The men who relentlessly pursue women in real life aren’t the same men who pursue women in rom-coms.
I also suspect that for the real-world women who occupy the same career & relationship niche as the female lead in one of those movies, many of them would at least start out interested in being pursued by somebody as good looking, witty, lucky, and/or rich as the male protagonist in that same movie.
I say “lucky” because a very common plot device is the guy is preternaturally good at showing up at the right place at the right time anticipating the right mood, equipped with the right clothes, gifts, lines, dinner reservations, and … such that his key perfectly fits the ever-changing configuration of her lock at that moment.
Real men, not being equipped with scriptwriters, struggle to be so “lucky”. Which makes them far less attractive to real women.
Have you established what percentage of these books have the man relentlessly pursuing the woman against her will?
Zooming out a bit, this whole discussion is an illustration of how a sexist patriarchal society automatically exploits any perceived inconsistency in female attitudes or behavior as an opportunity to disparage women as a group and lessen their agency. It may be subtle, but it happens.
Lots of men like action movies but very few men actually want to be an unfairly maligned hero constantly up to his eyeballs in bad guys trying to kill him? Eh, that’s so normal and natural as to be entirely unremarkable.
Lots of women like rom-coms but very few women actually want to be treated like a rom-com heroine by random male strangers? My goodness, let’s nitpick that “mysterious” female “irrationality” all to pieces, constantly emphasizing the unpredictable ramifications of it so we can reinforce the message that women are just cognitively unreliable compared to “normal human beings”, i.e., men.
Now, I’m not trying to get up anybody’s nose here, and I’m certainly not accusing anybody in this thread of being deliberately sexist. But this is, in a very mild form, the kind of societally-normalized quasi-trollish nitpicking of female behavior that I’m talking about.
Yes, it may be quite silly to reference a rom-com icon in a personals ad, I’m not denying that. But come on. You’re grown-ass educated men. You know perfectly well that the iconic aspect of the rom-com character that this woman was referencing was not her heavily fictionalized career in prostitution. If you read a personals ad from a man with a similarly silly metaphor about, say, “looking for somebody to be Maid Marian to my Robin Hood”, you wouldn’t pretend to imagine that he wants a girl showing up with a wimple and a longbow. You would understand more or less what he meant, and you wouldn’t think it was particularly funny to pretend not to understand what he meant.
But in the case of the woman’s silly metaphor, you’re kind of playing dumb about her meaning. Because if you pretend to take her meaning in a very specific literal sense, and she turns out not to have meant it in that sense, then that makes her look dumb and inconsistent. And making fun of women’s behavior and thought processes as dumb and inconsistent is a very deeply entrenched social convention, especially in a male-bonding kind of way.
So women can understandably get a bit tetchy when guys go into some form of the familiar gosh-I-just-don’t-unnerstan-wimmen schtick. Even if you sincerely don’t mean any harm by it, even if you think you’re being self-deprecatingly funny, deep down it’s still the same old sexist shit sandwich.
This 
Squared.
The key difference is that one of these scenarios is far more common in real life than the other. For a man to actually be an “unfairly maligned hero constantly up to his eyeballs in bad guys trying to kill him” is so rare in real life that everyone understands it’s a fantasy. For a woman to be pursued despite saying ‘no’ is far more common in real life.
Well, if that difference is making it hard for you to wrap your head around the point of the argument, then consider instead that lots of men like derpy comedy movies where the hero is screwing up ridiculously and getting in trouble. That is also comparatively quite common in real life.
Nonetheless, very few men actually want to be a ridiculous derp whose screwups land him in trouble. My goodness, why are men so incomprehensibly inconsistent between their chosen entertainment genres and their real-life preferences?
A soft no is also a no and should also be taken for an answer.
The person who wants to go out with you but can’t go on Saturday can make that clear. ‘I’m really sorry, I can’t do Saturday, but maybe another time?’ is easy enough to say. Or they can ask you themselves, next time; your first request made it clear enough that you’re interested.
I had a number of other things to say here, but I think they’ve mostly already been said. If you’re still having serious trouble understanding that people like to watch or read, for entertainment, things they most certainly don’t want to experience in real life, then I don’t think my trying to explain that yet another six ways is going to get anywhere.
The woman in question had literally dressed up like the character Julia Roberts played in the film and was holding a DVD case of the movie as the main picture in her profile. If that is a metaphor, it is certainly one with more layers than my three dimensional mind is capable of grasping, because between that and the rest of her profile it very much sounded like she wanted to cosplay the film to the point of specifying a man who had the physical attributes of Richard Gere.
Now, I don’t think that she actually wanted to be a prostitute (although I’ve learned not to be so absolute about making those kinds of assumptions) but she clearly had the expectation in a relationship of the same kind of drama and ‘romance’ of the film, even though the treatment of the main character was both horrifying by all parties involved and comically over-the-top. (In the original, unfilmed screenplay, she actually ends up dead in a dumpster of a drug overdose, despite which it actually treated the character with more respect and agency than what was put to film.) And this is hardly unique; if there is a man in a committed relationship with a woman, odds are good that he’s heard some variation of “I wish you were more like ”, as if someone would actually want to date the insufferable narcissists that populate romantic comedies.
