For the same reason they show lots of murder and mayhem when that clearly isn’t what’s wanted.
How many times is it possible to say ‘people think lots of things are fun entertainment in fiction that they don’t want to happen in their actual lives’?
I don’t think that’s quite right. As I mentioned upthread, while I’ve never been in combat, I’ve been in a few situations where I thought I was about to be. I’ve spoken with guys who actually have been in combat. Combat is fucking awful. I never want to actually be in a real combat. I still love action movies. I also love role-playing games even more, and in those I actively insert myself into characters who engage in, just, like all the combat.
Fictional combat is fun. Real combat is awful. Fictional romances are fun. Real “romances” that play out like that are awful.
Rom-coms as a film genre almost died out - and are pretty rare on the big screen. You get them from the Hallmark channel and Netflix productions. So its difficult to blame “Hollywood” - which was following the money, until rom-coms didn’t make money (the piece I remember reading said they don’t translate well into international markets). And modern rom-coms are usually smarter about female agency.
By “romance” I’m referring to a specific structure with specific story elements, not a style. I’m talking about marketing category romance - the “formula” you are deriding. Science fiction, historical, contemporary - these are all settings, not the stories themselves. Each of these subgenres has its own tropes, but the structure is remarkably the same. In almost all of them, a man pursues a woman. If your argument is that there’s little innovation, I would tend to agree - but I see just as little innovation in other genres. It’s rare that something stands out. The last time I’ve seen any innovation in action films is John Wick.
I spent a couple years studying story structure, and now I see structure in everything. It’s all the same. All of it. Romance, action, horror, thriller, Stephen King, Dickens, Austen and god damned EL James. Inciting incident, rising complications, turning point, crisis, climax, resolution. How the genres execute this nearly universal structure, this thing we call “story” varies from genre to genre, and each genre has its own structural patterns. The most common one in category romance is that two lovers meet, each lover has some internal conflict holding them back from a committed relationship, the conflict results in a breakup, and only once that conflict is resolved can the lovers be together. There are a million ways to innovate the execution of this pattern, but it is rarely done.
Lately I’ve been trying to get a grip on the marketing category science fiction romance because that’s what I write. Surprisingly, a lot of sci-fi romance follows a different structure than your standard contemporary romance. A lot of them are “fated mates” where the bonding happens almost immediately (insta-love is not to my taste), and the internal conflict is less pronounced so there is rarely a formal breakup. I attribute this in part to the fact that most science fiction is action - oriented and when you apply the action structure to romance, the pivotal “break up” moment becomes lovers separated by the villain. One might attribute the diminished internal conflict to bad writing - it’s a niche genre and a lot of it is self-pubbed - but it could also be a market preference. These books routinely get rated 5 stars, so I dunno. I’ve read a lot of highly-rated garbage so there’s something about the romance audience that remains elusive to me.
It’s worth noting that most rom-coms, like most romance book covers, are created by men. Women may consume these stories but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something they would like better.
How many rom-coms have you watched lately? I’m not totally immersed in the genre but I can’t see Zach & Miri Make a Porno flying with a 60s audience. As a side note, one of the interesting things about Seth Rogan rom-coms is they tend to focus on the male POV rather than the female. Charming.
Yes, and yes. And I’d be willing to bet that action movies have just as much symbolic resonance. I love action films and abhor real - life violence.
The hero in my first novel is a violent antagonistic alcoholic. I wouldn’t let him in my house much less spend the rest of my life with him.
To be clear, I’m not ‘deriding’ romance in general as a literary category; I’m specifically citing romantic comedy movies as being generally badly written and lacking any creative merit or novelty, and (while it isn’t intended as a comedy per se), Pretty Woman in particular as just a bad movie with pasteboard characters that exist exclusively to service the plot. Since this has gone afield from the o.p. I’ll leave it there, though I’ve enjoyed your discussion about story structure and how it varies within and between different genres and would like to continue that elsewhere.
Stranger
By “eroticized” I mean it is made sexy for us. Our critical political awareness of sexism and our tendency to react to polarized gendered assumptions with skepticism ameliorates this, but doesn’t 100% erase it for everyone involved. People who don’t approach real-life sex and courting-flirting by any such rules may still have the social sexual receptors for finding the portrayal of it sexy.
Yeah, and I enjoy movies about serial killers.
I’m going to need something more than “People watch them” as evidence that “women find them romantic.”
If I’m hungry, and all I’m driving past are Taco Bells, that’s what I’ll eat. Doesn’t mean I like Taco Bell in any meaningful sense. I just prefer it to being hungry.
Mostly men write, produce, and direct rom-coms. Personally, I think they are what men want women to like. And I have as much evidence for that as I’ve seen so far for the idea that women actually prefer these movies to other kinds, including theoretical ones that are not being made.
I actively hate rom-coms. As a result, I don’t see many, but I did see Pretty Woman– I used to write film reviews, and it was on my list-- I hated it. I would have walked out if I didn’t have a review to write. I still hate it. In fact, I used to like Julia Roberts before that film, but after it, I stopped seeing things she was in, for the most part.
