Celine Song’s newest film Materialists is a sleek and sexy piece of liberal feminist propaganda. Billed as a traditional romantic comedy, Materialists’ global box office earnings surpassed $45 million as of July 6, already outpacing the international haul of Song’s breakout film Past Lives. Before directing movies, Song worked as a matchmaker, an experience that she mines in order to explore the crass calculation that goes into modern dating.

Starring A-listers Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and former Captain America Chris Evans, Materialists provides a colossal, unintentional Exhibit A for why women have better sex under socialism, as I argue in my book by the same title. Although Song succeeds with an astute commentary on the dehumanization of singles, her film’s implied solution is individual professional success rather than any kind of systemic transformation, accidentally reinforcing the idea that only the beautiful and wealthy are worthy of love.

The plot of Materialists revolves around the “voluntarily celibate” Lucy (Johnson), a former actor who now works for a multinational company called Adore, a luxury matchmaking service for elite urbanites who can afford its fees. Her success as a matchmaker derives from her aloof devotion to “the math,” algorithmically determining whether people are compatible based on factors like education, class background, relative attractiveness, and income. At the ninth wedding resulting from one of Lucy’s matches, she meets Harry (Pascal), the filthy-rich brother of the groom. Moments later, she runs into her ex-boyfriend John (Evans), day-jobbing as a cater-waiter at the reception, who describes himself as a broke guy from a “shitty family” who “voted for Bernie.” The tuxedoed Prince Capitalism works in finance. The scruffy underdog aligns obliquely with millennial democratic socialism.

A flashback reveals that Lucy and John once shared a deep love, but his persistent poverty split them apart. Throughout the film, Lucy suggests that only a wealthy man can make a woman “feel valuable,” but it’s clear that she still has feelings for her handsome and earnest ex despite his penury. Lucy starts dating Harry, whom she considers “a unicorn” — an impossibly rare man who is handsome, charming, polite, well-bred, and tall. When she tries to convince Harry that he is out of her league, he argues back that her calculations fail to account for genuine emotional connection.

In a recent interview at the Karoly Vary film festival in Czechia, Johnson opined on this dilemma of choosing between a poor man you love and a rich man you don’t: “The question is, do you fight for the life that you think you want, or do you fight for being truly seen and truly loved?” Johnson said. “Even if that means not having a certain amount of money or not having a certain kind of lifestyle. I think that it’s a really good question. Now, because of social media, and because of the state of the world, people think they’re supposed to have a certain kind of life because of what it looks like on the internet. But we’re human beings. Wouldn’t it feel better to just feel truly loved?”

The plot glides forward as Lucy considers the choice between Harry and John. When Harry brings Lucy back to his penthouse to have sex with her for the first time, the audience sees that, while his attention is focused on Lucy, she is distracted by the size and opulence of his apartment. In a post-coital moment of repose, Lucy asks Harry how much the penthouse costs. When he flatly answers “twelve million,” you can almost hear the “ka-ching” sound in her head.

The film validates the general theory behind a 2004 paper by Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs on “sexual economics.” There, the social psychologists posit that sexuality is a commodity, with mating practices shaped by the background economic system (which they assume a priori to be capitalism). They write:

The sexual activities of different couples are loosely interrelated by a marketplace, instead of being fully separate or private, and each couple’s decisions may be influenced by market conditions. Economic principles suggest that the price of sex will depend on supply and demand, competition among sellers, variations in product, collusion among sellers, and other factors.

In their view, women sell and “men seek to acquire sex from women by offering other resources in exchange.” These “other resources” usually include necessary forms of material support, so that women who want “to have a certain kind of life” (housing, food, healthcare, etc.) should make romantic decisions based on economic calculation rather than emotion. Men lacking these other resources lose out in the mating market. American women would rather be single than be saddled with a scrub. To quote Fergie and Ludacris from 2007: “If you ain’t got no money, take yo’ broke ass home.”

