Romance is dying. Intellectuals no longer find it funny.

Larry Kummer, Editor

7 years ago

Summary: This article reports the dying of romance, one of the great events of our time (an example of the bolts popping out of American society). But the author cannot bring himself to look at the most obvious cause – feminism. Some cows are too sacred to criticize. But this is progress nonetheless. Problem recognition is the first step to a solution.

“How America Grew Bored With Love“

By David Masciotra at The American Conservative. Annotated.
“The pop love song and rom-com have died, relics in a world of instant gratification and consumerism.”

“Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack sang ‘Where is the love?‘ in an unforgettable hit from 1972 {Wikipedia}. Their breakup ballad could now double as an odd anthem for American culture. Its people, art, and entertainment have rejected romance and sexual intimacy as subjects worthy of celebration and investment. In a sad commentary on an increasingly dysfunctional society, love has all but vanished from pop culture.

“In 2014, the Journal of Advertising Research published a study documenting an odd decline in references to love throughout popular music. The word had fallen below phrases such as ‘good time’ and epithets such as the N-word on the list of most commonly sung terms in the chart topping hits of the 2000s.”

From “All You Need Is Love” in the Journal of Advertising Research, March 2014.
“Communication Insights From Pop Music’s Number-One Hits.”
Love was ranked first for three decades. It then dropped to third, then to ninth (below “n*gg*”).

“Music critic John Blake took notice seven years ago of how R&B – a genre that once gave the world Al Green and Aretha Franklin – no longer produced or broadcasted songs of romantic passion (‘Where is the love in R&B music?‘ at CNN). The only four letter word impermissible in hip-hop is “love.” Sexuality is primarily a means of misogynistic conquest; committed bonds of affection are not worthy of pursuit.

“Film is equally sterile and chaste. Leading men are more likely to wear face paint and capes than tuxedos or cowboy hats, and starlets jockey for ‘transgressive’ roles as tattooed, gun wielding action heroes, rather than brides-to-be or even femme fatales.

Editor’s note: Gender roles are increasingly reversed by Hollywood. For example, women hitting men (the men passively taking it), andwomen almost always being the one to initiate kisses. In Hollywood reality, women love faint-hearted betas – not bold alphas. Not so in the real world.

“Esquire recently reported that ‘moviegoers are tired of romance on the silver screen.’ A writer for The Washington Post declares that ‘the rom-com is dead. Good.’ Both articles attribute the lack of interest in love among the movie-going public to shifting social mores that now render the ‘clichés’ of the boy-meets-girl movie ‘offensive.’ It has become the stuff of cliché to read ‘cutting edge’ cultural critics deconstruct popular love stories like Pretty Woman and Say Anything, reimagining them as predatory tales of women surrendering to sexual harassment. Never mind that the largest audiences for these films were always and will likely remain women.

“Any heterosexual male attempt at seduction is now, in the words of one writer, a perpetuation of ‘society’s unprogressive cultural expectations regarding gender roles.’ Even nonsexual expressions of genuine feeling arouse anger. In ‘I Rewatched Love Actually and Am Here to Ruin It for All of You‘ at Jezebel, Lindy West (a New York Times columnist) summons all of her brilliance to call a British character in the film Love, Actually, who learns Portuguese and flies to Portugal to propose to a woman who spent a summer cleaning the house where he was staying, ‘creepy.’ The woman accepts the proposal in English, showing that she too took language lessons because she also fell in love with him.

“Is it any surprise, then, that in literature, as Vijai Maheshwari recently asserted at Quillete, ‘men cannot write about sex anymore’?

“In this fearful and inquisitorial atmosphere, sex is dangerous, and writing about sex is doubly dangerous.”

“As an instructor at a small university, I am continually shocked by the languid sterility of the contemporary college classroom. Most of the young men and women wear sweat pants and moccasins, rarely speak, and spend more time looking at their phones than each other.

“My observations might seem contradictory, but they actually complement studies of how college students who are sexually active are increasingly dissatisfied, claiming that they do not enjoy sex because it is the province of an increasingly vulgar and transactional ‘hookup culture.’ Rather than a stage in courtship, sex is now something that transpires between two drunken strangers at the end of a long party.

Ed. note: Allan Bloom saw the early signs of this in the 1980s and foresaw their inevitable results. He described them in Closing of the American Mind (1987). See excerpts here and here.

“Sociologist Lisa Wade spent five years studying ‘hookup culture,’ and her conclusions are as weird as they are disturbing.

See her book, American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus.

“‘There’s a dichotomy between meaningless and meaningful sex, and students have to go out of their way to “perform meaninglessness,”’ according to an NPR summary of Wade’s findings. ‘They have to prove that they’re not emotionally attached to their sex partners, and in fact that they care less than the other person.’

“An airport kiss between two reunited lovers, or the cries of passion from Marvin Gaye or Etta James, must seem like the unintelligible language of aliens to a generation who, according to Wade, ‘only have sex with partners they’re not interested in’ because they consider genuine feeling the most obscene offense against their idea of ‘cool.’ …”

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In the rest of the article, there is the usual guessing about causes of these changes. As usual with respectable conservatives, feminism is not mentioned. Feminists attacks on romance are seen but their significance is ignored. Companies pay the media billions to sell products, but assume that the media does not shape our culture.

The kind of love that women express in today’s music.

There are many songs expressing the true love of feminist women! These sentiments cannot be said by men. That would be toxic masculinity.

Whitney Houston sings of “The Greatest Love of All” (2010). Lyrics and video. 121 million views.

“I never found anyone who fulfilled my needs …And so I learned to depend on me. …Learning to love yourself. It is the greatest love of all.”

Here is the tagline to Taylor Swift’s video “Out of the Woods” (2015). 144 million views. That’s a summary of Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), fiercely attacked by feminists.

“She lost him. But she found herself. And somehow that was everything.”

Ariana Grande (age 25) sings about her four great love affairs in “Thank you, next” (2018). Lyrics and video. 211 million views in one month. At the end we learn she has at last found someone worthy of her!