I KNOW I am not going to be the only one, but watching that video made me REALLY REALLY long for and WANT there to be more gay romance movies. Even though they were joking about trite romance movie schtick, I just L*O*V*E*D watching guys act like they were falling in love with each other.

In the distant future, I fervently hope it will be the NORM for romance movies to feature all the different types of love and romance that there are.

FWIW, I am a straight woman. ANd I also thought the video was funny and cool.

ALso: my husband is a super sensitive guy, and even HE moans about “chick flicks” and wanting to see “things blow up” instead. But the few chick flicks he HAS seen are total favorites of his!!  He adores Moonstruck, and As Good As It Gets, and watched Jane Eyre BBC television (10 episodes) with great interest. I think he knows he is going to BE MOVED by emotional movies, and dreads it, rather than being bored or whatever dewds are supposed to feel about chick flicks.

He’s probably an exception though. Any other guys out there who just don’t want to FEEL EMOTIONS? ANd therefore rent DIEHARD?

Not to mention that I can think of at least three examples of friends who asked the guy out first, called first, wrote letters—and other shameless hussy moves—that have resulted in longterm, good marriages.

Also, my former highschool boyfriend, now happily married to a woman who asked him out first (a decade or two after we broke up, friendly like.)

So much for the passive approach of The Rules and He’s Just Not That Into You.

I know I’ll probably be the first of ten-thousand to tell you, but you can watch last night’s BSG on the Sci-Fi webpage this morning—I don’t have cable, so BSG starts at whenever I get up on Saturday.

The video: yeah, someone sent it to me as a funny this week, but when I watched it I totally felt that the wink wink was for those intelligent girls who dismiss girl-culture (and of course the intended audience of Dude-Nation).

I think that the chick-flick phenomenon is kind of like a fever, it has to get worse before it gets better.

I loved Bridget Jones Diary (both the book and movie) when it first came out, but then all the imitators kind of created this chick-lit/flick culture that took the original and then made it mass-produced.

There’s a great spoof on the phenomenon, “Death By Chick Lit” which is Lynn Harris’ take on the culture she’s helped create. Spoiler: one of the ghost writers of several chick lit novels was a het dude.

Mandos, I don’t expect the entire internets to avoid spoiling me.

Okay, I finally watched the above video, and yeah, it’s hilarious—was just irked yesterday, by the “heads-hitting-the-pillow” thing on a rerun of “Desperate Housewives.”

Oh and no, women don’t usually make love in their bras (another chick flick cliche), unless they’re actresses with enuf clout, or on network TV, so as preclude the bare breasts in the after-coitus scene.

In my opinion, it’s less jarring to have the covers pulled up under their arms after sex (the old cliche), more natural than imagining that every woman has sweaty intercourse with her breasts completely covered by a $50 bra.

But what makes me insane, judy, is that the people who wrote “He’s Just Not That Into You” actually mean well, and I can’t fault them for trying to help the multitudes of young women who don’t know the difference between being assertive and refusing to take a hint.  If I had, as a young woman, made a rule to never, ever call a guy twice (i.e. if you call, and he doesn’t call back, write him off) I would have been spared at least one tumultuous relationship. Of course, the writers go way overboard.  I should write a book called, “Go Ahead And Call But Learn To Take A Hint”.

The thing that irritates me is that the sexism could be very easily neutralized by replacing one of these guys with any of the actresses in the movie, and simply making it about the inanity of anything dubbed a “chick flick”, instead of about how women find this crap so compelling. If you actually made both genders your target, (because honestly, most women I know hate the shit they’re talking about just as much as men do), used all the same cliches/shots/dialogue, you’d reach more people and may actually convince rom-com hating women to see this movie. Whenever people talk about Hollywood as solely an engine of commerce instead of the main propagator of the dominant ideology, I get pissed off. Shit like this is why.

I have to agree with KMTBERRY.  This video was just advertising how awesome gay romcoms are.  The gay takes the edge off horrible cliches.  It makes me sad that there are few of them.

