Romantic comedy and the perfect balance

Yesterday I mentioned that Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing is the exemplar for romantic comedy, and it is, for its perfect synthesis of comedy and romance.

And bless Shakespeare for his genius - yet another example - the play was so far ahead of its time that it took almost 400 years to match that achievement. It took until 1940, and "His Girl Friday."

And then it took another 42 years to do it again, in 1982, with the television show "Cheers."

What the play, movie and television show all have in common is that the focus of the story is the couple (in the case of Cheers for the first five seasons before Shelly Long left the show), but even more essential: the romantic couple is perfectly balanced. Neither character is more important, and in the case of Much Ado and "His Girl", the couple is not only balanced but a very close match - they have quite a lot in common.

Cheers was more of an "opposites attract" scenario, but on the other hand it had five years, rather than five acts, to flesh out the relationship.

The relationship of Sam and Diane was so important to the first five seasons of Cheers there's even a Wikipedia article about the couple, which says that the show's creators...

...had intended Cheers to be a comedy about "family" of characters in a Boston bar, but quickly realized that the "Sam and Diane" romance was popular and decided that every episode would depict it. Burrows told the others several weeks after filming began, "Sam & Diane – that's your show."

Please note that Cheers was popular with a broad demographic, not just "chicks." I first saw it when I went to see what my father (then in his late 40s) was chuckling about in the TV room.

The Sam and Diane Wiki mentions the Tracy-Hepburn films as an inspiration, but I don't think they're quite up to the same standards - those films always seem to be more about the Hepburn character than evenly balanced.

Sam and Diane may be opposites - he's a working class regular-guy jock and she's a pretentious intellectual from the upper class, but they are equally matched in strength - Diane laughs at Sam's moves with (usually not very bright) women and Sam mocks Diane for her gullibility. Both have a past - Diane was ditched by her boyfriend in the first episode of Cheers and Sam destroyed his baseball career through alcoholism. Diane has mental health issues (which is how she meets Frasier Crane) and she leaves Sam at the end of season five to pursue a career as a writer (which doesn't work out very well, we later find.) But when they do occasionally find common ground, it's magic.

And bonus - the occasional feminist message, which was pretty progressive for the early 1980s.



The opposites-attract scenario can help sustain the sexual tension and prevent the couple from getting together right away, which is not so useful in a 3 hour play or 2 hour movie, but perfect for a serial TV show.

I've written about His Girl Friday before -  I believe that the Hildy character is such a good match for the Walter character because she was originally written as a man. Of course it helped that Rosalyn Russell (who was Howard Hawks' tenth choice for the role) hired her own writer:

In her autobiography, Life Is A Banquet, Russell wrote that she thought her role did not have as many good lines as Grant's, so she hired her own writer to "punch up" her dialogue. With Hawks encouraging ad-libbing on the set, Russell was able to slip her writer's work into the movie. Only Grant was wise to this tactic and greeted her each morning saying, "What have you got today?"

His Girl is often not put into the romantic comedy category, instead being called a "screwball comedy." NYTimes critic A.O. Scott does in this video clip - and Scott is focused on how the movie portrays the newspaper business.



We will be hearing from A. O. Scott again in this series on the romantic comedy.

Since Hildy was originally written as a man, she and Walter are both newspaper "men" and so completely understand each other when it comes to a good news story. And they both want to get back together again - Walter says that Hildy will be staying, rather than retiring from her career to be a housewife for an insurance salesman, but "she just doesn't know it yet." And she does end up staying, but not only because of Walter's desire - at the end of the movie Hildy breaks down in tears after one of Walter's tricks is finally revealed because, as she tells him, "I thought you were going to let me go." So they both got what they wanted, after much give and take and outsmarting each other in turn.

Give and take - that's what it's all about. I was conscious of this when I was writing Julia & Buddy and that's why I was pleased when one of the reviewers noticed:

Though Julia’s various phobias and stigmas and Buddy’s multiple problems and shortcomings pose a certain threat to their respective sanity, the two find solace in their understanding of one another.

That's what it's all about in a romantic comedy. Here we see Beatrice and Benedick go back and forth until they both have to give in mutually.

No matter how comedic a romantic comedy is, it is above all sincere about love. As Benedick says:

I'll tell thee what, prince; a college of
wit-crackers cannot flout me out of my humour. Dost
thou think I care for a satire or an epigram? No:
if a man will be beaten with brains, a' shall wear
nothing handsome about him. In brief, since I do
purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any
purpose that the world can say against it; and
therefore never flout at me for what I have said
against it; for man is a giddy thing, and this is my
conclusion.

And sincerity about love is not in fashion these days - it's much more acceptable to be snarky, alternating with portentousness. Those are the scourges of our present dramatic age.

But before I get into that, what happened to this give-and-take and balance in contemporary rom-coms? We'll talk about that and the rise of the dude-bro "romantic comedy" next.

Much Ado About Romantic Comedy

According to the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms:

Romantic comedy, a general term for comedies that deal mainly with the follies and misunderstandings of young lovers, in a light‐hearted and happily concluded manner which usually avoids serious satire. The best‐known examples are Shakespeare's comedies of the late 1590s, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It being the most purely romantic, while Much Ado About Nothing approaches the comedy of manners and The Merchant of Venice is closer to tragicomedy. 

I don't know what the Dictionary means by "purely romantic" but I don't agree that Much Ado About Nothing approaches a comedy of manners. Much Ado About Nothing is the very exemplar of the romantic comedy as the term is now understood.

I know a bit about Shakespearean romantic comedy - my ill-starred Tam Lin  owes everything to the 5-act structure and standard tropes of Shakespeare. So much so that a reviewer referred to it as a "Late-Autumn Night's Dream." And it even includes the "bed-trick" trope, for which I am now ashamed. 

Shakespeare used the bed-trick in All's Well that End's Well - which does not make the Oxford list of romantic comedies, partly because it's not very funny and party because the lovers come together at the end only after it was revealed that Helena is pregnant by Bertram because she pulled the bed-trick on him - or in other words, raped him. 

It must be said that audiences absolutely adore the bed-trick - and that includes the Tam Lin audiences. That may well have been the most popular scene in the play. (The Tam Lin bed trick also results in pregnancy.) Audiences don't perceive it as rape, in part I suppose because it's considered silly to imagine men can be raped - men are assumed to always want it from whomever will give it - and it's even considered a funny joke in the case of prison rape.

