The death of romance in America

Larry Kummer, Editor

4 years ago

Summary: America’s society is changing in ways we prefer not to see. Especially in the relations of women and men, as they become dysfunctional and romance dies. But our cartoons, TV shows, and films reveal what we are becoming. Clearly seeing these changes lets us understand them – and perhaps regain control over America.

Today’s funny about women attacking men!

Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis on 4 January 2020.

He asks her to “come back to my place.” Since she is uninterested, that is a degradation warranting a violent reply. Third-wave feminists tested for sexism by reversing the genders in an incident. It is a funny comic when a girl does this to a guy. A guy doing this to a girl would be prosecuted and risk doing time for assault. Girls hitting guys (even their boyfriends) for trivial reasons has become a common trope in films and TV. This is fourth-wave grrl-power: the unrestrained exercise of discretionary power.

It is a commonplace in modern stories – print, films, TV – for girls to describe guys’ approaches as evil or perversion. Husbands 7 to 10 years older were once commonplace, but are now pervy. Men physically attracted by girls in the late teens – post-pubescent, their physical sexual cues at peak levels – are called pervy. These are common tropes in Hollywood, the stage on which we see the great and wise of Hollywood instruct us on proper behavior (“teachable moments”). For example, on NCIS Los Angeles Kensi often describes Deeks as a pervert for looking at or chasing women.

Now the #meToo movement is further broadening the definition of harassment, narrowing the range of acceptable approaches by men to women (sometimes requiring telepathy, since men must know in advance how women will respond) – as a YouGov poll shows. Among young women 18-24, 28% say that it is always or usually sexual harassment when a man comments “on a woman’s attractiveness directly to her.” Among that group, 48% say that it is usually or always sexual harassment when a man places “his hand on a woman’s lower back.” Among those women, 68% say it usually or always sexual harassment to look at a woman’s breasts (your eyes should be under the command of society).

Too bad this is not working out well for women. Power is a two-edged sword. For more about this …

It was predicted. We didn’t listen.

In 1987, Allan Bloom published Closing of the American Mind. It overflows with stunningly accurate predictions, such as this one …

“Today there are none of the conventions invented by civilization to take the place of heat, to guide mating, and perhaps to channel it. Nobody is sure who is to make the advances, whether there are to be a pursuer and a pursued, what the event is to mean. They have to improvise, for roles are banned, and a man pays a high price for misjudging his partner’s attitude. …

“Women are still pleased by their freedom and their capacity to chart an independent course for themselves. But they frequently suspect that they are being used, that in the long run they may need men more than men need them, and that they cannot expect much from the feckless contemporary male.”

How well does the new regime work for women?

With this collapse of trust between men and women, it should not surprise us that hook-ups and sequential affairs have replaced true relationships in the lives of young people. See the stories in Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy by Mark Regnerus (assoc. prof of sociology, U Texas-Austin). This new social regime does not work well for many women. Time will tell how well it works for men. Will cheap and easy sex (for those that master the new rules) compensate for the frustration of men’s possessive natures. For details see these posts.

Mark Regnerus’s essay: Cheap Sex is the Inconvenient Truth in the end of marriage.
About the book: Misadventures of a young woman in modern America.

Another way to see how we’ve changed

I am a fan of old films and TV shows. Lately, through the free service of Amazon Prime, I have watched some more-or-less recent TV shows. and a few new films. The biggest change from older films is the absence of romance. The lead characters still pair off, boy-girl. But they have little romance. If there was a fourth Act to most films, I would assume it had some hot sex. Most action-adventure films fall into this group.

Replacing romance are guy-girl work buddies, much more fitting for the socialist realism that Hollywood loves. As in the TV show “Forever” and many films, such as Pacific Rim (they wrote out the romance) and The Great Wall.

But the shows that end in marriage are often the scarier ones. There are the tween romances, with their unaggressive men – as in The Hunger Games series. The marriages are even more terrifying, as in “Blue Bloods,” “NCIS: Los Angeles,” and “Castle” – where I want to shout “don’t do it” at the screen. The women in them are as certain to divorce their husbands as a Black Widow spider is to eat hers. The women first break their men into a pitiful betas, unless they already were pitiful.

There are some rare shows with romances, such as the murder mystery series “Death in Paradise” in season 1 and season 2. The science fiction TV series “Fringe” had one of the most moving romances I’ve seen on screen in a long time, whose denouement in season four (skip season 5) was both creative and dramatic. It brilliantly broke the ruling tropes of Hollywood’s “romances.”

These shows mold our lives

Don’t underestimate the power of these films to mold the lives of our children. More importantly, the silver screen magnifies our lives so that we can see them more clearly.

For More information

Ideas! For holiday shopping ideas see my recommended books and films at Amazon. Also, see a story about our future: “Ultra Violence: Tales from Venus.”

If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about women and gender issues, about alienation, about #meToo, and especially these…