The other night I finally settled down on the couch and turned on "To All the Boys I've Loved Before," a new romance movie on Netflix that everyone has been raving about. Although I'll admit that the story was generally cute, I couldn't ignore the constant thought that the movie was altogether problematic in it's premise, portraying harmful gender and relationship stereotypes that can be seen in most romantic comedies.
Don't get me wrong, "To All the Boys I've Loved Before" is not a bad movie and really doesn't send a horrible message, but the few messages that rubbed me the wrong way definitely had me thinking about every other romance movie that has left me feeling uncomfortable and caused me to grow up with skewed views of how relationships should actually be.
Let's start with the narrative of a nice, quiet, innocent, virgin girl who has feelings for the popular, high school jock who is obviously a jerk. And of course for some odd reason he also has feelings for her so some sort of relationship starts and the story devolves into how he helps her become more outgoing and risky and she makes him into the "good guy" that every girl hopes to find, or in this case, create.
The first issue with this is obvious: it categorizes people into the typical stereotypes that have been shoved into everyone's brains for years, and although both people change throughout the movie due to their love for one another and end up no longer fitting the stereotypes, the character's are still left as one-dimensional people who have no depth until they fall in love.
It's basically a story of how you have no sense of yourself until you experience a relationship. This is false and is often the reason that everyone is desperate to constantly be in a relationship. People are afraid to be alone because they worry that they can't reach their full potential until someone else shows them how to.
It's also a great way to make people feel left out of the narrative when their personality, looks, or sexual orientation don't fit into the romance story. Romantic comedies are unrealistic, yet people continue eat them up as the movies tell the same story over and over again, eliminating any chance of portraying complex people with complicated situations and lifestyles that typically aren't seen on the screen.
The next issue is the unhealthy relationships that are seen in romantic comedies. From guys who are pushy about sex, girls who are basically stalkers, and couples who stay together even though all they do is fight, these romance movies are always showing you relationships that should be cause for alarm. The more these relationships are seen in movies and media, the more normalized they become and the more people yearn to have that coercive, obsessive, angry relationship that seems cute in the movies, but is horrible in real life.
Finally, the way gender in shown in romantic comedies is repulsive. Let's take one line from "To All the Boys I've Loved Before," when the main character says "It's bad enough if a guy were to do this, but the fact that a girl did, I mean, that's despicable." So what's the issue here? The issue is the fact that, once again, media is giving permission for guys to be held to less of a standard than women, continuing the horrendous line that "boys will be boys."
And this line doesn't even touch on how romantic comedies sexualize women and make them out to be petty and thirsty for romance, all while attempting to call every female protagonist a "feminist."
Of course, not every romance movie is problematic and not every romance movie has any of these issues. Though, at the same time, this is truly only scratching the surface when it comes to social issues that are shown in romantic comedies. In a time with the Me Too movement, the movie industry needs to start doing a better to properly show how gender, sexual orientation, and relationships play out in real life.