Midsummer isn't quite exactly a romantic comedy - it deals with many couples and magical powers and is more comedy than romance. Not that I don't appreciate Midsummer - it is one of Shakespeare's hardiest vehicles - I've seen plenty of Shakespeare's plays screwed up by directors taking too many liberties - I've yet to see a production that screwed up Midsummer. 

Although arguably rape happens in Midsummer, since Titania is ensorcelled by Oberon into lusting after Bottom - although we don't know explicitly what goes on between them. And then there's the questionable "courtship" of Theseus and Hippolyta. 

Twelfth Night is a little closer to the mark, but there is still the problematic issue of the woman disguised as a man. The relationship of Orsino and Viola doesn't happen in earnest until the very end of the play when Viola's true identity is revealed. And while there is plenty of comedy to be had by the mistaken identities and the ever-popular mockery of Puritans (the character Malvolio) the play is more about misunderstandings than love. 

As You Like It, while dear to my heart, has the same problem with Rosalind dressing as a guy - although at least she meets Orlando first as a woman. As You includes a queertastic moment when Rosalind is wooing Orlando as Ganymede. Shakespeare probably didn't mean audiences to take it that way (or did he?) but when I saw the BBC production it seemed like Orlando could easily be falling for Rosalind while he thought she was a boy. It completely blew my mind. This, I thought, is waaaay different from Julius Caesar (the only Shakespeare play I was familiar with up to that point.) 

But the play is at least as much about the relationship between Rosalind and her cousin Celia as it is about Rosalind and Orlando. Call it an early buddy comedy.

And the four marriages at the end are accomplished via deus ex-machina when Hymen the god of marriage shows up. Not something you're likely to see much of in any self-respecting romantic comedy these days.

In Much Ado there is no supernatural match-making, Beatrice never dresses as a guy, and Beatrice and Benedick are introduced already having a history together. They don't even have to "meet cute." I used that idea in my Julia & Buddy.

Although in Much Ado there is a moment that comes close to a bed-trick: Claudio, believing he is responsible for the death of his fiancee Hero, has agreed to marry a cousin who just happens to look like Hero - according to her father. Turns out it it's Hero after all (Shakespeare used this scenario again in A Winter's Tale.) It's Claudio's own volition to marry the cousin, albeit a pretty dumb idea, that saves this from being a true bed-trick.

But although Claudio and Hero are the alpha couple in the play, nobody really cares about them. It's the B & B show. Here they are meeting up after not seeing each other for awhile - and the battle of the wits begins.

So do any other romantic comedies even come close to Much Ado? I will address that next.

I believe in love

Rom-Com Killers - prime suspects

After reviewing the various articles on the death of the romantic comedy yesterday it seems that the prime suspect in its demise is the dude-bro.

Andrew Romano:

Romcoms used to be known as “chick flicks,” and while the name isn’t entirely accurate (exhibit A: me), there’s something to it: Women tended to buy more tickets to these movies than men. But now that Hollywood has concluded that its only remaining competitive advantage is spectacle, it’s all but ceded the fairer sex to cable TV. The only demographic adrenalized enough to reliably show up for this weekend’s latest extravaganza is men aged 18-24, or so the thinking goes, and so the industry keeps churning out dude bait. Even romantic comedies themselves have become more male-centric over the last dozen years, with the Nora Ephrons and Nancy Meyerses of the world giving way to “bromance” auteurs such as Judd Apatow (The 40-Year Old Virgin) and Jason Segel (I Love You, Man).

Amy Nicholson:

Men don't like romantic comedies -- or if they do, they can't admit it. A marketing executive at a major studio says that, in development meetings, there's a tacit agreement that a male "no" carries more weight than a female "yes." Why should studios risk selling guys on a romantic comedy when they can rely on guys selling their girlfriends on Transformers?
As the current wisdom goes: Men are stubborn; women are flexible. "It's the 'Will you hold my purse?' theory," Feig explains. "A guy's in a store with his wife or girlfriend and she asks him to hold her purse, it's, like, Kryptonite or something. They have to hold it so that no one around them thinks it's theirs. But if a guy says to his wife or girlfriend, 'Can you hold my backpack?' she's like, 'Sure.' She doesn't give a shit. I think Hollywood banks on that."
Hollywood didn't always. In fact, Walt Disney trumpeted the opposite. "Women are the best judges of anything we turn out. Their taste is very important," he wrote in 1959. "They are the theatergoers, they are the ones who drag the men in. If the women like it, to heck with the men." That all has changed.
Except it hasn't. Women continue to buy 51 percent of all movie tickets, a figure that becomes even more impressive when you calculate post-Walt Hollywood's wan efforts to lure them into theaters.
"Certainly not 51 percent of movies are centered on women," says writer-director-producer Nancy Meyers (It's Complicated, Something's Gotta Give). In fact, in 2011, only one in 10 films starred a female protagonist. Not even Katniss Everdeen driving The Hunger Games franchise seems likely to balance the odds in females' favor.
"But you know what they say: 'Women will go to movies about men, yet men may not go to movies about women,'" Meyers adds. "So as long as that theory prevails, I suppose no one feels the need to change the status quo."
But studios should. Forget squishy ideals of feminism and fair play. Studios should make female-driven films for a mercenary reason: They're leaving cash on the table.
Think of the lessons in Meyers's 2001 flick What Women Want, which grossed more than $374 million worldwide. First, that a film obsessed with understanding the female brain can become the second-highest-grossing romantic comedy of all time. As for the second, the plot couldn't make it any clearer. Mel Gibson plays a marketer who specializes in testosterone-slick ads starring cool dudes and chicks in bikinis. Selling to men has made his company good money, but his boss, Alan Alda, suspects it could make even more. So instead of promoting Gibson, Alda hires Helen Hunt, who lectures the boardroom about the peril of ignoring the female dollar.
"When Sears decided to go after women in their advertising and said, 'Come see the softer side of Sears,' their revenues went up 30 percent," Hunt tells them. "We can't afford not to have a piece of a $40 billion pie."
Why does Hollywood think it can afford the loss? The only explanation is industrywide amnesia. When a female-driven film does well -- think Bridesmaids -- it's greeted as an unexpected success. But it should be no surprise that the predominantly female theatrical audience bought tickets to a great, female-centered comedy.
And while the suits swore they'd learn from its example, the projected Bridesmaids bounce in female-driven comedies hasn't happened. In the three years since it came out, only one other major female comedy has been released: last year's Sandra Bullock-Melissa McCarthy flick The Heat . . . also directed by Paul Feig. It, too, was a hit.
Hollywood execs applaud Feig's successful formula, but they don't get the message. Instead of greenlighting more female comedies, they've begged Feig to make a movie about men.
"I've been lectured so many times by producers and people in power, 'You don't want to get pigeonholed in the whole woman thing,'" Feig chuckles. "Do I want to get pigeonholed in the menthing? I want to get pigeonholed in the people thing!"