I’ll add that just because a man marries you doesn’t necessarily mean he’s into you.  I know that sounds counterintuitive—-and the authors of the book seem to think the wedding ring is the brass ring—-but there’s a number of spineless men out there who marry a woman because she hung in long enough.  Of course, that goes both ways, and there’s a whole cottage industry of men proposing dramatically in public so that the woman doesn’t really feel empowered to say no.  There’s a ton of marriages made because of a dynamic where one person wants it really bad and the other person goes along because they don’t see any better options.

Apparently you shouldn’t watch the preview for next week’s episode. It seems to contain spoilers.

I also agree with KTMBerry and cola.  There should be more gay rom coms out there.

Plus, on the ‘falling in love montage’ part, don’t the couple usually end up kissing in the under the umbrella scene.  Clip would have been all kinds of awesome if they’d done that.

I’m with you on the “but I LOOOOOOOVE him, so I won’t take a hint” crew.

Listened to a neighbor obsess over a guy for ONE FULL YEAR after a very brief relationship and then he dumped her for someone else. Ugh—I finally told her I was calling it quits on hearing about that guy, and the possibility he might. come. back.

However, just got off the phone with a childhood friend, in a successful nearly 40 year marriage—they met her first year in college, were parted every summer during which she wrote to him frequently, although he never wrote back (back in the day when long-distance phone calls were considered expensive.)

However, probably since she’d only dated two guys before they married, she then spent the rest of her 20s, um, falling in love with a couple extracurricular men—it’s gotta come out somewhere—neither of which she allowed to threaten the marriage.

So, yeah, quitcha stalking ladies and take a hint, but relationships are more elastic than the box of the Rules and He’s Just Not That Into You.

Comment from the movie review at Salon:

An ex-girlfriend of mine some time ago bought Behrendt’s book, and quickly began reading it as a cipher to interpret my every action. Out of interest (and sheer confusion), I read a good bit of it, and it found that it’s the perfect guide book for simple, vapid, easily stereotyped women attracted to simple, douche-bag, easily stereotyped “bros”. From what this review says, it sounds like this movie is a spot on adaptation of the book! Even the casting (Barrymore, Aniston, Afleck…How much more vapid and douche-y can you get!) perfectly harnesses the kind of unrealistic cardboard-caricature-people that the book describes. Great!

Now, there’s a slim margin of possibility that this guy is the nice, giving boyfriend he’s pretending to be.  Or, more likely, his girlfriend bought the book because she was tired of having him toy with her, absorbing her attention and affection but refusing to return it in kind because he thought it was emasculating to do so and/or because he enjoyed a relationship with a person who he’s disempowered through emotional manipulation.  So she buys this book and when boyfriend starts performing the “under my thumb” dance—-making someone call three or four times before deigning to call them back, running half an hour late for no good reason, refusing to initiate any kisses or snuggles so that she gets labeled as “clingy”—-instead of doing what she did before, which is to cling harder and try harder, she decides not to enable his behavior any more.  She calls once and if he doesn’t call back, she doesn’t follow up, meaning that he has to wait days for sex if he’s committed to making her feel like she’s not a priority for him.  She stops initiating kisses and cuddles, meaning he’s deprived of these things unless he wants to emasculate himself by seeming like he desires these things.  In the past, he was rewarded for communicating a lack of interest by her striving to please him.  Now, he’s punished for sending these signals because she takes them at face value.

Angry, the boyfriend reads the book, and there is a fight because he doesn’t want to be “boxed” into this category.  However, she’s enjoying the time that the book has freed up for her now that she’s been untied from waiting by the phone.  The relationship grinds to a halt, and the now ex-boyfriend makes tenuous claims about how any man who would behave in the way that the book tells women they should consider a minimum standard—-calling, showing up on time, initiating affection, not making you beg—-must have something wrong with him.

That’s my suspicion.  And so while I think the book is regressive in certain significant ways, I can’t help but think if it helps women like the semi-hypothetical one I’ve imagined here to grow a spine, then it’s done some good.

