Dennis had built up quite a head of steam by the third stanza, which begins, “Lady this is all in vain/ Youth can never come again.” But then he really let loose: “NIP AND TUCK ‘TIL CRACK OF DOOM!” he thundered. “What is foretold in the womb/ May not be forsworn with gold — Nor may time be bought and sold!”

The six black-clad members of the Royal Shakespeare Company flanking Dennis on either side of the stage smiled nervously. A listener in front of me whimpered, “I’m scared.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Until now, Felix Dennis, 57, has been best known as leader of a soft-core newsstand revolution, and one of the publishing industry’s most terrible enfants. The publisher of Maxim, Stuff, music magazine Blender and news digest the Week began life as a wannabe blues singer in a London suburb. A horny young buck in the swinging ’60s, he started his climb through media’s ranks by selling copies of hippie magazine Oz on King’s Road. (In 1970 he was tried for conspiring to corrupt the morals of children with an edition of Oz that depicted an orgy on its cover.) Dennis’ stable of magazines would later be populated by periodicals on considerably less titillating topics: cars, computers and world news. But what made Dennis famous — besides his public bout with crack addiction, reports of his multiple simultaneous girlfriends, and his 1996 admission to the Guardian that he preferred non-penetrative sex — was his popularization of toned-down skin rags aimed at advertiser-friendly young men.

But now, the man who made a fortune on unsentimental product is using his lucre — according to the New York Times his net worth is between $300 million and $700 million — to fund a 14-stop tour in support of “A Glass Half Full,” his first collection of poems on topics like aging, terrorism, death and faithful mutts.

“There are tough poems in here that might be very uncomfortable for some people to read,” Dennis told me on the afternoon before the reading, sitting at a Dennis Publishing conference table in Midtown Manhattan, wolfing a roast beef sandwich and smoking Silk Cut cigarettes. “But I don’t think there are sentimental poems in here, and if there are I would like you to point them out to me.” Dennis defended “An Old Dog Is the Best Dog,” his loving ode to an aged canine, claiming, “When I read the old dog one, as I will tonight, you’ll see I don’t deliver it in a sentimental way. In fact, you can sometimes hear people sucking in breath when I actually call a female dog what it is.”

Sure enough, later that night, you could smell the old dog coming a mile away. In a special installment of the tour, members of the Royal Shakespeare Company had agreed to mix readings of Dennis’ work with those of the Bard for a $200-a-head benefit for the theater troupe. Actor Mark Hadfield came to the mike clutching a large stuffed dog and read Launce’s exhortation to his mongrel from “Two Gentlemen of Verona.”

“O, ’tis a foul thing when a cur cannot keep himself in all companies!” lamented Hadfield as Launce. Then it was Dennis’ turn to prove his unsentimental mettle.

An old dog is the best dog,
A dog with rheumy eyes;
An old dog is the best dog
A dog grown sad and wise,
Not one who snaps at bubbles,
Nor one who barks at nowt,
A dog who knows your troubles,
A dog to see you out.

But the poet’s subtext became clear as he spat out the second verse, which began, “An old bitch is the best bitch.” Dennis emphasized both instances of the word “bitch.” As promised, people in the audience sucked in their breath. Or spat their wine into their napkins. It was hard to tell.

When I asked the childless, never-married Dennis how his feelings about women had changed over the years, he said, “I believe I’ve always been immensely generous with women. I was brought up by a single mother — a very unusual thing in the 1950s. So I didn’t have to be taught by Germaine Greer about equality in work and sex. My mother was earning the money in my house.” Dennis, who worked with Greer on Oz and appointed former Marie Claire editor Clare McHugh to be Maxim’s first chief, added, “I don’t have some of the concerns that I see some men having. For example, if I didn’t own my own company, it wouldn’t be the remotest problem for me to report to a woman.”

When I asked him about his repeated use of the possessive construction “our women” in his poem “The Summer of Love,” about the hedonism of 1967 (“And we scolded non-believers and we taunted the police./ And our women made us teas while we puffed the pipes of piece … And we lived in San Francisco, or else in Notting Hill,/ And we made a lot of babies though our women took the pill”), Dennis said it was intentional provocation.

“That’s quite deliberate when you’re writing poetry,” he said, “when you think, That’s great and that’ll really upset some people! I’m gonna go and do it again!” Here he let out one of his frequent, self-appreciative staccato laughs, and recalled a day 30 years ago when the women working at Oz “got so fed up with all the guys getting all the glory that they went and started their own magazine called Spare Rib. Literally, some of them were the secretaries, and we were all stunned. We just couldn’t believe it! Where had they gone?” Here Dennis looked under the table, in mock confusion, seeking the secretaries of his youth.

One on one, at least with a female reporter, Felix Dennis seemed pretty tame: charmed to be asked about his verse, but almost shocked when questioned about whether it’s getting him laid. He recovered enough to say, “When you’ve got hundreds of millions of dollars, getting laid is not your problem,” and giving another loud laugh before continuing: “I’m getting older, you know?” He offered a parable about a Chinese fisherman realizing that he has missed the tide and continued, “The tide has gone. You start to think, Thank Christ for that, now I can have a decent conversation with a young woman without…’” Dennis trailed off.

“I’m 57 years old now. When I was in my 20s and 30s, if I didn’t have sex loads of times a week I’d think something appalling was happening. Now I tend to mock myself and even sex, because it’s not as important to me as it used to be.” But Dennis was quick to clarify, using his stiff palm to chop at the table for emphasis: “When it’s important, it’s very important! But for many years I would argue that even making the money was to feed the sexual appetite. That is certainly not true anymore.”

