The Twinkly Christmas Rom Com Feeds Off the Disappointment of Women

The Twinkly Christmas Rom Com Feeds Off the Disappointment of Women

(Link): The Twinkly Christmas Rom Com Feeds Off the Disappointment of Women

Excerpts:

….These films are also objectively bad. They hinge on undefined traditional values, and imply that there’s a literal magic that spurs improbable behavior around Christian holidays.

The characters—particularly the women—are completely one-dimensional. The plots are improbable at best and completely far-fetched at worst. And yet, they’ve never been more popular.

While there’s surely some aspect of escapism in these films, there’s also something darker at play: These movies don’t just depict a world that’s brighter and cheerier than our own; they depict one drastically different, where being a woman who Has It All is as simple as embracing the holiday spirit.

At the end of another year where the news cycle highlighted the inequalities, hurdles, and abuse that women around the world still face, one reason these movies are still so appealing is that they can be watched with both envy and outrage.

We can laugh at them because they’re so far from the truth of modern women’s experience.

Woman Says She is Lonely in Marriage to Husband Who Ignores Her in Favor of His Job, Watching TV, etc.

Woman Says She is Lonely in Marriage to Husband Who Ignores Her in Favor of His Job, Watching TV, etc.

A woman named San wrote to Christian program “The 700 Club” to say she’s in a marriage where her husband is ignoring her in favor of TV shows and his job and so forth. Pat Robertson’s son Gordon answered her letter.

Here is her letter to The 700 Club:

I have been very lonely in my marriage.

My husband’s priorities fall in this order: work, television, and then his phone. I have brought it to his attention so many times. I find myself only relying on God and Him being my true friend but I am still lonely.

Yes, I have God to turn to and I talk to God all day, every day, but it would be nice to have a husband in my life who I can truly share my life with. What should I do?

[signed] San

I didn’t completely agree with the host’s answer.

One Foot in Christianity, One Foot in Agnosticism – In a Faith Crisis

One Foot in Christianity, One Foot in Agnosticism  – In a Faith Crisis

November 2016. (There is a moderate amount of swear words in the post below)

Some of the points in the post, in brief (the long explanation is below):

• I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior before I was ten years old
• I have read the entire Bible.
• I spent many years reading books ABOUT the Bible (e.g., books about its formation and history)
• I spent years reading Christian apologetic literature
  – so do NOT tell me that I “do not understand Christianity” or that I was “never a REAL Christian to start with”
• I currently have doubts about the Christian faith and/or aspects of the Bible
• I have not rejected Jesus Christ Himself
  (he’s pretty much Christianity’s only good feature or selling point, as far as I can see at this point)

• I am not an atheist
• I am not a Charismatic
• I am not a “Word of Faither”
• I was brought up under conservative, Southern Baptist and evangelical teachings and churches

• Even though conservative Christians claim to believe in the Bible, they
  • cannot agree on what the Bible means or how to apply it – this is a huge problem as I see it in the faith
  • they diminish the role of the Holy Spirit or deny Him and that He can work for Christians today, because they are “hyper sola scriptura” and have reduced the Trinity to “Father, Son, and Holy Bible,” (this is also problematic),
    they usually do this because they are hyper-cessationist and paranoid or hateful of Charismatic teachings or practices
  • they teach that most to all of the biblical promises are not for Christians today but are only for the Jews of 5,000 years ago, there-by teaching that the Bible is NOT relevant for people today  (this is also problematic)
• If you are a Christian, do not act like a smug dick about any of this and immediately disregard any points I have to make about God, the Bible, or other topics, because in your view, I am a “Non-Christian who was ‘never’ really saved” -not to mention, that is not even true.
  I was in fact “truly” saved, and I am / was, a “real” Christian.
• No, I don’t want to enumerate a detailed list of reasons why I have doubts about God, the Bible, or the faith.If I were to provide such a list or explanation, your average Christian would only want to debate each and every point to argue me back into fully believing. (A witnessing tip to Christians: doing that sort of thing is NOT an effective way of “winning back a lost sheep to Jesus.”)