Claude Brodesser-Akner:

JC Spink, a partner in the management and production company BenderSpink, which has executive produced romantic comedies like Monster-in-Law and Just Friends, notes that the rom-com genre has been damaged by studios’ desire to make every film appeal to everyone. “The studios have gone from aiming for one or two quadrants — younger women and older women — to three or four,” says Spink. Hence: the proliferation of the Apatow brand to bring in men; centering rom-coms around boorish, Tucker Max–ish guys (The Ugly Truth); or braiding romances with other genres like action or sci-fi (This Means War; The Adjustment Bureau). “But the effect, I think, is that the movie actually becomes less appealing to women,” says Spink.

Lindy West:

In keeping with that theme, Alan Rickman's secretary is just constantly pointing at her vagina and licking her own face, like she's a porn actress who forgot she was doing a mainstream movie. Or, more accurately, like the character is a porn actress who forgot she was working in a real office. I don't mean that there's anything wrong with porn actresses, or that the actress who plays Alan Rickman's secretary is anything but lovely here, I mean that LOVE ACTUALLY SEES NO PROBLEM WITH TREATING ITS FEMALE CHARACTERS LIKE GIANT BIPEDAL VAGINAS IN SWEATER VESTS.
(Also, she's still looking for a venue for the holiday party and it's only three weeks before Christmas!?!?! This is why you shouldn't hire any non-sentient organ to do clerical work. No matter how sexy it is.)
Anyway, the flirtation is a problem because Alan Rickman is married to Emma Thompson, but don't worry—she wears foundation garments and talks too much (see above) and therefore deserves to die alone with nothing but Joni Mitchell for comfort.
Laura Linney, the only other female character with some semblance of an inner life, meets a similar fate.
This is a movie made for women by a man.

But I would suggest that it isn't only dude-bro culture but also a good helping of nerd culture, as analyzed in this excellent piece Your Princess is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement and Nerds.

More soon.

Walking in Space

Lyrics here.

Taking back the romantic comedy

In preparation for the first of my three promised rants I have posted the list of useful links on this topic from the NYCPlaywrights weekly email blast from July 26.

The Romantic Comedy Is Dead

by Andrew Romano

They Came Together is a comedy. This much is clear. The movie stars Paul Rudd (I Love You, Man) and Amy Poehler (Parks and Recreation). It was co-written by Michael Showalter (The State). It was directed by David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer). These are some of the funniest people in the business. When you see it, you’re supposed to laugh.

And yet I left the theater the other day feeling sort of… sad.

The reason, I think, is that They Came Together isn’t just a comedy—it’s a parody of romantic comedies. Molly (Poehler) owns a quirky mom-and-pop candy shop on New York’s Upper West Side. Joel (Rudd) works at the big Corporate Candy Company that’s threatening to put Molly out of business. At first Molly and Joel hate each other—and then (surprise!) they fall in love.

If the story sounds familiar, that’s because it is; Wain & Co. borrowed it from You’ve Got Mail (which itself was a riff on the 1940 Jimmy Stewart classic The Shop Around the Corner). Many of their jokes refer to Nora Ephron’s canonical 1998 romcom as well. There’s Joel and Molly’s over-the-top obsession with New York, which everyone keeps reminding us is “almost like another character” in their tale. There’s the used bookstore where Joel and Molly finally discover they’re right for each other. There’s Joel and Molly’s sense of shared bemusement at the increasing intricacy of the modern coffee-industrial complex. And so on.

But You’ve Got Mail isn’t the only movie They Came Together strip-mines for satire. Basically the film is a compendium of every romcom cliché known to man, lovingly compiled, combined, and amplified to an absurd degree. Molly acting clumsy. Joel and his bros discussing lady problems while shooting hoops. Molly ordering food a very specific way. Molly and Joel playing Charades at a holiday party. A falling-in-love montage. A trying-on-clothes montage. “I’ll have what she’s having.” If you’re a fan of the romcom genre, watching all of these gags in quick succession is dizzying, delirious, and ultimately very funny.

Appealing young actresses who could have been this generation’s Meg Ryans or Julia Robertses—actresses like Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Stone, and Scarlett Johansson—have read the writing on the wall and increasingly gravitated toward big tentpole jobs.

It’s also strangely depressing. Here’s why: As They Came Together wore on, I started to realize that every movie it was referencing was at least 15 years old. That no one under the age of, say, 30 would have any clue what Rudd and Poehler were parodying.

And then it hit me: Could it be that the Romantic Comedy is dead—and that I didn’t notice until it was too late? How in the name of Meg Ryan did this happen?

I’m afraid the answer to the first question is yes. I should start by saying (in case you haven’t figured it out already) that I really like romantic comedies. Sure, they can be conventional. But pop songs tend to be conventional, too, and that doesn’t dull the dopamine rush of a perfect chorus. A well-made romcom—It Happened One Night, Sleepless in Seattle, Say Anything…, Groundhog Day, The Apartment—works in much the same way. It’s a dazzling machine doing exactly what it was designed to do. 

MORE…

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/07/the-romantic-comedy-is-dead.html

***

WHO KILLED THE ROMANTIC COMEDY?

Rom-coms used to be a cash cow --and wildly popular with audiences. What happened?

by Amy Nicholson

The corpse lay crumpled on the conference table, close enough that the studio executive could tug on the red heel of her Louboutin. She'd been lying there unnoticed, or perhaps just ignored, for quite some time. Her wedding veil was tattered, and someone had spilled coffee on her white satin dress. A receipt had been crudely shoved in her bouquet.

