Sometimes, it’s SO hard to tell, eh?
No, this is not to make 18-year-olds look particularly appealing, or older-than-thou women especially alluring. It relies on some pretty mindless stereotyping of women of ALL ages.
And while we’re on the subject of mindless stereotyping, how about those romantic comedies? Most of them are neither romantic NOR funny, from where I sit. They are alarmingly didactic, sexist, and full of sly put-downs, just like the graphic above. (They fail the guys, too, but in different ways. Also sexist.)
I can literally count on one hand the ones I’ve seen that kind of liked. Two of them had a nutty sci-fi element thrown in, which might explain a lot: Earth Girls Are Easy, and Making Mr. Right. And in both cases, the leading man (who was superior to any real-life male in the film, or indeed in real life) wasn’t even human: in the one, he was an alien (Jeff Goldblum), and in the other, an android (John Malkovich). Who could blame Geena Davis and Ann Magnuson for ditching their respective human suitors? When the aliens and robots do humanity better than “real” leading men do, we’re all in deeply unromantic doo-doo.
As it is, I haven’t spent money on a friggin’ rom-com in years. How many? Um, since I was as old as “Girls YOUR age”. That was when I grew up and realized that you can’t Make Mr. Right, and that Earth Girls Shouldn’t Be So Easy, and that rom-coms are actually, as a genre, really fucking stupid, because the basic formula hasn’t changed since silent movies were all the rage.
Happy Valentine’s Day. Here, have some music.