The Men in Movies, and the Women Who Learn to Love Them

The other day, I was watching the movie Dinosaur, a cute animated film, as a study break. The main character is set up as a good guy, and I was ready for an hour and a half of no stress. As the main character passes a herd of passing dinosaurs, he bumped into one and she angrily told him to watch where he was going. I immediately exclaimed to my girlfriend, “They’re going to fall in LOOOOOVE!” And then I stopped and asked myself how I inherently knew that two dinosaurs were going to fall for one another after a single meeting.

The answer was simple: the woman hated him. Because I am so brainwashedly-familiar with movie plots where female characters initially hate their future love interests, I instantly knew that this plot would turn out the same way. When I realized this, I wasdisgusted with myself for never before having noticed it. When we watch movies like this, the message to men is that the women you are interested in may act like they dislike you, but you can change their minds if you are persistent enough.  The list of movies like this goes on and on: 10 Things I Hate About You, The Notebook, The Ugly Truth, The Proposal, Something’s Gotta Give, even in a kids’ movie like Dinosaur.

In movies like these, either the woman ends up having some tragic flaw (usually “bitchiness”) that the man must fix in her, so that she can be a better person. Once the male lead “fixes” her inexcusable quality, her life turns around, people like her more, her performance at work improves, etc. We learn that whatever reason she had for hating him was entirely about her own bitchy hangup, and not at all the fact that she has a legitimate right to be uninterested. In The Ugly Truth, the female lead is an independent woman with a high-ranking job and clear feminist leanings. When she encounters the male lead, a chauvinist to say the least, she is initially disgusted with him, but eventually takes his piggish advice to help her land a man. By the end of the movie, he has not only improved her popularity with men, but her job performance. Movies like this tell the audience that a woman who is uninterested in a man must be so because of something wrong with her, evidenced by the general disarray of her life that a man can swoop in and amend. 

In The Notebook, possibly considered the ultimate “chick flick,” the main characters get together because he threatens to kill himself if she doesn’t go out with him. This kind of mental terrorism is supposed to be romantic, because the male character knew at first sight that he loved her. The male character approaches her while she’s dating someone else, practices emotional terrorism to get her to agree to date him, and then shows up when she is engaged and demand that she marry him instead. This character clearly has boundary issues, but we think of his gestures as heroic and romantic. We don’t see portrayals of women who are determined to make someone fall in love with them, unless they are portrayed as scary stalkers, like in the movie Swimfan. From this, we gather that men who unrelentingly pursue women are romantic, but women who pursue men are crazy.

And just like that, we have yet another media outlet that tells the public t hat what women think and feel is irrelevant, irrational, and most importantly, “fixable.” Movie plots like this make it seem rational to dismiss and ignore women’s wishes, leading once more to a rape culture where consent is irrelevant. So if she turns you down, remember, it can’t possibly be you; it’s got to be her.