Inquiry+rough+draft

//Topic: How are women portrayed in romantic comedies? // Romantic comedies are most likely every girl’s ideal must-see movie. Not only do these wonderful movies have a love story, but they also have happy endings. Throughout the whole movie, the audience is engaged while laughing and feeling satisfied with their lives. Right now, we are living in hard times, with so much hatred and violence going around, that people like to get away from reality. And teenage girls turn to romantic comedies for this alternate view of reality. Why, then are girls the ones primarily watching this genre of movies when most of these films depict women in a negative and stereotypical light. I have watched a lot of romantic comedies in my time and from personal experience, I can safely say that most of these films portray women in a way that is unflattering and somewhat offensive and sexist. Is this what we want the future generations to think that it is okay for women to be sexually objectified and In order to justify my position, I have re-watched three romantic comedies: //Knocked Up, Sex and the City,// and //He’s Just Not That Into You.// Initially after watching these three movies, I actually enjoyed them, but upon further analysis of the female characters in the films, I have realized that the depiction of women in these movies has ruined the films for me. This may not be true for other girls because they still watch romantic comedies. And why are they turning to these types of movies? Well, for one thing, you can count on having a cute guy starring in it. Teenage girls are at that stage in life where they are boy-crazy, so having Robert Pattinson or Zac Efron in a movie is reason enough to go to watch the movie. The PG-13 rating for these movies also allows for teens to watch these movies easily. Their parents do not have to worry about any crude language or sexually-explicit scenes. Romantic comedies also appeal to teen girls because of the fact that they can be realistic, yet have an element of fantasy twisted into it (USA Today). By watching these movies, we are teaching the youth that it is okay for women to act in an unbecoming and critical way. Is that what we want to teach them? //Knocked Up // is a movie that stars Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl in the lead roles. Notice how I mentioned Rogen before I did Heigl, even though this paper is on the portrayal of women. This is because Heigl’s character is easily forgettable and could have been easily replaced with any other girl in Hollywood. Heigl played Alison Scott, a no-nonsense producer of the E! television network channel. The basic premise of the story revolves around Alison having a drunken one night stand with a stranger, Ben Stone (Seth Rogen). The consequence of this one night is that she ends up pregnant, hence the title. The movie goes through the ups and downs of this new relationship, with Alison trying to figure out if Ben is not only father material, but the right man for her. Since it is a romantic comedy, the ending does involve Alison and Ben mending their problems and deciding to be a real family with their new daughter, but not without some drama, which is actually the comedy part of the movie. In a nutshell, Alison is an uptight, humorless, control freak. For most of the movie, she is a one dimensional character that remains static and immovable. She has no real redeeming qualities about her and often times, I just wanted to go through my television and just give her a good slapping. Ben, on the other hand, is a funny, witty guy that seems to have real, genuine feelings. It seems like Alison is a robot, while Ben is human and he is not afraid to show it. My problem with the portrayal of Alison is that the movie creator, Judd Apatow, makes it seem like women do not have sense of humors at all. Not only in this movie, but in other comedic movies, the female characters are never really the funny ones. They are never the characters that I laugh //with//; it is more like I am laughing //at// them. Apatow, like other creators of comedic movies, plays off a woman’s insecurities in order to get a good laugh out of them, while the male characters are just plain funny. Why is it that we laugh at the expense of other people’s flaws and lack of self-confidence? Alison is the stereotypical, hormonal pregnant woman who constantly cares about her looks than anything else. This portrayal makes it seem like all women are vain and completely unreasonable. In one scene of the movie, Alison is at the doctor’s office and is getting weighed by the nurse. The nurse comments on Alison’s growing weight, while Alison is trying to take off her belt in order to lose an extra tenth of an ounce on the scale. I mean, did Alison really think that by taking off her belt that her weight would magically go down? Unless she was wearing a WWE gold plated belt, the scale was not going to change. This shows how delusional and vain Alison was acting. Apatow also made it seem like women are only considered with practical and realistic issues. The men in the movie were people that were able to be fun, open and able to experiment, while the women were solely preoccupied with the functionality of the world. The movie showed the guys actually having feelings and aspirations, while the women were the cold-hearted, unreasonable