In a series of humorous interludes, the viewer inhabits Lucy’s point of view at work as she struggles with the same dilemma as in her private life. We sit across from her clients as they delimit the parameters for their potential matches. One client explains that he won’t date anyone with a BMI over twenty, while a forty-eight-year-old man refuses to consider meeting any woman over twenty-seven. A white woman suggests that she wants to start with “whites only.” Another hands Lucy a multi-page document outlining her preferences, explaining that she deserves to get what she wants because she’s “a catch.” Exasperated, Lucy replies, “You are not a catch, because you are not a fish.”

Lucy’s relationship with Harry continues to develop even as she turns to John for emotional support. Before a couple’s getaway to Iceland, Lucy discovers a diamond engagement ring in Harry’s suitcase and realizes that he plans to propose. After a brilliant scene where Harry and Lucy discuss the cosmetic “investments” they’ve made in improving their respective “products,” they accept that they are not in love and part amicably. Having sublet her apartment during her planned vacation, Lucy decides to stay with John.

And here’s where the movie could have gotten interesting. Socialist theorists from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries observed that capitalism distorted heterosexual relationships by forcing women to be economically dependent on men. Prominent proponents of women’s emancipation like August Bebel and Alexandra Kollontai proposed that only socialism could be truly liberatory in the realm of sex relations.

Many twentieth-century socialist societies in Eastern Europe managed to put these theories into practice by socializing reproductive labor through the provision of childcare, public cafeterias, and public laundries; guaranteeing paid, job-protected parental leave; and establishing housing, healthcare, and education as basic rights of citizenship. These changes in the background “market conditions” meant that women could choose the partner they loved rather than the one with the most resources. This also meant that women measured the desirability of men by more than the size of their bank accounts. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, state-supported social safety nets help to free romance and marriage from materialistic calculations.

Song might have used her film to grapple with how the economistic thinking around love emerges naturally in capitalist societies, which measure adult human value in terms of net worth. Instead, she makes a classic liberal feminist move by extending to her heroine a privilege usually reserved for heroes: if men can use their other resources to land an ideal mate, then women should be able to use these handy resources (money) to do the same.

In the end, John admits that he has always loved Lucy and will do so until the day he dies. Even as she complains about an inevitable future of crappy restaurants, Lucy chooses her broke ex-boyfriend. Could it be that Song wants us to believe that Lucy is finally willing to give up the finer things in life to follow her heart? Does true love win out in the end?

Alas, no. Just before John’s proposal, Lucy receives a call from her boss at Adore, who is moving to London. Lucy has been promoted to head up the New York office and can ask for any salary she wants. With this information fresh in her mind, she agrees to marry John — the implication being that she’ll now be able to have her fancy restaurants and her true love, too.

Good things happen to ambitious girlbosses. Although Lucy doesn’t accept the position right away, the implicit message seems clear: In a free market economy, women either need to marry for money or earn enough of their own money so they can afford to marry for love. This liberal feminist worldview elevates slim sophisticates like Lucy — with her smooth ponytail and solid work ethic — over the tradwives and gold diggers looking to depend on men. You’ve come a long way, baby!

I know that romantic comedy isn’t a genre that tackles larger political-economic problems, but this makes the film’s ideological underpinnings all the more disturbing. Materialists does provide an extended rumination on how the outrageous cost of living in big cities like New York warps dating and romance. It highlights the unreasonable expectations and ulterior motivations that inform modern relationships. It satirizes the “math” that so many people do before they commit to a potential partner.

But Materialists also fixes the background “market conditions” as immutable. In the context of the film’s worldview, John’s vote for Bernie Sanders feels like a naive, utopian gesture, a mere character detail intended to signal his status as a hopeless romantic. The hardscrabble Lucy understands the world as it is, not as it could be. And only because she manages to pull herself up by her own stiletto straps does Lucy earn her happily ever after. Apparently, if we don’t want to die alone, we should all be doing the same.