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DETAILED EXPLANATION

I find that people who are both Christian and Non-Christian (and several other categories of people I bump into on Twitter and other sites) get frustrated when they cannot easily box me in.

People seem to be more comfortable with labels, but I’m not sure what label I would give myself these days.

I have briefly tried to explain my current religious beliefs on my Twitter bio, and I explain them a little more on my blog’s “About” page and have mentioned them in a post or two over the course of the last few years I’ve been blogging here.

Here is my background:

I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior prior to turning the age of ten.

That means: I believed that Jesus took my sins upon himself, he was without sin, he paid the price for my sins, and was raised from the dead three days after having been crucified – and if I believe in all that, if I put “saving faith in” Jesus (as opposed to mere intellectual assent), my sins have been forgiven by God, and I go to heaven when I die.

I read the entire Bible through when I was 18 years old, and afterwards, I read a lot of the Bible in the years after. Prior to that age, I had read portions of the Bible when younger.

The Rise of Delayed Marriage and Female Friendship – article from The Atlantic

The Rise of Delayed Marriage and Female Friendship – article from The Atlantic

Speaking of friendship: there is an account on Twitter whose owner sticks up for friendship and sometimes blogs against the Christian obsession with marriage or the stupid Billy Graham Rule. That account is (Link): Forbidden Friendships (@MenWomenFriends)

The Atlantic has a very long article about societal shifts concerning the delay or demise of marriage and the rise of female friendships, as they discuss it in the context of some television show called “Broads” that is about two lady friends. I’ve never seen the show.

(Link):  Broad City and the Triumph of the Platonic Rom-Com by Megan Garber

Excerpts:

The show’s new season asks what its heroines, Abbi and Ilana, are to each other: friends? Partners? More?

….Abbi and Ilana share, basically, what a lot of young women—and young men—share in this age of delayed marriage and emergent adulthood and platonic roommates and geographic peripateticism and economic prosperity and economic uncertainty: a friendship that occupies the psychic space that used to be devoted to spouses and children.

While the (Link): marriage plot may still, dissolved and distended, drive many of Hollywood’s cultural products, Broad City reflects friendship’s age-old, but also new, reality: The show is suggesting that its heroines are already, effectively, married. To each other.

…The women’s partnership [which is platonic; they don’t have sex with each other], crucially, is not merely a matter of social circumstance; they aren’t simply keeping each other company until their respective dudes carry them along to their Happily Ever After. They are each other’s Happily Ever After. The pair, as Ann Friedman (Link): put it, are “more obsessed with each other than they are with men.” They are very probably the loves of each other’s lives.

Which makes Broad City, on the one hand, yet more evidence that we are living, as The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg (Link): put it, in “a golden age of female friendship.”

Romantic Comedies: When Stalking Has a Happy Ending (from The Atlantic) / Men Who Mistake Platonic Friendliness For Flirting – So Annoying

Romantic Comedies: When Stalking Has a Happy Ending (from The Atlantic)

Some people confuse what this article from The Atlantic terms “persistent pursuing” with courtship. That is, men do it all the time, and some women, due to Hollywood Rom Coms, have been conditioned to view this as normal, romantic behavior.

May I add another related issue: men who mistake platonic chit chat with flirting?

That drives me up the wall. It’s one reason I am usually loathe to enter into pleasantries with men I don’t know when I’m in stores or sitting around in waiting rooms, because many men mistake idle, polite banter for,

• “Oooh, this lady is into me, she is warm for my form, she wants to marry me and make babies with me, I am one sexy beast, grrrrr.”

So these men ask for your phone number or they get all flirty back. And you, the woman, are like, “I did NOT send this dude any sexy signals, where is this coming from?”

No, dude, my romantic interest is only in your imagination. (Duran Duran (Link): sang of this very concept.)

Me saying stuff like, “Wow, some crazy weather we’ve been having lately, huh?” as we’re sitting in Wal-Mart’s auto care center waiting for our tires to be rotated is not me hitting on you.