characters. Katherine Heigl who played Alison, even felt like the movie was a bit sexist. She told //Vanity Fair// that she often felt that her character was a “killjoy” while her male counterparts were painted as “lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys.” She felt that the characters were stereotypical and exaggerated, which made it hard for her to love the movie (Huffington Post). As a woman, I wanted to side with Alison in the movie, but she made it very difficult for me. “Girls come to New York City looking for the two l’s- labels and love”- this is the opening line of the //Sex and the City// movie, which stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrell, Kristen Davis, and Cynthia Nixon in the lead roles. Right from the very first sentence, we get a sense of a sexist perspective, albeit from a woman’s perspective. The film goes on from the popular series of the same name about four, 40-something year- old friends living in NYC, and dealing with the trials and tribulations of love, marriage, infidelity, and the list goes on. This time around, Carrie’s getting married to Mr. “Big”, Charlotte’s expecting a baby, Samantha’s frustrated with her mundane life, and Miranda’s getting cheated on by her husband. There have been many criticisms of the series of the show in the past, anything from being too sexualized to being untraditional and moral -less. I enjoyed the series because it gave women more power on their lives and it did not allow for a man to define themselves. But watching the movie gave me a slightly different impression. I never noticed how exaggerated the roles of women were represented. You have Carrie, the shoe-aholic, who longs for nothing else in life besides a good pair of Manolo’s and an apartment-sized closet. Carrie was practically speechless when she saw her new remodeled closet, but when “Big” proposed to her, she was slightly less ecstatic. Then there is Charlotte, the ever-perfect traditional wife, in a traditional marriage, living the life with her traditional family. And now there is Miranda, the breadwinner of her family. She is too absorbed in her job to notice the lack of intimacy in her marriage. Did she really expect her husband to remain faithful when their love life is nearly non-existent? Finally, there is Samantha, the over-sexed cougar, who becomes tired of living her life on the safe side, even though she is with the man she loves. She sabotages her own relationship. If nothing else, these characters have taught me that there really is no middle ground for women; Women are one of the following: 1. an independent, shoe/closet-lover, 2. a traditional step-ford wife, 3. a workaholic in a lacking marriage, or 4. a never satisfied, self-sabotaging older woman. It is like woman can only be defined by the extremes. Based off a popular self-help book by the same name, //He’s Just Not That Into You,// is a story that follows nine people through their romantic lives. Each couple has a problem based off of their differing ideals and values. Again, the women in this movie are viewed in a stereotypical way. Gigi is at the center of the story with her constant misinterpretations and obsessions about the guys in her life. She is so clueless to the rules of dating that she will date just about anybody. She is so blinded by what is happening around her that a complete stranger/bartender, Alex, has to point out her mistakes in her dating life. It was so obvious the blunders that Gigi committed, but she was too desperate for a guy that she did not notice. So based off of this example, women do not care who they are with, as long as they are with a guy. Desperation is better than loneliness is Gigi’s motto. Another plotline of the movie involves married couple, Janine and Ben. Janine is too preoccupied with the renovation of their new home, that she has no time for her husband at all. So what does Ben do? The only thing that men do in this type of situation, where his wife is too busy for him- he goes and cheats on her with a yoga instructor/aspiring singer, Anna. Again, like in the case of Miranda in //Sex and the City,// when women become too busy with their own lives, they soon forget about the people that matter to them, which then lead to infidelity. Therefore, women cannot work or become too involved with other projects, without having her husband cheat on her. In the final example, we have Beth and Neil, who have a good relationship, despite the fact that Beth wants to get married and Neil does not want to ruin a good thing. This ultimately leads to their break up, but Beth has an epiphany on the state of marriage when she finds her sisters’ husbands to be useless, lazy men. From this one event, she realizes that marriage is not for her; she realizes that Ben is more of a husband than her brother-in-laws. She lets one example dictate her life and she runs with it. Women are often portrayed in an unflattering light in romantic comedies. They are seen as the straight-as-an-arrow, humorless characters. Or they can be the extremes of examples, like a sex-craved cougar, a workaholic, a fashionista with a fetish for big closets, or traditional housewives. They can be seen as either too desperate or too preoccupied. Either way, women have the short end of the stick in this genre.

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