...I am, of course, not only a giant sap for romantic comedies that feed me a ridiculous fantasy that someone could ever love me despite my ambition and neuroses (which, being a single, educated woman, I have by the dozens), but I’m also a narcissist who can’t think of other options for viewing romantic comedies other than demanding my boyfriend suffer.

Which means the video mocking cliches is premised on yet another one.

I don’t feel offended by this video in the same way I don’t feel empathy for someone who buys a house on the ocean and then has to pay for all the work needed to protect it from storms. This video is aimed at the kind of guy I loathe most: smart, funny, probably cute and shallow enough to date bimbos (many of whom are smarter than they pretend to be). They trade nights at shitty movies for sex. And yes, I’ve seen this cliche occur in real life on many occasions. For whatever reasons of their own, many women do in fact choose to play the role of insufferable bubblehead and resent the women who don’t. They make a good match for the previously mentioned type of guy, who *prefers* to date women he doesn’t have much in common with, as it provides great fodder for trash talk with his friends and a sense of inherent superiority. I dated a few of these guys in college and it was always a baffling experience. Any attempt at bonding over mutual interests seemed to freak them out and the relationship would usually fade away quietly. Once, post-breakup, I bumped into one of them at the movies with a new girl on his arm. Me and my friend were going to see “Boogie Nights.” I asked him what he was going to see. He turned a little red and then answered with a pained expression on his face: “The Object of My Affection.” A pox on both their houses, I say, and may the money wasted on this new craptacular romcom give our economy a little jolt. And no, I don’t think the understanding that I’m not on these dudes’ radar makes me a “sucker”—just a little wiser.

<The thing that irritates me is that the sexism could be very easily neutralized by replacing one of these guys with any of the actresses in the movie, and simply making it about the inanity of anything dubbed a “chick flick”, instead of about how women find this crap so compelling. If you actually made both genders your target, (because honestly, most women I know hate the shit they’re talking about just as much as men do)</blockquote>

Yeah, that’s what detracted from my enjoyment of it.  But I don’t think it would ever have occured to them to neutralize the sexism, nor do I think they would choose to if it were brought to their attention.  It’s like Amanda says in her post, the whole point is to reassure men about how much smarter they are than the dumb bitches.

But but, #7…Grey’s Anatomy…

Seriously?!

Can’t help it, I love that show.  Now, I love it despite the whole Meredith and Shepherd train wreck, not because of it.  I still don’t find #7 to be that painful, unless the new boss is played by Hugh Grant.

I liked the “falling in love montage”.  I’d go watch that movie if those two guys were going to fall in love with each other.

From what I’ve been able to tell, there is a certain social level —probably determined by a limited degree of education—at which men and women play themselves out in the world as cliches.  I haven’t listened to the video, but you have to consider that if men are mocking women as a whole for being some kind of stereotype, then they are overestimating the consistency of characteristics within the female gender, and their flawed thinking is just as likely to put males into another box with predetermined characteristics.  IN other words, those who impose shackles on others are most susceptible to wearing them themselves.

“and then I felt angry about that, because the premise of the video is that I, due to the unfortunate act of nature that granted me a vagina, cannot either find this video funny nor find these cliches anything but compelling.”

I don’t feel that, but I do see where having an actress could make it better. But it could be that earnest fundie outlook that surrounds you in Texas is dampening your funny bone, Since I moved down to Fl. my wisecracks have repeatedly bounced off the complete lack of irony that the locals have; to the point I just smile and nod now and keep to my self.

But also, I guess I’m just not that deep

I’m torn between thinking that it’s cool of the actors to play the romantic cliches off of each other without any sort of evident discomfort or “lol! gay!” comments… and thinking that the “lol! gay!” is an inherent part of the joke that they’re not playing up just because it’s self-evident and it would be bad comedy to hit the audience over the head with it.  Sexual orientation is always a great punchline!

I really can’t tell.

Amanda, here’s a spoiler from last night’s Battlestar Galactica’s episode if you haven’t watched it yet:

Felix Gaeta’s leg stump stops bothering him.

Mandos, that reminds me of the episode where Major Garner gets the FTL drive of the Pegasus working again by closing a few valves with a wrench.  Talk about hi-tech!

