Ten years before “Bridesmaids” showed it was okay to portray women acting like a bunch of twits, there was “The Sweetest Thing.”

A goofy and footloose tale about a trio of foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed women, The Sweetest Thing was something of a flop when it came out and without interviewing thousands of people I can only speculate as to why this was the case…

In terms of sexual suggestiveness TST is certainly no worse than other films of the time – no one has sex with a pastry or mistakes a wad of semen for hair gel – so I can’t imagine that its lip-licking lasciviousness was what kept audiences away. And while TST’s humor is a bit of a hit and miss affair this is equally true of just about every popular comedy that has come out in the last thirty years. Yet back in 2002 this movie fell on its face like a sorority girl after three bottles of Jack, while last year’s Bridesmaids became a big hit. So how are we to explain the commercial failure of a funny, high-profile, fast-paced, outrageously sex-obsessed movie stuffed full of attractive young women?

I suspect that the most likely explanation for The Sweetest Thing failing at the box office is that it was perceived as misogynist. After all, a multitude of other equally smutty movies with far less going for them have succeeded, but those movies focused on male idiots while TST focuses on their female equivalents. But that was ten years ago. Since then we have all been treated to a decade of reality TV in which real(ish) women behave in ways that make the three leads in “The Sweetest Thing” look like Julie Andrews clones, so when “Bridesmaids” came along there was less of a feeling that women were being smeared and more of a sense that “girls will be girls.”

But, as I said at the start, without massive research all we can do is speculate. What is certain is that The Sweetest Thing was a decade ahead of its time. Before it was culturally and socially safe to do so, TST said the un-sayable – it told us that despite all the gynocentric propaganda spewed by the mainstream media women aren’t a bunch of angels and choirgirls, and for that brave act alone it deserves far more attention than it gets.

Several memorable scenes come to mind when I think of this movie. The first is a sequence in which Cameron Diaz and Christina Applegate have to avail themselves of a men’s toilet. While Applegate is busy trying to figure out how to take a wiz in the urinal Diaz opts for the stall, a stall with a suspiciously conspicuous hole in one of its walls. The second is the scene in which Selma Blair finds out why you should never deep throat a man with a pierced glans. The third is an impromptu song and dance number during which the girls recite all the bullshit they tell men about how great their dicks are. And the fourth is this…