His most voracious appetite right now appears to be for readers of his poetry, of which he claims many. When “A Glass Half Full” was published in England last year, it sold through its 10,000-copy print run. Miramax Books has printed 15,000 copies here. Even with corporate offices around the world, homes in Warwickshire, England; Connecticut; and Mustique, the tiny sandbox of the ludicrously wealthy, Dennis identifies more strongly with his hardscrabble beginnings, and fancies himself a bard of the masses. He burbled happily about the “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of letters and e-mails” that come “literally from dentists and housewives and doctors and just the weirdest broad catholic readership.”

As Dennis commented at the reading, “The English are not unused to dealing with a certain level of contradiction.” A cur who is in fact able to keep himself in most companies, Dennis is a man of contradictions: a Mustique dweller who sells to the proletariat, a peddler of impossible female forms who chides women about self-alteration, a soft-core balladeer, a recovering crack addict who passes time with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

“Some of [Dennis' poetry] is quite good,” RSC actor Sean Bean told me at the reading after-party, before actress Samantha Bond bade him goodnight with a kiss on the cheek and a whispered “Bizarre!” that seemed to sum up the evening.

But a collaboration with the world’s preeminent dramatists hasn’t rid Dennis of the chip on his shoulder about his perceived exclusion from the poetry community. I had no more said, “So about your poetry…” than Dennis launched unbidden into a minutes-long monologue in defense of metered verse. “I’m putting forward the alternate view, that you do not have to write free verse to be a great poet,” he said, after expressing his enthusiasm for Donne, Herrick, Browning and Keats and his distaste for free verse. Dennis’ poetry — which is actually pretty fun to hear out loud — recalls the work of Shel Silverstein, whose poems were filled with satisfyingly rhymed ditties about the harmless, if dark, desires of childhood.

Like continuations of Silverstein’s poems, Dennis’ focus on some of the grim realities of adult life: sexually active grandmothers, firing people, blowing off business meetings in favor of a quickie, cocaine. He employs classical forms — quatrains, sonnets, ballads, sestinas — which he taught himself after the muse struck him four years ago. He’s also rewritten some nursery rhymes: In one, Jack and Jill and the hill and the pail of water all sue each other. There’s also “The House That Crack Built,” and the tinfoil-on-teeth “Baa Baa AIDS Sheep,” which does not appear in “A Glass Half Full,” but which Dennis read in front of the RSC.

Dennis’ poems always rhyme.

Tom Wolfe, who compares Dennis’ work to Rudyard Kipling’s on the jacket of “A Glass Half Full,” and attended the RSC reading, acknowledged that Kipling’s poems are not regarded with fondness by the poetic establishment. “But he wrote really good stuff, and of course above all Kipling realized the power of rhyme and meter,” said Wolfe.

“A hundred years ago if you had tried to write free verse people would have looked at you and said, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’” said Dennis. “And now the shoe is on the other foot. Now if you write long quatrains or pantoums, you’re the idiot.” But, Dennis argued, there is some question as to where the idiocy lies. “Free verse has presided over a monstrous decline in the interest in poetry … And yet as soon as a guy writes a book based entirely on those [classical] forms, people say, ‘Who the hell does this guy think he is? This guy is just a rich idiot.’ Maybe they’re right. But not, apparently, to thousands and thousands of people who read this book and write to me.”

Dennis is known for his explosive temper — just ask the security guards in the Dennis Publishing building, who pursed their lips and shook their heads in warning when I told them who I was there to meet. But his rumpled, lumpy look diminishes the fear factor. Then there’s the fact that while describing a recent reading in Detroit, where he claims two luscious young bawds appeared backstage and started fooling around, he said, “I did enjoy it, but I think I knew in my heart of hearts that nothing was going to happen. They were just pretending this was a big rock ‘n’ roll tour.”

Dennis also said that overcoming his crack addiction has left him few vices save smokes and wine. “I’ve always been attracted to walking on the edge of the pond on the ice,” he said. Now, he claimed, his precarious ice walks come at moments like the New York reading. “Going onstage with these hugely professional actors and doing all that kind of stuff — I get very, very nervous, because I am outclassed and outgunned. I am not used to being in a room of any kind being outclassed and outgunned.” Not exactly the kind of danger once provided by the crack pipe, I protested. “No, they are different kinds of discomfort,” he acknowledged with a smile.

Still, Dennis hasn’t exactly lost his edge. This is not a guy you’d want to compare sexual track records with — or, even in these, his 12-step days — attempt to drink under the table. But he sure seems to have begun the fade into baby boomer fuzziness. Felix the Cat is becoming Felix the pussycat. He’s still making mass-marketed nubile skin available front and center on newsstands. But he’s also taken up softer projects — like the poetry, yes, and the huge forest he’s planting in Britain, and the Garden of Heroes at his home in Warwickshire, which includes sculptures of Bob Dylan, Dorothy Parker and Dennis himself. It’s as though whatever was dangerous, fractious and maverick about him has started to melt and blur slightly.

It is no wonder that Dennis is so distressed by my suggestion that his poetry is sentimental. Back in the conference room, when he defied me to name a poem in “A Glass Half Full” that exhibited the sentimentalism he so clearly loathed, I looked at my notes and told him that “A Silent Prayer…” had been the one that had prompted my question.

For books, old dogs, and hissing logs,
For letters left a week;
For bells not rung, for hymns unsung,
For mice that softly Squeak;
For dumbstruck snow and tears that flow
In silence down a cheek.

“Mmm,” said Dennis, thinking hard. “Well, I would say that that is the one poem in the book that tips furthest toward falling over the cliff of sentiment into the abyss of sentimentality. I think I’d accept that as criticism.”

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.