment in her moviegoing future, an effort to ensure that she will have years ahead of her in which she has a chance to see herself, her friendships, her relationships, her work and her life reflected back at her in a way that makes her laugh till she cries.