Once, she'd been worth a fortune -- at least $100 million, according to her friends, who sat at home and rewatched tapes of her at her prime. Every woman had wanted to be her: Julia, Meg, Sandra, Reese. Not anymore.

The romantic comedy is dead.

In 1997, there were two romantic comedies among the top 20 box office performers. In 1998 and 1999, there were three. Each cracked $100 million in sales. Even as recently as 2005, five romantic comedies topped $100 million at the box office.

Contrast that with 2013: There's not one romantic comedy in the top 50 films. Not even in the top 100.

Men and women are still falling in love, of course. They're just not doing it onscreen -- and if they do, it's no laughing matter. In today's comedies, they're either casually hooking up or already married. These are comedies of exasperation, not infatuation.

It's not only that audiences are refusing to see romantic comedies. It's that romantic comedies aren't getting made, at least not by the major studios. The Big Wedding, 2013's sole boy-meets-girl-meets-matrimony comedy, was unceremoniously dumped into theaters by big indie Lionsgate and limped to No. 101 on the chart.

What happened?

MORE… 

http://www.villagevoice.com/2014-03-05/film/who-killed-the-romantic-comedy/full/

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WHY CAN’T THEATRE AND ROMCOMS GET IT TOGETHER?

From As You Like It to The Front Page, theatre was once captivated by romantic comedies. Did we get too cynical?

By Lyn Gardner

The other week I interviewed the playwright David Greig and the musician Gordon McIntyre about their lo-fi musical, Midsummer. The show (opening at Soho theatre this week) is being sold on the novelty of its indie soundtrack – but when I saw it in Edinburgh last year, it wasn't the music that stood out, it was the romance. Indie music in theatre isn't so uncommon. But romantic comedy? If there'd been popcorn for sale in the Traverse foyer, it could hardly have seemed more out-of-place.

So is theatre down on romcom? It wasn't always thus: consider As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream et al, and Shakespeare starts to look (well, just a little) like the Nora Ephron of the Elizabethan age. Romcoms were popular, too, in the theatre of the early and mid-20th century. Some of the great Hollywood examples – The Philadelphia Story, The Shop Around the Corner, His Girl Friday (based on Hecht and MacArthur's The Front Page) – were cribbed from hit plays. Bernard Slade's Romantic Comedy, recently revived by (and starring) Tom Conti, was one of the genre's last hurrahs.

Of course, there are still plenty of romances in theatre – but not many plays that satisfy themselves with romance alone, and fewer still that are funny. The classic romcom traces the lovers' will-they-won't-they trajectory up until consummation – and then blushingly draws a veil. But when modern stage comedies take love as their subject – Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, for example – they seldom send us home with romantic illusions left intact. It's instructive to compare Stoppard's theatre romcom with his script for Shakespeare in Love.

More…

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2010/jan/12/theatre-romcom-romantic-comedies

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BITTER GERTRUDE

…I’ve long had the desire to fire every romantic comedy into the sun. I despise romcoms, and I never spent time figuring out why. Now that the answer is in my face, it’s undeniable: they’re one way we disseminate all of the worst ideas about relationships we have as a culture, including (especially) the male master narrative. What was once just an annoyance to me now looks like the worst kind of reprehensible irresponsibility. And that’s just one tiny corner of the art we produce. 

It’s easy to say, Oh, it’s just a play; it’s just a movie, etc. But there is no “just.” The narrative art form is POWERFUL. The human brain can experience narrative as if it’s happening in real life. The brain of a person telling a story and a person listening to that story experience neural coupling. Art is where we discuss who we are as a culture; our hopes, our dreams, our fears, our past, our imagined future. It’s the most important aspect of how our culture is created and how it is changed. Stories are the building blocks of culture, and we’re the ones who create and tell those stories.

More…

http://bittergertrude.com/2014/05/29/our-role-in-this-as-artists/

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BITCHES IS CRAZY

~ OR ~

Why I despise and loathe the Pulitzer Prize-winning play TALLEY'S FOLLY

In which I explain why I have a problem with a play that presents a stalker, who forces a woman to remain in a boathouse until she submits, as a romantic hero.

by N. G. McClernan

When I first saw Lanford Wilson’s TALLEY’S FOLLY, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980, I didn’t even pick up on the horrific stalking and bullying aspect. This was in the early 1990s, when I first became interested in writing plays, and I considered it homework to go and see a community theatre production of the play in Haddonfield New Jersey. I picked the play exactly because it had won the Pulitzer Prize: I figured it had to be good. Like Shakespeare good.

But instead I was bored. It’s a ninety minute play that felt like two hours, but I gritted my teeth and stayed until the end. As I was walking out of the theatre I remember wondering whether I should abandon playwriting and go back to painting. If that was theatre, then I hated theatre.

My impression of the play, based on that long-ago production, was a long boring conversation, with lots of exposition, and the man doing most of the talking. I don’t know why I didn’t pick up on the truly repulsive underlying message of the play - perhaps it was the way it was directed - I don't remember any physical force used, as it is specified in the stage directions of the published script. 

Cultural gatekeepers have always been men (or men's female enablers.) To this day the vast majority of movie and theatre critics in the traditional media are men. But thanks to the new technologies all kinds of excellent feminist commentary is available to the public. One of the best purveyors of feminist culture theory is a web site called Tiger Beatdown. And one of its best essays is called TIGER BEATDOWN FOR DUDES Presents: That’s Not Funny. No, Seriously Dude, It’s Not.

More…

http://mcclernan.blogspot.com/2012/09/theatre-essay-bitches-is-crazy-or-why-i.html

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Can the Romantic Comedy Be Saved?

By Claude Brodesser-Akner

   

It was not that long ago when romantic comedies were a reliable date-night staple at the box office. It was a carefree, frothy time, when Julia, J. Lo, Kate, Katherine, Sandra, and Reese could show up onscreen, meet cute with just about any handsome male specimen, and pull in seven figures. But audiences seem to be falling out of love with the genre: The near-total rejection of Gerard Butler’s Playing for Keeps ($12 million, and fading fast) is only the latest casualty.