Me hitting on you, men of the world, consists of me putting one hand behind my head, one hand on a jutted out hip, head tilted back, eyes narrowly parted, and me saying something (in a seductive sounding, cat like purr), like, “Hey there big boy, you come here all alone? Mama likes what she sees! May I have your phone number? Are you free for a date this Saturday?”

Think (Link): this.

Yes, (Link): this is what a woman who is flirting with you looks like, the facial expression and mannerisms.

About men who refuse to take “no” for an answer from a woman they are interested in, who confuse pursuing with stalking: other than entitlement, I wonder if what drives some of these men is a sense that they HATE to be alone and MUST have a romantic partner to “complete them.”

I know this sort of thinking is very common among a lot of women. I think secular society (and Christian culture) does try to convince people there is no way they can be whole and happy single. There is a lot of pressure on people to pair up and date or marry.

Culture (especially through movies and TV shows) and churches need to stop sending this bogus message that there is something wrong, flawed, or second class about being single as an adult.

There is no disgrace in being single. I understand if you are single and lonely and pine for a significant other how hard it can be at times, but you are okay on your own.

You are not some loser or in-complete if you don’t have a mate, contrary to the messages Christians and Hollywood like to send us all.

(Link):  Romantic Comedies: When Stalking Has a Happy Ending by Julie Beck

Excerpts:

Overly persistent pursuit is a staple of movie love stories, but a new study shows that it could normalize some troubling behaviors.

…Reasonable people know that rom-coms aren’t what love is really like, just as reasonable people know that porn is not what sex is really like. But these movies still create an image of romance that leaks into the atmosphere and may subtly shape people’s perceptions and expectations of love.

One troubling way they may do that is by making stalking behaviors seem like a normal part of romance, according to (Link): a new study by Julia Lippman, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of communication studies at the University of Michigan.

…[Lipman says] “Indeed, they may be seen as reflecting one of the great cultural myths of romantic love: that no matter how big the obstacle, love will conquer all.”

The website TV Tropes, which tracks, wiki-style, frequently-used narrative devices—not just on TV, but in all kinds of fiction—has a page for this. It’s aptly titled (Link): “Stalking Is Love.”Lippman files stalking under the broader umbrella of “persistent pursuit,” which can also encompass “more benign and even positively regarded behaviors such as some types of romantic courtship,” she writes.

Rom Com Movie on Women Allowing Themselves To Be Used By Men – And A Leading Man Disappointment

Rom Com Movie on Women Allowing Themselves To Be Used By Men – And A Leading Man Disappointment

(This post has been edited farther below, over August 8 – 10, with more observations based on some new interviews or links I saw.

This post covers several topics, including but not limited to: how feminist characters are depicted in movies, the impact of sexism on dating, to actors who publicly express their religious and political views in an obnoxious manner.)

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I am normally not a fan of “Rom Com” (romantic comedy) movies.

But I heard some good things about this particular one.

I don’t know if I want to say what it is, if I want to say what its title is.

I’ll call it “Rom Com X.”

(If you have seen this movie you may be able to guess what it is, even from my vague description below.)

One reason I don’t want to just come right out and say the title of this movie is because farther in this post I have some mild criticisms of one of its actors, and I do not want any of his fans coming here and leaving me hostile posts. I am not going to name the name of the actor I discuss below.

Rom Com X has been on cable TV a few times. I’ve seen it about twice so far, maybe three times.

I find the MC (main character) sympathetic. Well, usually. There are a few scenes in the movie where she did or said things I never would have, where she unnecessarily was hostile to a person or two.

But of course, to balance that out, she was going through a very difficult time in her life, so to a degree, you do understand she is lashing out on occasion at others and being cranky because her life is in a tail spin.

This movie was interesting on several levels to me.

I related to some of the plights of the MC (main character) in a very big way.

She and I do differ on a few points, but I have some things in common with her, if not in the details, but in the overall scheme of things.

There is an actor who plays MC’s (Main Character’s) eventual love interest in the movie. I’m going to call this guy “Actor X.” I will refer to his character’s name as “Roger.”