Gay rom coms? Blech. Romance in general? Blech. Away with it all!

Here’s a spoiler that doesn’t really spoil anything ...

Does anyone know if Hitler wanted to build restaurants shaped like food?

Early for Valentine’s Day, are we?
Valentine’s Day…bah! Humbug!

My valentine’s garb.

Here’s your Galactica spoiler, is fuck Battlestar Galactica. That episode was the dumbest bunch of bullshit in the history of dumb bullshit.

Does anyone know if Hitler wanted to build restaurants shaped like food?

That’s exactly what I thought last night.

Anyway, back to the romcoms.  What really pisses me off about the alleged emasculation of men who are dragged to romcoms by their girlfriends is what if they genuinely like them?  My father loved movies of all kinds:  art house flicks, action movies, and, yes, romcoms.  He was able to like XXX and Amelie and didn’t see anything wrong with that.  Certainly plenty of romcoms are objectively bad, but it says a lot about these kinds of douchebags that they can’t apparently can’t even appreciate a well-made one.

There’s a ton of marriages made because of a dynamic where one person wants it really bad and the other person goes along because they don’t see any better options.

Hi Amanda,

There’s been posts of yours that touch on this from time to time, so I’m curious:  Do you think the fear of loneliness is mostly a byproduct of patriarchy?  For both women and men, that is.

I don’t think the ranking of living options is as simple as “Married to Love of My Live” > “Living Alone” > “Married to someone I like, but isn’t Love of My Life”.  I agree that a lot of relationships would improve, or end when they’re supposed to, without the static of societal expectations, but sometimes you don’t find The One, but someone that’s close enough.

Jeffrey’s Tube!

Jeffrey’s Tube!
Ken Cope on 02/07 at 02:19 PM

Like the original Jeffries Tubes on ST, they are actually a series of tubes…

Do you think the fear of loneliness is mostly a byproduct of patriarchy?  For both women and men, that is.

I think fear of loneliness is a powerful weapon/tool used by patriarchy to achieve other ends. 

Most people want to feel connected.  If you can convince them that there’s only one acceptable form that connections can take, you can make them very anxious.  Convince them that the love they feel for their friends is an inferior love.  The love they have for their significant others is inferior if it exists outside accepted norms.  Make them fear that they will never have the one thing that is allowed and they are more likely to behave in whatever way they’re told will help them to avoid loneliness.  It’s like the war on terror, only with cake.

I laughed out loud watching it, and then I felt angry about that, because the premise of the video is that I, due to the unfortunate act of nature that granted me a vagina, cannot either find this video funny nor find these cliches anything but compelling.  Also, my vagina gives me a tin ear to the desires of the more intelligent, humorous sex who doesn’t want to waste their time with stupid movies that my vagina makes me want to watch.

I was of course gratified that my possession of a penis allows me to comprehend these things.  My penis gives me a very subtle understanding of the desires of the more stultified, earnest sex, and it has great taste in films! 

Or maybe I should upset that these actors (whose work I generally enjoy) think that, merely because I possess a penis, I’m so simple minded and reactionary that I’ll conclude an entire genre of film is not worth my time; and that I therefore need to be mollified and coddled and seduced into abandoning my penis-based prejudices.

Or perhaps they made a funny little short attempting to tear down some of these genital-based cliches, and we shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Happy to oblige, mustelid.  But I did actually wear that to teach class on Valentine’s Day last year.

Okay, so they’ve laid out which montages are specifically not in the movie. However, I am still not going to see it unless they can promise me at least one getting-in-shape-to-kick-ass montage.

I just want a movie where I’m not either looking at my watch or rolling my eyes. Romantic comedies usually make me do both, but I enjoy them if they’re well done. My wife does complain that we don’t go out to the movies often enough.

And guys who need to feel superior all the time annoy the hell out of me. I guess it’s a defense mechanism, and some of them grow out of it eventually, but you’re better off avoiding them.

All I’m gonna say is “eye teeth”. Frakking EYE TEETH. I do not want to mess with a woman who will figure out a way to fuck you up with her teeth.