Earlier this year, Wanderlust ($17 million) and The Five-Year Engagement ($28 million) fizzled, while the genre’s once-reigning doyenne, Reese Witherspoon, saw her hybrid action/rom-com, This Means War, met with yawning indifference: It grossed just $54 million domestically, ten million less than its explosion-heavy budget. The highest-grossing rom-com of the year was Kevin Hart’s Think Like a Man ($91 million), and that film never truly broke out beyond its predominantly African-American target audience. “It is the hardest time of my 30 years in the business of doing them,” said Lynda Obst, the producer of romantic comedies like Sleepless in Seattle, One Fine Day, and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. Vulture asked several top filmmakers, producers, and executives for a heart-to-heart about the reasons why the genre is getting the cold shoulder — and as with most splintering relationships, there’s plenty of blame thrown back and forth: Studio chiefs blame audiences and stars, directors and producers blame studios and audiences, and agents blame their clients.

The downward slope of the rom-com’s fortunes has been steep. Just a decade ago, theaters were packed with date-night fare that took in hundreds of millions of dollars: In 2002, the top five highest-grossing romantic comedies alone — My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Sweet Home Alabama, Maid in Manhattan, and Two Weeks Notice — collectively took in a whopping $555 million in domestic box office. There were seven rom-coms in the top 100 films of that year, and this septet averaged a $96 million take. In 2008, there were eleven rom-coms in the top 100, with an average domestic gross of $77 million. By 2010, there were fourteen rom-coms in the top 100 highest grossing films — but their average domestic gross had dropped to $53 million. This year the average gross in the top 100 is up a hair to $54 million, but that’s based on only four movies that have cracked that list. (Many more did not.)

More…

http://www.vulture.com/2012/12/can-the-romantic-comedy-be-saved.html

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3 WAYS THE ROM-COM CAN SAVE ITSELF FROM EXTINCTION

Clearly, the rom-com is in dire straits, and things only seem to be getting worse.

by Phoebe Robinson

This week marks the 25th anniversary of arguably the best romantic comedy of the modern era: "When Harry Met Sally." (I write “arguably” to appease the ornery person who always steps to me, proclaiming "Love Actually" is the new sheriff in town.) And to that I say, “Show me the receipts,” which usually includes someone pointing out the film’s omnipresence on basic cable as proof, but I’m still unconvinced because Actually contains one of the most ludicrous love stories of recent memory. Colin Firth's character, Jamie, falls in love with a gorgeous, non-English speaking foreigner and they subsequently get engaged thanks to her father's response to Jamie's asking for his daughter's hand in marriage: "Who? Her? Sure." O...K. 

Clearly, the rom-com is in dire straits and things only seem to be getting worse. "Think Like A Man Too," which was released three weeks ago, has decent box office numbers ($61 million dollars), but is saddled with a 24% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In the past, this sort of critical lashing would have been an anomaly for movies of its ilk instead of what it is now: par for the course.

Since the early aughts, the average rom-com now is not only getting bad reviews and poor to middling box office returns, but major film studios are releasing fewer of these films in theaters (in 2002, there were 13, including "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" which grossed $241 million domestically; this year, only five romantic comedies are coming out).

The rom-com genre is going the way of the wooly mammoth, but I have three ways it can save itself from extinction: 

1) Let’s get some comedy up in here!

The genre is called “romantic comedy,” so why are so many of the films low on the funny? Where’s the witty Cary Grant/Rosalind Russell banter of "His Girl Friday," the satire of "Clueless," the go-for-broke rom-com/gross out humor mash up of "There’s Something About Mary"? Too often what's passing for "comedy" in rom-coms these days is a basic Katherine Heigl-type chick dressed in basic beige linens who vacillates between klutzy and shrill. Ugh.

More…

http://www.xojane.com/entertainment/3-ways-the-rom-com-can-save-itself-from-extinction

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I Rewatched Love Actually and Am Here to Ruin It for All of You

Lindy West

We open in a fucking airport. A fucking AIRPORT!!! Of course Love Actually, the apex of cynically vacant faux-motional cash-grab garbage cinema would hang its BIG METAPHOR on the bleak, empathy-stripped cathedral of turgid bureaucracy known as "the airport." Of course. And then, of course, Hugh Grant's voice pipes in to tell us how inspiring and magical the airport is, because when you're at the airport you can't help but notice that "love actually IS all around." THE FUCKING AIRPORT!!!!!

If that's not the epitome of unexamined privilege—declaring that the airport is your favorite place—then I don't know what is. Welcome to Love Actually.

Bill Nighy and his technicolor dream-blouse are in the studio recording a shitty, vapid Christmas song in hopes of squeezing a few dollars out of idiots who will pay for any tatty garbage as long as it has a celebrity's name attached (way better metaphor for your movie than "the airport," BTW!). Bill Nighy keeps ruining perfectly good takes so he can yell about how shitty his shitty Christmas song is, because Bill Nighy doesn't care about the valuable time of the hardworking professionals who are just trying to finish his vanity record so they can get home to their families. Not Bill Nighy's problem! He's done heroin before!

Question: Can somebody please adjust Bill Nighy's microphone so he doesn't have to cop that weird squat anymore? I should be able to watch a movie without my brain being forced to contemplate the current dilation of Bill Nighy's butthole. Thx.

Text appears on the screen to alert us that it's five weeks before Christmas. Why are you recording a Christmas single FIVE WEEKS BEFORE CHRISTMAS!?!? This movie is so fucking incompetently made that even the people doing their fake jobs inside the movie are incompetent.

Colin Firth's girlfriend is sick. NBD, right!? WRONG. Turns out, she isn't sick with the flu—she's sick with ColinFirth'sBrother'sDongitis! Colin Firth cannot deal, so he runs off to France all sulky to fucking type a novel on a fucking typewriter in a mansion. Siiiigh! "Alone ah-GAYN!"

This old French woman shows up at Chateau de Firth and is like, "Here, I found you a lady. I'm literally giving you this lady." Score! Free lady! The lady is named Aurelia and she only speaks Portuguese, and so does her entire family, apparently, even though all of them live in France. It's irritating.

Colin Firth falls in "love" with Aurelia at first sight, establishing Love Actually's central moral lesson: The less a woman talks, the more lovable she is.

None of the women in this movie fucking talk. All of the men in this movie "win" a woman at the end. This goddamn movie.