Sorry if I came off as defensive. We are in agreement that Pretty Woman is dreck. I’ve seen some surprisingly good stuff lately though.
Yes, this is what I mean. And I think, you can even like Taco Bell while still wishing you had a steak. Or you can like some things on the Taco Bell menu and not others.
Do some women find these films romantic? Sure. One of my guilty pleasure rom-coms is The Cutting Edge. It’s about a hockey player who has to switch to a career in figure skating after a head injury. He gets paired up with a total Ice Queen. It’s completely cheesy and I fall for it every time. It’s not a “won’t take no for an answer” story though. In fact, there’s a scene where the woman is drunk and throws herself at the guy and he rebuffs her because he doesn’t want to be some one night stand.
In fact, I really can’t think of a lot of films off the top of my head where men won’t take no for an answer. Surely they exist but they are hardly a requirement for the formula to work. The only one I can think of is Groundhog Day and let me tell you, those scenes do not age well.
We are entering an era where women are getting more writing and directing gigs. I have thoroughly enjoyed women - directed ventures like Bridesmaids and Sleeping with Other People. I think you will see the genre opening up to a wider range of possibilities than tired old stereotypes.
I have a question for @DrDeth though. When women expressed that they felt these films were romantic, did they say, “this film is romantic because he won’t take no for an answer” or was it more like, “this film, which contains a scene where a man won’t take no for an answer, is on the whole, romantic.”?
The OP named just one, which I have never heard of, but claimed there are many, many more. Perhaps the discussion could be more fruitful if @DrDeth would name some of the others he had in mind?
I didnt make this up, there has been buzz about it:
“Stalking for Love,” though, summarizes the prevalence and problematic nature of the setup in 24 minutes of movie examples, ranging from “The Notebook” to “There’s Something About Mary” to “Say Anything” to “Love, Actually” to “Wedding Crashers” to “Twilight.”
“Our hero is typically a nice guy who doesn’t quite fit the Hollywood ideal of manhood,” McIntosh narrates. “And who, for a variety of reasons, hasn’t found love. One day, he sees a very special woman and instantly becomes infatuated with her. Time slows down. The music swells. And the camera zooms in. These audiovisual cues are designed to communicate to us, the audience, that this is true love. But wait, there’s just one small problem. She doesn’t return his feelings. Maybe she’s dating someone else. Maybe she’s already rejected him. Maybe she doesn’t even know he exists. Or maybe she’s just not interested.
But think about how Noah met Allie. In the scene when they first meet, Noah will not take no for an answer. He risks killing himself in front of Allie just to coerce her into going on a date with him. Throughout the scene, Noah repeatedly asks Allie to dance with him or go out with him. Meanwhile, she’s on a date with another guy. She repeatedly responds, “No,” and, “Because I don’t want to,” but he refuses to accept her answer. She doesn’t give in until Noah dangles himself by one arm off the Ferris wheel and forces Allie to scream, “I wanna go out with you!” and then repeat then statement, just to prevent Noah from killing himself for a date.
And we all want to think, “Wow, I wish a guy would see me and risk his life to ask me out—it’s so romantic!” But it’s not romantic. That would never ever happen in real life. If a guy actually did that in real life, he’d probably be more of a stalker-ish sociopath than a romantic boyfriend.
## The “Her Mouth Says No, But Her Eyes Say Yes” Guy
We’ve all seen this trope played out — for years, it ended up in a lot of romcoms and cheesy ’80s movies. It goes like this: a guy meets a girl. He finds her attractive and tries to pursue her. She rebuffs his advances, but instead of taking no for an answer, he just tries harder. He thinks she’s playing hard to get and secretly wants him. Even if her mouth is saying no, he’s picking up some sort of sign that says yes.
Classic examples of this trope include Edward Bloom’s “romantic gestures” in Big Fish . He falls in love with a woman he’s never even spoken to and then tells her he’s going to marry her. She obviously thinks he’s insane, but after pursuing her for months, she finally develops feelings and marries him. It’s an incredibly unrealistic situation, and the movie suggests that Edward is being romantic — but he’s really being obsessive. These kinds of movies preach that it doesn’t matter if a woman says no — if you declare your love enough times or plant her an entire field of daffodils, she’s eventually going to say yes.
Real-life romances don’t work like that — if a woman isn’t into you, there’s no big romantic gesture that’s going to win her over.
The message that these movies send to men — especially younger boys who might not have as much experience in the dating world — is troubling. Dating is a two-way street and men don’t have to “convince” a woman to date them or try to turn a no into a yes.
So, it’s a real problem that has been discussed. Hollywood shows this sort of stuff as romantic. People love those films.
But the actual behavior is problematic (Ok, sure some women might want this, but as shown in these articles and in thise thread- most do NOT). But guys are encouraged by Hollywood.
Yes. And women are more likely to minimize the behavior when it happens in real life. It’s a bad idea to take your relationship cues from Hollywood.
Or the cues on what to do if your family is the victim of a crime. Or cues on police community relations. Or cues on how much is affordable on a middle class income. Or how to plan and execute a bachelor party in Vegas. And sure as heck don’t learn history from Hollywood movies. Hollywood sells fantasy.