I don’t watch too many romantic comedies. In high school I liked Never Been Kissed (if Michael Vartan had been my English teacher I wouldn’t have gotten anything done) but watching it on USA a few months ago I realized that Not Another Teen Movie had a great point in that it made no sense whatsoever that Drew Barrymore was believable as a high school student and something that irked the hell out of me even when I saw it the first time was when her brother makes the baseball team and they make it to state (extremely quickly). Every single game he played in would’ve disqualified them.

I have a friend who LOVES romantic comedies, no matter how shitty they are and I feel bad for her because I think it’s messing up her perception of real relationships (which, she hasn’t been in since her fiance left her for another woman). And there was that study that came out that said watching romantic comedies gives people (women) false expectations in real life.

Damn!  Too bad those “clips” weren’t from a real movie; I’d so want to see it if they were.

Yes, and complete with all the overacted cliches.

Heh.

Umm so does anyone have any idea what was up with the giant “scratches” Tyrol sees at the end of the episode?

Umm so does anyone have any idea what was up with the giant “scratches” Tyrol sees at the end of the episode?

Those were tears in the hull I believe. Galactica is on its last leg and probably won’t be making too many more jumps, if any at all.

Laura Roslin: great president or GREATEST president?

I think fear of loneliness is a powerful weapon/tool used by patriarchy to achieve other ends.

I think fear of loneliness is a perfectly understandable natural response in a species that is inherently social, and has the mental capacity and sense of self to contemplate the possibility of being alone.  Nothing particularly devious about it.

“From what I’ve been able to tell, there is a certain social level —probably determined by a limited degree of education—at which men and women play themselves out in the world as cliches.”

Excuse me, but try to check the classism. Romantic comedies depict an overly sentimental world where almost everybody is white, women spend at least $500 per week at the salon, men spend fifteen hours a week at the gym, everybody has a college degree, nobody ever wears an outfit that costs less then $700, nobody is ever desperate for money, nobody ever has to have a roommate to pay rent, all jobs are in the office, freelancing is profitable, it isn’t expensive to own a dog, people can take week-long vacations on a whim, everybody has a car, and nobody is ever obese due to poor nutrition/limited supermarket access.

I’ve seen plenty of people try to act this out. They all had very good, very extensive educations. Many of them earned over 100k a year. Acting out the sexist expectations of society isn’t the exclusive territory of us dumb poor folks. Thx.

OK, I’ve had the flu, and the whole “did Hitler want to build restaurants shaped like food” had me spinning for the reference “where have I heard that before???” but the last BSG was bullshit.

That was wish-fulfillment bullshit.  No way does everything come up roses for Roslin and Adama except in a dream.  That first firing squad?  That’s reality.

Yeah, I had a high fever, but all I saw on my screen was crap.

—————

I find myself oddly drawn to “He’s just not that into you”  I want to like it.  I want it to be a funny movie.  The actors are so likable.  Why can’t it make me laugh and make me happy?

B/c it’s a bullshit romcom, and it’ll piss me off.  When can we stop marketing to quadrants and make movies with stories again?  And how about dropping the stupid as shit meme that “boys won’t play with girls toys, but girls will play with boys’ toys, so don’t bother making cartoons for girls” meme?  It’s even blown away in the stupid ad above, when the guys talk about how the “girl’ is going to drag her new date to this movie.

If men are the deciderers, and won’t go see chick flicks, then how are these guys seeing this movie in the first place?  If men and women go to movies together, maybe each one gets to drag the other to one they prefer ever other week.  Maybe the most money would be made by movies that told a compellig story, regardless of things going all explodey.

now I am angry that the only context in which American culture seems to be interested in talking about women falling in love is in contexts where we laugh at them

What about “Nights in Rodanthe”?  There’s a subcategory of romantic films that are not romantic comedies, including the whole “surprised by a soulmate” theme about people who have Given Up On Love.  They seem to be pitched at an older audience, and aim for big salty tears rather than wackiness and laffs.