Lest I be further accused of “societally-normalized quasi-trollish nitpicking of female behavior”, this is hardly an exclusively female problem; men are equally if not more prone to this, except their selection of model genres leans more toward action and sports movies, to the extent that many of the tropes and quotes of famous films have permeated the lexicon of Western ‘manhood’, and the resultant stupidity therefrom is almost certainly even more destructive and obtuse, and certainly feeds the faux-‘Outlaw’ culture that causes middle aged men to get tattoo sleeves and buy Harley-Davidsons like they are some kind of extras in Sons of Anarchy. I could pick other examples for alternate gender/queer identity, but gender stereotyping aside, the fundamental problem is people confusing storytelling for an example of how to actually function in real life. Like actual pornography, people have taken to mistaking genres for how relationships should work in reality.
So, returning to the o.p., take a “No” as a no, regardless of the conventions of romantic comedies. And if she just said, “No” to be coy like that Kate Hudson character in the film where she pretends to really like the guy because she wants to win a bet even though she doesn’t like the guy but ends up falling in love with the guy because that is what the screenplay requires in order for the film to be ‘funny’, count yourself lucky to avoid the confusing drama of that nonsense. Watch My Cousin Vinny instead. Seriously, it’s a great movie and the Marisa Tomei character is far more appealing and honest than any rom-com princess.
Stranger
I write romance. I think about this stuff a lot. Brace yourself.
The things that happen in romance novels and movies have a lot of symbolic importance and if you try to take them literally, you may get yourself confused. First, romance is one of the few genres overwhelmingly written by and for women and it’s one of the only genres that make women’s emotional and sexual fulfillment a critical and necessary part of the story. When you look at the romance genre as a whole, it helps to understand the social context of the women engaging in these fantasies.
It’s normal, and I would argue, healthy for women to fantasize about being objects of desire. The structure of a romance story delivers on this in a very specific way. Every trope serves a narrative or symbolic purpose and holds meaning for the audience. The relentless pursuit by the leading man in fiction is just proof of his desire. The intended audience needs that proof. If he just walked away, there would be no story. Desire is the engine that drives the romance, at least until desire becomes intimacy, and then the primary driver is love.
Every romance in history requires a climactic act that proves love - a sacrifice usually on some value that resolves the internal conflict. The most common one in rom-coms is the declaration of love, in which men make themselves vulnerable with the open expression of their feelings. They usually have to do this at the expense of their career or something. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Pretty Woman but I think he had to get over his need to maintain social status and show that he wasn’t ashamed to be dating a prostitute. Sometimes those big Proof of Love scenes would translate into creeper territory if they were acted out in the real world. But they are necessary for the emotional payoff of the story. These are stories. And I don’t just mean that in the sense that they are fiction, I mean they have a specific structure and required components like any other story.
The problem is you’re looking at the story from the character’s perspective rather than the viewer’s perspective. This is an emotional journey for the viewer. The viewer is not afraid of the leading man because he is the leading man. A lot of romance novels and many movies include the threat of sexual assault - the very opposite of sexual agency - as a direct contrast to the safety and sexual agency offered by the lover. Women live in a world in which sexual assault is a basic reality of life, but in a romance, there is no safer place to be desired. The key here is being desired by someone you love. And in these stories there is usually a blinding bright line between being desired by the wrong guy and being desired by the right guy. The viewer is smart enough to understand this difference.
I have a theory that romance stories aren’t about real-life romances at all, but about a more general need for women to feel safe, fulfilled, and loved. Notice the heavy presence of supportive ancillary relationships in these movies. The leading man is just the symbolic force for good. And yes, these messages do get absorbed into society, and yes, some people develop unrealistic expectations about relationships because of them. But I don’t think that’s the reason they exist. They started in a world where women had very little agency, at a time where being the star of one’s own show was unheard of if you were a woman. Look at Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre and what an absurd notion it was at that time to marry for love. Romance says, “Who cares what the world thinks? Your happiness matters, lady.”
Thank you for the romance-splaining! Seriously, that was helpful and enlightening.
(I’m another ex-Borders dude — used to shelve or pull the romances, idly glance at a page or a chapter, and feel pretty lost. As with, say, the Warhammer stuff.)
Thanks. I love romance. I really do. I’m not really into rom-coms which is why I’m short on examples there, but I love action movies with romantic subplots, and that’s more or less what I write. In action romance, love is a matter of life and death!!!
Again, you miss the point. Yes, romcoms and such arent realistic. No one claimed they were. It is just that women find them romantic. Hollywood pushes this as romantic even when not realistic- so why?