More…

http://jezebel.com/i-rewatched-love-actually-and-am-here-to-ruin-it-for-al-1485136388

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The greatest romantic comedy: His Girl Friday

Hawks stages an exceptional battle of wits and sexual politics between Grant and Russell, two performers matched in their capacity to hurl  verbal jabs with machine gun speed. Russell’s Hildy Johnson wants out of the newspaper game to marry her dopey insurance salesman fiancé, Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), and make a family in Albany. She arrives at the Morning Post’s offices to tell her editor, Grant’s Walter Burns, of her plans to wed Baldwin the next day after catching a train that evening. With little time to maneuver, Burns concocts a scheme to keep her around, in part because his paper needs her sharp reporting, and also because he still loves her. “Oh, she’s staying,” Burns quips. “She just doesn’t know it yet.”  His biggest hook is the execution of Earl Williams (John Qualen), a cop-killer who should have been tried with an insanity plea. Should the Morning Post cover the story, they could save Williams’ life and simultaneously rub out the careers of the corrupt Mayor (Clarence Kolb McCue) and his ineffectual sheriff (Gene Lockhart). Burns dangles the story in front of Hildy, lays an effective guilt trip on Baldwin, and Hildy eventually agrees to write one last story, in exchange for Burns signing a life insurance policy with Baldwin that will provide the new couple a financial nest egg. After Hildy interviews Williams to play up the insanity angle, the prisoner escapes, creating a frenzy of newspapermen trying to get the scoop. Working together again with Burns to get the story makes Hildy realize she still loves being a reporter and still loves Burns too.

More...

http://www.deepfocusreview.com/reviews/hisgirlfriday.asp

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Study: Rom-Coms Could Save Your Marriage

by Kat Stoeffel

Watching and discussing romantic movies is roughly as effective as couples therapy in reducing the divorce rate among newlyweds, according to a University of Rochester study published in December's Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Researchers looked at 174 couples over the first three years of their marriage, when one in four couples divorces. Couples were randomly assigned to one of three month-long programs — conflict management, compassion training, or movie-and-talk — as a kind of secular surrogate for the marriage-preparation classes offered by churches. The conflict-management and compassion-training groups required about twenty hours of therapist-supervised lectures and practice sessions, whereas movie-and-talk required half as much time, involved watching movies, and was almost entirely done at home. But all three groups halved the divorce rate of the control group, from 24 percent to 11 percent. 

Their conclusion? People already know how to fix their relationship problems, they just need the excuse to think and talk about them…“

http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/01/study-rom-coms-could-save-your-marriage.html

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OBVIOUS CHILD - Take Back the Rom-Com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYzPEgsIwHk

The stunning double standards of Christian Rudder of OKCupid

Christian Rudder is president of OKCupid, and like so many men, has double standards about male and female preferences vs. "realism."

I remember being annoyed when I read this piece written by Rudder some years ago. Women rated men in a different way than men rated women and Rudder found this highly offensive:

The female equivalent of the above chart shows a different bias:As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable. But with the basic ratings so out-of-whack, the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.
Just to illustrate that women are operating on a very different scale, here are just a few of the many, many guys we here in the office think are totally decent-looking, but that women have rated, in their occult way, as significantly less attractive than so-called “medium”:
Females of OkCupid, we site founders say to you: ouch! Paradoxically, it seems it’s women, not men, who have unrealistic standards for the “average” member of the opposite sex.

Check out the terminology: "occult way." Yes, women are just so completely mysterious.

When he says "rating" he means that on OKCupid you are shown profiles with pictures of people in the age/gender range you specified and asked to give them from one to five stars. The understanding is that you are responding to the photos based on your own personal preferences, not based on some universal assessment of all males in the world. 

So what the person doing the rating is expressing is her own, personal preference.

But Mr. Rudder finds women expressing personal preferences as indicative that women are unrealistic. And you can see how annoyed he is with this resentment-seething passage:

But with the basic ratings so out-of-whack, the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.

"Aren't good enough for her" is not the issue. The fact that she doesn't rate them attractive but messages them anyway is a sign that the women are accepting that they can't always get what they prefer.

Personal preference isn't based on anything but that - preference. Just as many men would prefer to date a 20-year-old Victoria's Secret model over an older non "model-quality" woman. This is an unrealistic goal for the vast majority of men, but it doesn't stop them from having that preference.

And speaking of entitlement, I have yet to meet a man, no matter how unattractive he is, who doesn't think he's entitled to a much younger, much more attractive mate. But if women actually point out that the men they settle for are less attractive - boy does that make Christian Rudder mad.

Christian has no problem with men having preferences. I know this because in Sunday's NYTimes he is quoted:

Mr. Rudder is particularly interested in the divide between the mates people claim they want and their actual online pursuits. Witness the actions of 35-year-old heterosexual men on OkCupid. 

These men typically search for women between the ages of 24 and 40, Mr. Rudder reports, yet in practice they rarely contact anyone over 29.“I see this as a statement of what men imagine they’re supposed to desire,” he writes in the book, “versus what they actually do.”

By Mr. Rudder's estimation, by limiting the number of women they contact, men are not being "unrealistic" but rather expressing their true un-politically-correct desires.

Now there are problems with Rudder's interpretation of the data outside of his own innate sexism. Foremost it's possible that men are more likely to message women under 30 because there are simply more women under 30 on OKCupid. Another possibility is that many women set their preferred age-range for men older than themselves - so a 39-year-old women might set her preference as 36 - 45, and so the 35-year-old man is less likely to see her profile.

But the issue isn't how Rudder could be wrong - the issue is how Rudder chose to interpret the data. And I would suggest that he does so because he does not approve of women's tastes in men. So he declares women to be "unrealistic" because they have a preference distribution curve that doesn't match men's preference distribution. Clearly men's preference distribution is the norm, the standard, and so if women's vary, there is something wrong with women.

As I discussed the other day, - and as Steinem and Kimmel  noted - until recently all women were property and in some places in the world right now they are still property. Of what advantage is it to men for their property to have aesthetic preferences?

