that’s interesting. Did the media influence you in any other aspects of life, or just dating? I mean, did porn influence you on how you should treat sexual partners? Did mafia films influence you on how you should treat your friends?
I believe it has been noted that mafia movies did influence the actual mafia.
That may be, but I’m asking about actual people here, right now. Did it influence you to change your behavior to emulate what you saw in TV and movies?
I really enjoyed that one too. I think rom-coms are getting smarter.
I am surprised that you are surprised by this. Yes, people are influenced by what they see in film and TV.
In answer to your questions:
For porn, by the time I was old enough to get my hands on an actual porn movie (it used to be much more difficult), I was old enough to guess that the scenario of a woman just screwing a guy she just met seconds ago was unrealistic, and therefore wish fulfillment. However, it still influenced me in lots of ways: how the guy is supposed to perform (e.g. cunnilingus; with no other references to draw from, I assumed those guys were doing it right) to unrealistic expectations for what women’s bodies look like naked and, suffice it to say, I was concerned about the size of my pecker for a while.
When I lost my virginity, I remember just sort of “going at it”, and in retrospect I should have talked more, and asked how it was feeling for her, because I was certainly not doing a good job. Maybe this was also because in porn people don’t talk in that way, so it didn’t occur to me.
Regarding the mafia, your question is comparing apples and oranges. No, mafia movies probably didn’t influence how I treated my friends. But they would influence my expectations of what the mafia is like.
Again, this is a straw man. Most people are not going to watch one movie and become Batman.
Most people are however, going to be influenced in many ways by the movies, TV shows and other media that they have watched throughout their lives.
Well, that is what is surprising to me. I mean, I know that what I see on TV and in movies is fake. And I shouldn’t try to emulate what I see. I just assumed most people did the same. That’s why I’m asking here. I hear a lot about “people do this” but wanted to know, who, here, on this message board, changed their behavior based on something they saw on TV or in a movie.
Thank you for your story, I appreciate it.
It’s not generally a matter of ‘hey, they did that on TV, I should try it.’ It’s a matter of back-of-the head assumptions: the things you assume about how people behave or ought to behave, not because you consciously worked them out, but because you’ve absorbed them, without thinking, from various influences around you.
People aren’t going to think of it as ‘changing their behavior’ because they’re likely not even to notice it as a change.
Sure, but my “back-of-the head assumptions” are “Don’t do anything you see on TV or in the movies”. Isn’t that yours?
That’s not a back-of-the-head assumption. That’s a front-of-the-head fully conscious statement.
Just about everybody has back-of-the-head assumptions they don’t consciously realize. I’ve figured out some of mine (at which point I no longer have them.) I probably haven’t got all of them. They’re really hard to see.
That’s fair. I’m sure I have some too. Also, front-of-the-head assumptions that I find it hard to deal with. Like being more protective of my daughter. However, both my kids know “if you see it on TV or in a movie, it’s not real life”
I drive my car, I eat. I watch TV, I listen to music. There are lots of things I do that are in TV or the movies.
Sorry, i mean “Don’t do anything simply because you saw them on TV”
does that help?
This is not the problem with Twilight, etc. and what people point out is not the “male lead would be considered a creep and stalker and loathsome if he were anything but the billionaire/handsome/charismatic guy”. They point out they are creepy, stalkers, etc. period. The characters do not “pursue hard”, they do things like call up a woman’s boss to get her fired from their job, so they can hire them at their own company and break into a woman’s bedroom to watch them sleep. Describing the events of these books as OK if the perpetrator is handsome shows, at best, you don’t really know what’s depicted in the series. Problematic behavior in rom-coms may or may not be so severely abusive but the same principle applies to the persistent refusal to respect boundaries that is depicted. “Attractiveness equates to consent” is not the lesson.
Just as a counterpoint, this behavior was pretty common in the clubbing scene when I was younger, pre herpes and AIDS. I slept with many women, some I barely knew some I didn’t know at all.
It was so common to me that when I began to see movies where a bunch of guys would go to a club, go talk to a woman for two minutes then come back to sit down with his friends saying " I got her number (or digits)" I thought they just skipped the sex part for ratings. Who the hell would talk to a woman, get her phone number then go back and sit at a table of men and drink all night. Clubs, to me and those I knew, were all about sex, dancing, sex, drinking, sex. What good was a phone number for that?
When I was in my 20s, just a year or two out of college, I had a conversation with Susie Bright. I interpreted for a panel she was on, which is how I happened to meet her. This would have been 1991 or 92, so, 30 years ago. A whole generation now raising girls was not even born yet.
