Unidimensional

Excerpts from Betsy Hart post:  Beware Romantic Pornography

I recently watched the film Sleepless in Seattle with my teen and tween daughters. I hadn’t seen this particular romantic comedy since it was first a blockbuster in 1993. I suppose I found watching the film a little bit like riding a stomach-dropping roller coaster—I have to do it every so often to remind myself why I don’t do it more frequently.
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When you’ve seen one romantic comedy you’ve of course seen them all. There is some level of confusion involving a wonderful woman and an idiotic man. He doesn’t know how romantic he really is until the wonderful woman shows him the way and reveals his fabulous, sensitive, romantic side that was aching to get out all along we find. He so wants to talk about his feelings, just like her best girlfriends! Who knew? Romantic man finally realizes he cannot live without said woman, and pursues her in an ever-so-sensitive if bumbling way. There seems to typically be a fountain involved at some point.

If it’s all not quite “magic,” it sure is fantasy.

That’s where the pornography comes in. Just as sexual pornography twists an understanding for men about real women’s bodies and sexual appetites, so romantic pornography twists the perception for women about real men and how they “ought” to behave toward women, which tends to amount to, well, behaving like a woman. I have a dear friend who once didn’t like a fellow I was dating. Among other shortcomings, he didn’t arrange spa treatments for me, she explained. Seriously. No more chick flicks for that girl.

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But both kinds of pornography go wrong by portraying genders as unidimensional. And the unidimension of men in romantic porn gets magnified because our mainstream culture has a “man bad, woman good” view that opposes traditionally male qualities (unless they turn up in women, but that’s another column). In a symptom of what’s going on in the culture at large, “rom coms” and many television sitcoms denigrate such traits such as aggression, competitiveness, a certain amount of stoicism, and even the desire to protect and care for a woman.

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I can’t fix the culture at large, but I sure hope to affect it in my own home. So I tell my girls that I want them one day to look to marry a Christian man of faithful and strong character; whom they will respect and whose distinctly male characteristics they will appreciate; that I hope they will have a group of close women friends, and that they will never get them and their husbands confused.

And yes, I tell my girls if they want to enjoy some good romantic comedies along the way, go ahead. I just encourage them to remember where fantasy meets reality, and to never, ever judge a man by whether or not he makes spa appointments for them.