Evolutionary psychology - and I will bet anything that Christian Rudder is a believer - is one of the methods by which male entitlement aficionados attempt to tell women what they are supposed to naturally find attractive - older, powerful men. Aesthetics are not supposed to matter to true, evolved women - evolutionary psychologists are constantly proclaiming that women aren't as "visually oriented" as men. So evolutionary psychology would predict that women's preferences would align perfectly with women's actions in contacting potential mates - because according to evo-psycho theories women don't really care what men look like. And since the data shows something besides what would be predicted by evo-psycho - that women do have aesthetic preferences something must be wrong here - and what's wrong here is these women being "unrealistic" by simply expressing aesthetic preferences.

While 35-year-old men, on the other hand, are not declared "unrealistic" by failing to contact women their own age. They are just doing what comes naturally, according to evolutionary psychology. 

Christian Rudder is a well-spoken professional man and so he can't say what he really thinks but other men are not so circumspect. P. Z. Meyers posted this on his Pharyngula blog recently:

But jesus fuck, I had no idea how stupid the arguments could get.

You deserved this because a girl like you would never date me in real life, no matter how nice and courteous I was. Karma!
Sorry but it’s not fair that only the guys of your choosing get to see the photos while the ugly, less fortunate guys do not.
Seriously, dude? You honestly believe that women owe you dates and naked pictures? That they don’t get to choose who they are intimate with?
I owe you one photo of me puking in a bucket.

J. Matthew is clearly enraged that beautiful women might prefer beautiful men. Because, the thinking goes, women shouldn't care about the appearance of men. They owe it to all men to make themselves available. Why should property have preferences?

I would suggest that J. Matthew and Christian Rudder are expressing the same attitude in different ways.

Now why exactly do women rate men differently than men rate women? Why do women find so many men unattractive?

Well only an evolutionary psychologist would be stupid enough to think the reason is because women are "unrealistic." There are many reasons why, beginning with the most obvious - women put much more work into their appearance. Now this is changing, but only because younger generations of men are growing up in a world where it is no longer the case that the only thing that a man has to bring to the table is a good job. Women can have good jobs - so women have the luxury of picking mates based on aesthetics, the way men always have.

Of course if you are a fervent believer in evolutionary psychology, you are going to cling to the belief that women don't really - women shouldn't - care about what a man looks like. 

The belief that women don't care about aesthetics in mate selection and that there are/should be two different sets of standards for males and females is so reflexive in evolutionary psychology, they seriously argue that baldness has been selected for! "Selected" means sexual selection. They actually argue that women in ancient times preferred bald men because baldness was a sign of masculinity or maturity.

Somehow though, they never get around to explaining why one of the only cosmetic issues that men have traditionally cared about - even in the days of perfect masculine hegemony - is hair loss. If going bald got you laid, all men would be shaving their heads.

Something that never occurs to evolutionary psychologists is the role that women-as-property has played in human evolution. We don't know for sure that in pre-historic times parents sold their girls to wealthy old men the way they do in parts of the world right now but why wouldn't they? The sexual value of young women was likely to be even higher during a time without a vast array of consumer goods.

So once again it comes back to women being treated as property. Property doesn't get to have sexual preferences. If young women didn't find old bald men sexually desirable it did not matter! The only thing that mattered - to her parents - was how much money he had. And so his baldness genes were passed down to the next generation.

Really, evolutionary psychology is so blinkered you can't believe the theories developed out of stupidity - it must be willful obtuseness.

UPDATE: my hunch was correct - Christian Rudder is completely in league with the evolutionary psychologists.

Guitar Center

It's nice that not every date with someone from online is a living hell. The guy I met today is an amazing musician and took me to the Guitar Center, which is located below Times Square. Maybe in the middle of the day it's a living hell as reported in various online publications but on Saturday night it was pretty empty and my date got a chance to play selections from Franz Liszt and his own compositions on keyboard as well as Hendrix, his own compositions and the work of some guy named Eric Johnson, whom he adores on guitar.

To my amazement he had never heard Steely Dan (he's on the young side) so I immediately had to send him Youtube clips of the Dan.

On Sexual Reciprocity

I am so busy this month - foremost I have to get a complete draft of my play DARK MARKET ready for the September 21 reading. I also have to write a one-act about the Bronte sisters and as if that isn't enough I was just inspired to write a one-act based on my sister's infamous bachelorette party many years ago.

But I've been rolling the idea of an essay about sexual reciprocity around in my head for weeks now and I need to put something down before I forget. This is an auspicious time since Gloria Steinem has just co-written an op-ed piece with Michael Kimmel in the NYTimes that addresses the issue.

Here they talk about the implementation of an explicit-consent code of conduct at colleges:

While doomsayers lamented that the new rules would destroy the mystery of campus sex, the students took it in stride. Instead of, “Do you want to have sex?” they simply asked, “Do you want to implement the policy? 

Of course some guys on campus were against it, in an honest way. “If I have to ask those questions, I won’t get what I want,” blurted out one young man to a reporter. Bingo. 

But seriously, since when is hearing “yes” a turnoff? Answering “yes” to, “Can I touch you there?” “Would you like me to?” “Will you [fill in blank] me?” seems a turn-on and a confirmation of desire, whatever the sexual identity of the asker and the asked.

Putting aside practical issues about implementation, there is an unexamined issue here. The fact that rape and prostitution and forced marriage exist makes it clear that for many people, especially male people, mutual desire does not matter. They don't care if they get a "yes" because although yes may not be a turnoff, no is not a turnoff either. In the case of some rapists of course, getting a "no" is the whole point, but many men who don't require resistance by the same token do not need to believe their sexual partner is aroused in order to complete an act of sexual intercourse.

This is obvious, and yet it struck me recently - why should this be, and why is it never discussed?

The most likely reason it isn't considered remarkable, or a phenomenon to be scientifically investigated in any way is because of the long persistence of absolute patriarchy. As Steinem/Kimmel observe elsewhere in the article:

Until now, this has been the state of affairs in our nation’s laws on sexual assault. Invading bodies has been taken less seriously by the law than invading private property, even though body-invasion is far more traumatic. This has remained an unspoken bias of patriarchal law. After all, women were property until very recently. In some countries, they still are. 

Even in America, women’s human right to make decisions about their own bodies remains controversial, especially when it comes to sex and reproduction.

That is it, exactly. Women were all property until very recently and some women are property in some places in the world right now. Since when do the sexual desires of property count for anything? And in fact, property having sexual desires could be extremely inconvenient, since there's always a good chance the desire is not for the legal property owner.