Anyway, she told me about recently participating in a Take Back the Night march (they were very common in the 90s), and was given a sign that said “‘No’ means ‘NO’!” She said that wasn’t quite the sign she wanted to carry. She “couldn’t quite get her slogan together” (a great phrase, which I have borrowed), but she wanted something about “Let women say Yes, so they can also say No, and mean it.”
I said, “So, you mean, that until women are empowered to say ‘Yes,’ without having to be coy about it, they can’t say ‘No’ with the right conviction?”
She said “Exactly,” and then said something I can’t remember verbatim about that’s how she was going to raise her daughter, who was about 20 months at the time.
And yeah, that was a problem, in 1992. I haven’t dated literally this millennium, having started dating my husband in the Fall of 1999. I’m really hoping that those women who weren’t even born when I had that conversation with Susie Bright in 1992, particularly the ones just entering the dating world now, are having an easier time of it.
Yes, we have the hippies to thank, to an extent.
But we also have AIDS to “thank,” albeit, I really don’t like putting it that way. However, negotiating a sex life in the age of AIDS forced people to adopt a frankness that didn’t exist before. Getting caught up in the passion meant risking even more than an unwanted pregnancy; it meant risking your life. Literally. The time from diagnosis to death was about 18 months back in the year I lost my virginity.
I have never had sex with someone without first making a trip to the county health building, or something like that, so we could each get tested. Even then, we used condoms. My husband is the only man I’ve not used condoms with every time. There was never getting caught up in the passion. There was always “Do we need to stop at the store?” at the outset of an evening.
I’m not finding anything online right now, and I can’t honestly remember whether I read this in an online or print article, but there are several diseases, particularly psychiatric ones that didn’t exist, or were extremely rare, until someone in a movie had one.
The particular example in an article I read was the amnesia Drew Barrymore has in 50 First Dates (another terrible, stalkerish rom-com). She can remember everything that happens to her in the course of a day, but then she goes to sleep, and wakes up, and has forgotten everything that happened after a traumatic brain injury.
A neurologist will tell you this is impossible. Either something gets to your long-term memory, or it doesn’t, and there is no “24 hour” memory; short-term memory is seconds. Sleep, moreover, is when memories “set,” not erase.
Nonetheless, this impossible form of amnesia, unknown before the movie, suddenly became something patients were presenting with shortly after the film came out.
Another example is “multiple personalities,” and yes, I know there are updated terms, but I’m using that one for a reason. This disorder was fleetingly rare before the 1970s. There cases in psychiatric literature were in the single digits. The the TV movie Sybil with Sally Field came out. Within two years, there were thousands of diagnosed cases.
You can’t chalk it up to mere “increased awareness,” particularly in the first case, where the disorder just can’t exist. Well, except as an hysterical (I wish I had a better term) disorder.
Interesting counterpoint.
I guess I was thinking more of the pizza delivery guy showing up and immediately getting laid. If a guy is fantastically good looking and charming then anything is possible, but I think we can all agree this is far from a typical occurrence.
In terms of clubs, I can relate somewhat, because there were a few times where I would make out and grind with a girl having barely said a word, and later get in a taxi still having hardly spoken. But it would still take a while, nothing like the token set up for a porn scene.
So I still don’t quite get this:
So you mean you would have sex right there in the club within seconds of meeting a girl? Wow.
Yep, bathroom sex was pretty common. Sometimes in your/their car. Sometimes her place if it was close.
Closest I can think of to a porn type thing, I showed late at a club and my friends and some women were at a table so they did some quick intro like “everyone this is mordecai, mordecai this is everyone.” One of the women I had hooked up with before so I jokingly said “wanna fuck” she said yes and we went out to her car. Everyone at the table was as surprised as me. Probably end this hijack now, pretty far from the OP.
And our age of social media has repeatedly slapped us in the face with how otherwise previously functional adults who would have called themselves intelligent are vulnerable to be drawn in to an erroneous mindset if presented in a manner that pleases them. So it’s not as easy as saying “My default position is to not be influenced. Isn’t that yours?”
Heck, conditioning oneself to the discipline to avoid being drawn in by seeing X Y or Z trope portrayed in general popular culture is itself a recognition that one needs to exercise good preventive mental health against often unnoticed influences. But that’s not even about facing TV or Hollywood or Harlequin, that’s just general learning how to think.
And it’s not necessarily about “doing X because you saw it done on TV”, it can be about attitudes and judgements about it and about those who do it or think it even if I don’t, and things I may not even consciously notice.
I don’t know how old you’d have to be, to have been clubbing pre-herpes. Unless you meant wooden clubs.
Here’s an example of a female grizzly bear wanting to be pursued. Flirts a bit, then wanders off expecting the male to follow. But he doesn’t, so she returns to the male and flirts some more, then wanders off again. This time it’s a success and he follows her.
Suggests to me that it may be an innate preference.