I don’t claim expertise in the area, but I think “romance” as a category of literature is pretty distinct from rom-coms, which are pretty much a narrow genre of films that are about as formulaic as you can get. In my film survey class we had to deconstruct a classic romantic comedy (in my assignment, Bringing Up Baby) and then contrast it with several modern rom-coms, and it was surprising (or not) just how little the basic structure had changed. Most genres like sports/betting films, crime thrillers, horror, et cetera have gone through an evolution as tastes have changed and tropes have been worn thin, but rom-coms are basically the one adult genre that has been essentially static in form since the beginning of talking films.
“Romances” as a literary category are so broad that it is difficult to really call it a genre; they span the gamut of historical fiction, high and low fantasy, modern drama, and even science fiction; Leigh Brackett who was (as I’m sure you are aware) the coscreenwriter for The Empire Strikes Back and essentially responsible for the Han-Leia relationship storyline that gives the film a more mature appeal, wrote “planetary romance” that also had some actual romance elements as well which is quite distinct from the male-dominated writing in the field which is quite dated and with often painfully underwritten female characters where they exist at all as anything other than love interests or madonna figures. As a literary category, romance is more a style of writing which, as you note, is more about appealing to the emotional interests of the intended audience than the particulars of story or genre elements.
I don’t pretend to have particular insight into writing romance, but as an objective screenwriting exercise in plotting and character development , Pretty Woman is a pretty mediocre movie that shows the hallmarks of studio interference and multiple rewrites, engineered for maximum marketability above any creative virtue. I “get” the appeal in terms of the main character overcoming her background and presumptions upon her social status, but it’s really framed and was marketed as essentially a fairy tale with realist trappings which makes for a discordant story with character development that seems to occur only in service of the plot. And to be honest, I’d probably have little to share in terms of perspective with someone who thought this was a great film, especially if it was the centerpiece of her expectation about dating, because it essentially plays the worst kind of conclusion.
Stranger
Now, how are we doing this? The question isnt are women wrong, but why does Hollywood keep showing what is clearly not acceptable behavior as romantic? The issue isnt with women, it’s with Hollywood.
That would be nice, wouldnt it?
Again, that isnt the point. Hollywood portrays that as romantic, what every woman wants. I am not saying women want that. I am asking WHY Hollywood shows this over and over when it clearly isnt what is wanted… at least most of the time.
“Hollywood” isn’t trying to promote a philosophy; film studios are just selling a product which in the case of the rom-com is of almost guaranteed appeal. These films are so popular with studios because while they’re rarely blockbusters they almost always make a consistent profit and often have strong post-theatre sales, and they’re popular with audiences (and not just women, although they are obviously the target) because they are unchallenging and inoffensive if you overlook the inherent character defects. And while the behavior of characters in rom-coms is often unrealistic, narcissistic, and often illegal, the same can be said of films about the hero cop, or courtroom dramas with bullshit legal proceedings, or science fiction movies that ignore basic physics.
Stranger
I’ve read that one reason is that 70-200 years ago, for many women, they were in situations (maybe cultural, religious, or whatnot) where it is frowned on for them to be proactive in getting a mate. In fact, it’s even frowned on for them to be perceived as too eager or amenable when a man pursues them, even if he’s a very suitable guy. They must put up a ‘ladylike amount of resistance’ in order to be perceived as chaste. This then gave birth to a genre of romance novels where the hero pursues the heroine, and the heroine has to play hard to get, and only after she has resisted him appropriately (as ‘a virtuous woman ought to’) is she finally allowed to give in.
My family was involved in an almost cult-like, fervently conservative Christian organization for a decade or so. Romance-novel culture seemed to be deeply ingrained in the minds of some women in that organization, and I suspect it is because they were so restricted in their dating/romance lives. They were bound by “can’t this, can’t that”, and it was probably enjoyable for them to read stories where the man does “all the work” in pursuing and the women just has to be there as a passive recipient, because that’s what the organizational culture preached.
I cannot respond by the rules of this forum.
I think Spice Weasel’s post #50 as an expert in the field has the answer you’re looking for.
It’s that there’s a difference between being the viewer/reader of that story genre and being the leading character in that story genre. The target audience likes being in the viewer position. So they buy tickets. So Hollywood makes more films like that.
Perhaps with men and action/adventure films the guy may not want to really live the rogue cop life, but at least while watching the film he’s fantasizing himself as being the leading guy or as an unseen partner doing much the same action in the scenes on screen. In short: he’s putting himself in the film.
Whereas perhaps with women and rom-coms the woman definitely doesn’t want that experience in real life, but also doesn’t fantasize herself as the leading woman or phantom participant. Instead, using that famous female empathy, she’s imagining she’s watching this unfold to a friend or neighbor. And is made happy as that person finds happiness and love through the ups and downs of the story arc. In short: she’s putting herself in the position of being friends with the people in the film.
That may be the distinction you/we are missing.