I wouldn’t be sad to see this trope dissappear. There are other, less creepy ways to show desire.
Although, I can’t help but think of the Hero’s Journey here. If a story is told from a woman’s POV, one of the elements of the Hero’s Journey is to Deny the Call. So if a woman is being called to a romantic adventure, she must first refuse to take it. I’m not sure how often this structure is used in romance, though. I’ve never looked for it. It’s extremely common in Hollywood.
Regarding Pretty Woman, looking at a person saying “I want to be treated like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman” and saying “So you want to be treated like a prostitute?” is like if a person said “I want to be like Harry Potter!” and saying to them “So you want your parents to be killed and have to live under the staircase of an abusive family?”
It is quite deliberately selecting the most stupid (but accurate!) way to describe the situation in the movie. It’s stupid, and dishonest, and of course misogynistic - pretending that the “was a prostitute” part is what women like to make women look stupid. All to score cheap points.
There has been some interesting responses to this question ITT. However, something that annoyed me was dismissing any negative behavior that men might do to women in fiction with saying that it’s not real, so people shouldn’t care.
An opinion of mine (taken as fact for the sake of argument) is most people don’t enjoy watching people being tortured, even in fiction. The question to ask is, why don’t people generally enjoy watching other people being tortured in fiction but many women may enjoy (if we are to believe the OP) watching movies where a man would be classified as a creep/harasser/stalker/rapist, or at least cringey, if they acted the same way in real life.
Works of fiction that depict some negative things like rape, torture, pedophilia etc might be horrible yet compelling when they show these things since they almost invariably show them in a negative light. People would be appalled if a movie generally showed these things positively I think. Fiction that is borderline or downright NAMBLA propaganda in the case of pedophilia would be good example of appalling.
Of course, there might be some women that enjoy a novel or film about a women that falls in love with their violent rapist, for example, but if all media depictions of women were like this would it be okay, since it’s “fiction”? Are we going to say that media has no influence to culture or people’s behavior, especially when it comes to younger ones?
A female friend of Ian Fleming was disgusted at the sexist behavior of the main character in his first James Bond novel and told not him to publish it. Was she stupid and wrong in thinking this way? After all, it’s only fiction.
Things might be changing for the better though, as some in the thread have stated examples of older fiction where “romantic” male behavior is “dated”, problematic or worse. But saying some old movie can be bad due to it’s depictions or romance means that we can’t just say anything goes, even in fiction, or at least (morally) better fiction.
“What she’s really saying is, ‘Uh, get away from me now,’ or possibly, ‘Try harder, stupid.’ But which one is it?”
-Hitch
It’s usually not as simple as “take NO for an answer”. At least not in rom-coms. Usually it’s “boy meets girl, boy hits on girl, girl rejects boy (or maybe they sleep together and boy blows off girl), boy and girl spend most of the film getting into contrived situations where they are forced to interact with each other, boy and girl realize they are in love, the end.”
You had me at “anal-fisting clause”.
There is a certain irony in two feuding brick-and-mortar book store owners falling in love via the internet.
No, I wouldn’t say that. I agree with your points, and @DrDeth’s point more generally that while all genre fiction is unrealistic, most people have the opportunity to engage in relationships (as opposed, to say, shooting bad guys.)
Your post strikes at the heart of the conflict for me, because I am a writer and I believe all media both reflects and shapes the society we live in. But I also believe fantasies are fun and probably healthy.
For my own part, I try to put it through the 14-year - old girl test. I happen to be pretty liberal about what adolescents may be exposed to, so I have zero compunction about a teen reading my raunchy sex scene. But I do care about things like affirmative consent, and equal power in relationships, and what that looks like. So even though I write adult fiction, I try to think about what messages a young reader might take away from it. I think I fail in some ways, but if I sanitized my work completely it would no longer be my work. Very difficult balance to strike as a socially conscious artist.
Hey, those covers let Fabio build up a nice nest egg.
But yes – I thought of that when how one compares RomComs with Romance genre fiction came up. That there are more women creators of the latter as opposed to the former must make a big difference.
Plus as mentioned the standard RomCom has sort of faded because if you’re the studio exec and you can either invest 20 million in a RomCom that may make 50 million in Europe and North America, or you can invest 200 million in a movie about Things Blowing Up Real Good that is sure to make a Billion worldwide, you’d be a damn fool to choose the former. Meanwhile that same incentive is not present in anywhere near the same scale for Romance genre fiction publishers.
BTW let me join in thanking you for the extremely cogent explanations of what goes on with “romance” as genre fiction within different idioms.
Who in this thread do you think has been saying that?
I don’t write romance novels, but I have been reading them for several decades now. The genre has changed over time because both the authors and their readers are products of their times and environments. Plotlines that were common in the 70s and 80s are less likely to be acceptable today. (On the romance websites that I read, people frequently write things along the lines of “I loved this book when I was a teenager. It has not aged well.”)
That’s a sentiment I’ve read from a lot of writers. And it’s apparent in the books that are getting published and promoted. More and more books forefront affirmative consent. There’s more discussion about boundaries and making sure that all of the protagonists respect each others’ boundaries.