Even though women in the US are for the most part no longer goods exchanged between parents and husband, that way of thinking persists, as long-held customs will. 

The belief that men don't care about the sexual desires, much less more nuanced emotions of women is so reflexive that I was stunned by this passage in an article about the career of porn star James Deen in GQ. Author Wells Tower :

At this point, in answer to the query I posed at the start of our voyage, I can sincerely say that I would rather drink a mugful of live ticks than switch places with James Deen. 

You're shittin' me! you say. Why? Well, not only because being impelled to couple every day with a stranger before a room of onlookers seems like an experiment dreamed up by Martian scientists. And not only because the Groundhog Day-ish sameness would, I think, accumulate to a monotony akin to a career in oyster shucking. Ultimately, for this reporter, I would be frightened that if I weren't able to recall the names of sexual partners beyond the previous two weeks, ideals like intimacy and love would begin to seem gooey and absurd, and a terrible unexamined loneliness would become the natural condition of my life. I do not voice this sentiment to Deen. It would offend him. It would come across as prudishly un-"sex-positive" and critical of Deen and the industry he holds dear.

It's quite a surprisingly good article, and includes a harrowing episode where an especially grueling and uncomfortable three-way porn shoot leaves one of the female actors in tears - which she tries to minimize, but I don't think the author buys it:

Deen flees the set in search of a shower. Isis and Proxy sit abed for a postgame interview.

Isis Love: Proxy, how you feeling right now? 

Proxy Paige: [panting] Good! Worked over. 

Isis: Was it everything you expected it to be? 

Proxy: Yes, and I got to do a lot of things I hadn't done before. 

[Proxy is breathing heavily. Her voice is fragile, muted with restrained emotion.]

Isis: Do you want to cry right now? Come here, munchkin.

Isis Love holds Proxy Paige while the brine flows from her eyes. "It was a really good day," Proxy says, her voice splintering. "I don't know why I'm crying. It was really extreme, and I did a lot of things I don't normally do."
"You're so cute," says Isis. "What was the best part of the day? Your favorite part." 

"You fisting me," says Proxy. "I've always wanted to be, like, fully fisted in the ass. I felt like that would cross some sort of, like, anal threshold, and I finally did it. It was intense." 

"Can I have a tissue for my munchkin pie?" Isis calls to the crew. Isis Love cradles Proxy Paige, and Proxy does the only thing one can do when you've survived such an afternoon as this, which is to weep and grin and weep.

I was expecting the article would be nothing but admiration and jealousy of Deen and his means of making a living. Tower acknowledges this with the "you're shittin' me!" But he follows that up with:

...ideals like intimacy and love would begin to seem gooey and absurd, and a terrible unexamined loneliness would become the natural condition of my life...

I thought that intimacy and love being declared gooey and absurd was the masculine ideal! Certainly to the extent that you wouldn't normally admit otherwise in a men's magazine. Having an endless parade of anonymous female jizz-receptacles was the ultimate goal of every red-blooded American male, I thought. 

This section from the article also surprised me:

"Yeah," Deen says. "I always say sex is like soccer: It's fun and athletic, and you should do it with your friends."

Yes, I think. Right. Certainly. Here is a simple statement that Deen means pretty much as it sounds, but it also pithily expresses yet another reason why you or I will never be the sort of soccer player James Deen is. It's not just that he's got bigger, you know, feet than we do. It's that for you, on that night of enduring awkwardness when you went out for drinks with the woman in the adjacent cubicle and achieved your long-cherished fantasy of playing soccer with her, you did so not because you thought she was going to be this tremendously good soccer player. It was that you were thrilled that she found you sufficiently nonrevolting that she was willing to get on the field with you, which was a big consideration, because as you both knew, what makes the game so very, very exciting isn't its competitive physics but the conceit that the game is actually a high-velocity delivery system for privileged emotional knowledge of the other player's secret self. And that even if you're the sort of freebooting venereal Olympian who tries to play soccer with absolutely everything that moves, your compulsion to play is still ultimately grounded in the marrow-level conviction that the game matters in some way a good deal more complex and high-stakes than simple athletic fun.

Really? Men give a rat's ass about a woman's secret self? Men even conceptualize that a woman has a secret self? Maybe I've been spending too much time talking to 20-something guys on online dating sites lately, but in my recent experience what men want most from women is "no drama" by which they mean "no personality quirks that might impede the goal, however briefly, of impersonal sex-having, please."

Which brings us to prostitution. What so many of these 20-something men on dating sites seem to want is basically a free prostitute - someone who will serve their needs for dehumanized coitus and not have any needs of their own in exchange.

As this discussion on The Straight Dope board indicates, the majority of the discussants consider all women to be basically prostitutes, and so actual prostitutes are better because pretending to have feelings for a woman, while preferable to paying big money for a quality prostitute, doesn't guarantee a sexual pay-off and therefore it's worth the money to go to a prostitute. So actually, the idea of reciprocity is absent from both their interactions with prostitutes and with non-prostitutes. The goal is a penis in a vagina - everything else is the unpleasant but necessary services or goods you must pay to achieve the goal. Pleasing the woman sexually is not even a secondary pleasure - it's a horrific burden.

The online discussion is ancient so there's no point in my asking the participants, but I wonder - would they pay someone to be their friend? And consider that a bargain? Because with a real friend, you have to provide friendship services to them in exchange for those they provide for you. But there's no guarantee the friend will always be available, or always in a good mood. Sometimes the friend might want something from you. Much better to pay for a friend then to bother with all that emotional work.

Well of course a friend is not considered property. Women still are - and I suggest that the men on this discussion board have that belief in the back of their mind. Women are property you have sex with and it is very inconvenient to have to pay property anything in exchange for sex, but if you have to pay, you might as well pay cash and get exactly what you want, when you want it, like any decent capitalist.

But how important is reciprocity? Well consider this - if men actually cared whether or not their sex partners felt desire for them, rape would disappear, prostitution would disappear, all forms of sexual exploitation would end. This would never have happened. We would be living in a paradise.

But we are not. Because it would appear, most men, most of the time, simply do not care about women's feelings. Even - or possibly especially - the women closest to them.

Now the big question is - is it nature or is it nurture?

More soon.