There’s also a factor that a lot of Hollywood movies which show up in theaters aren’t worth the $11+ price of admission.  After being jaded by the feeling of wasting too much money on what was at best forgettable and at worst..utter crap….the only rare time I go to see movies now is if it is heavily discounted and I go with one or more groups of friends not for the movie…but to complain, deconstruct, and otherwise poke fun at them. 

He’s probably an exception though. Any other guys out there who just don’t want to FEEL EMOTIONS? ANd therefore rent DIEHARD?

People, especially men who prefer explosion-laden movies IME aren’t trying to avoid feeling emotions…....they just want to feel different types of emotions than ones usually experienced by rom-com audiences…..such as excitement, euphoric omnipotence, idiotically giddy happiness, and the relief from a overly complex world where problems cannot be solved by explosions/heroic victories….

Amanda, what do you make of the fact that the cliches are acted out by the three men?  It seems like they could very easily have had the same premise and used men and women to act it out, and the points you raised would still apply (because of the framing device rallying men who dread being dragged to conventional romantic comedies by their female partners who are indiscriminate fans of the genre).  What does the same-sex aspect add?

From what I’ve been able to tell, there is a certain social level —probably determined by a limited degree of education—at which men and women play themselves out in the world as cliches.

I’ve seen plenty of people try to act this out. They all had very good, very extensive educations. Many of them earned over 100k a year. Acting out the sexist expectations of society isn’t the exclusive territory of us dumb poor folks.

All of the women I know who love romcoms lead lives that are the exact opposite of what’s depicted in those movies.  They got married and had children, or just had children, at a very young age, don’t have that much higher education (probably a vocational degree vs. a four-year college degree), and are lower middle class.  They go to see those movies for escapism, to imagine what it’s like to be single and child-free and to have handsome men falling all over them.  So, yeah, I agree.  People who act out the cliches in those movies are not poor, “dumb” folks, people who act out those cliches probably don’t even watch romcoms.

I love me a good Sweetest Thing style wacky clothes montage.  Wacky clothes rock! 

Now the whole Notebook-style, stalking means he really loves you thing, that’s the shit that pisses me off.

Jeez you seem to have one hell of a chip on your shoulder! In the blog post you argue that the book/film is vapid and simply encourages sexist behaviour, and then further down you get some boyfriend’s negative comment on the book (a comment that mirrors your own initial observations) and decide that, actually, the book is good because it exposes the boyfriend (who you don’t even know) as a manipulative sleaze who can’t deal with his girlfriend becoming empowered.

Looks like the fellas can never win….

For the record. I thought the clip was funny, the same way my husband finds ridiculous male stereotypes funny. If that makes me a ‘sucker’, then so be it - but a world where everything conformed to your quasi-fundamentalist feminist code would be a whole lot grayer.

Anouk:  Amanda always said she felt conflicted about the book.  You want to run a man-hating script over what’s been written here, but the real man-hating takes place when Hollywood executives behave as though men are a special audience that must be protected from having to deal with emotions.  That’s insulting to men.  Looks like the fellas can never win with those Hollywood executives, huh?  If you’re concerned about the unfair treatment of men perhaps that’s a good direction for you to point your concern.

“but a world where everything conformed to your quasi-fundamentalist feminist code would be a whole lot grayer. “

Cue Captain Subtext:  Anouk is married, so she wins.  Amanda’s just a bitter femnazi because she doesn’t have a husband talk and to use as a justification screen.

*lol*

sometimes you don’t find The One, but someone that’s close enough
Dunno, that didn’t work out so well in the many cases I have seen so far. When lack of money or stress of having kids, or illness or other curve ball life throws reaches these “close enough” couples, they fold. Not to mention that “the one” may show up for you or your partner and then what ?

Any other guys out there who just don’t want to FEEL EMOTIONS? ANd therefore rent DIEHARD?

KMTBERRY

These aren’t mutually exclusive by the way.
I spent the weekend watching the anime version of The Count of Monte Cristo.
There were many times I was nearly crying as friends died, families were betrayed and people found, lost and refound love.

Of course it also had space aliens, vampires, space ships and giant &^%$ robots!