Right, welcome to a thread fraught with land mines for men.
But…what about the Anime/Manga subgenre tsundere - which I know about through my kids, really. Tsundere is defined as:
Frequently, this is presented - and it’s popular - as a person showing romantic interest in another - both men and women - and being rejected but through persistence wearing down the focus person’s resistance and eventually winning them over. It can be friend-oriented but very often is romantic and ends with the couple being happily involved.
Hell, you could consider Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing to also fill this role. It’s not stalker-esque but it would bear a lot of the same hallmarks.
Except the tsundere is also often verbally (if not physically) abusive to the supposed love interest, too.
Just as a guy wearing down a woman in real life isn’t a great plan, pursuing a woman who keeps hitting you with hammers or verbally cutting you down is also a bad plan in real life. I’d say the tsundere character is also more common in series aimed at male viewers; female tsundere protagonists in female-targeted series are less common than shy or awkward protagonists.
Oh, I’m not arguing for it, or that people should live their lives that way, God knows. But it’s a pretty common trope.
Even Rumiko Takahashi - for my money the greatest Japanese comic creator of all time - used this in Ranma 1/2 several times. It was more nuanced where the characters of Ranma and Akane were forced together but it’s a variant on a theme.
The question wasn’t “Do works ever portray this kind of relationship?”, though, but “Do women like these shows?” (to which the obvious answer is ‘some of them do’) with an underlying question of “What does this mean about women and about relationships?”
I like anime and comics, but I wouldn’t read a lot of Superman to try to understand how to woo a woman through his relationship with Lois. Even if Superman were more popular with female readers.
A tsundere character honestly strikes me as appealing to fans in part because this sort of relationship is such a terrible idea in real life. I assume some male fans like female characters that would be terrors to encounter in real life because they also realize that this is best as a fantasy. I don’t think men secretly want to be treated like Akane treats Ranma, or Asuka treats Shinji, for anime examples. So… similarly, I think that the idea of being obsessively pursued may appeal to some women, but obviously not all, and even those women probably see it as a fantasy exaggeration that is totally undesirable in real life.
Nobody wants to wake up to someone screaming “baka” at them every morning. I hope.
The desire to be desired is hardly unique to women, but it is not unknown to them either. Being romantically stalked is an extreme example. Likewise there is an attraction to being overwhelmed - it absolves you of responsibility, and that is sometimes a relief.
Nobody is suggesting this as a model for a healthy relationship, but neither is porn, and that’s popular as well. Although for different reasons.
Pornography seems like a fair comparison. I’m a little puzzled why 50 Shades wasn’t considered to be porn by more people, based on the excerpts I’d read. It seems to have a lot of intense description of fetishy sex, and not a lot of artistic merit outside of that…
I think there’s a pretty strong backlash, but it’s not a hill I want to die on. I’ve never seen the movies or read the books and I don’t know any woman who has or has an interest.
The creepy stalker genre is just another one of the myriad ways that society pushes trying to normalize the awful behavior women experience in real life. It’s trying to get us to think that maaaaaaaaybe we should not listen to our heads and our guts telling us to get the fuck away from the creepy stalker because maaaaaaaybe he’s just a “nice guy” who’s socially awkward and blah blah blah. We get told this shit from childhood–“Oh, he teases/bullies/hurts you because he LIKES you!” and it’s gaslighting, trying to get us to ignore and stifle that voice inside us that lets us know the situation is wrong and damaging. Thank the gods more women are vocally and forcefully pushing back against this bullshit more and more.
So put me down for a hearty “Fuck NO!” to the OP’s question.
Are people reading the topic? There is a difference between liking a genre and liking a villain in a genre. For example, you can like WWII movies without necessarily liking any of the nations that participated in the war, any of the generals or admirals in the war, or war in general.
Well, I don’t know much about Twilight, though I understand Edward crossed some pretty serious lines, it wasn’t a major part of the movie. The plot–as I understand it–is “Ordinary girl moves to new town, becomes popular, gets involved in love triangle with a beautiful brooding boy and a hunky jock, both of whom have supernatural powers.” I think you can understand why this would appeal to teenage girls.
I know even less about 50 shades, except that it royally pissed off the BDSM community. I suspect it functions as soft core porn with slightly more of a plot. There are a lot of people–men and women–who have sex fantasies that they would never want to happen in real life.
As for 80’s rom-coms, let’s just say they haven’t aged well. But even here, if you have an attractive male lead, people can enjoy a fantasy. There were a lot of women in my generation with a crush on young John Cusak, regardless of how questionable his character’s actions were.
Because “here” is not a representative sample of the population?
See also: Percentage of Americans who voted for Trump vs Percentage of posters on the SDMB who say anything remotely approaching non-horrible about Trump?
This is basically how the current emperor of Japan got his wife - by wearing her down until she agreed to marry him. So art imitates life, at least in Japan.