I watched Love Actually recently, and was reminded yet again that in romcoms, and just in Hollywood in general, the women are almost always more attractive than the guys. There are lots of couples floating around the film, and some of them are more or less balanced in age/attractivness…but then there’s homely cute aging Hugh Grant with the blindingly hot Martine McCutcheon (who of course has to endure constant jokes about her weight) and the homely cute aging Alan Rickman at whom the much younger and exponentially hotter Heike Makatsch keeps throwing herself. The Woody Allen dynamic of dweebish guy with sizzling younger woman is a Hollywood staple (and is only made more uncomfortable by the allegations about Allen’s real-life abuse of a 7-year-old.) But the reverse — dweebish woman with sizzling guy — hardly ever happens.
Or at least, it hardly ever happens on film. I’ve read a bunch of romance novels recently, and there the tropes are pretty consistently reversed. At least in the dozen or so books I’ve read, there is not a single instance of the character actor guy getting the incredible babe in the end. Instead, both men and women tend to be described as ravishingly attractive (and, in the case of men, as having impressive genital equipment. Size, in romance novels at least, does in fact matter.)
Or, if both are not ravishing, then the one who is not is, consistently, the woman. In Jennier Crusie’s “Bet Me”, the Adonis-like Cal passes over the perfect, slim, Cynthie in favor of the decidedly not-thin Min, who is described in her initial appearance as being “dressed like a nun with an MBA.” In Cecelia Grant’s “A Gentleman Undone,” the novel proper begins with the words, “Three of the courtesans were beautiful. His eye lingered, naturally, on the fourth” — that fourth being our heroine. In Judith Ivory’s “Black Silk,” the most notable physical characteristic of the protagonist is her irregular teeth — which the hero finds “Oddly” but “strongly feminine.” Here, as elsewhere, the men see past the women’s imperfections — or, indeed, the men are attracted by the imperfections.
Obviously, this particular narrative difference has to have something to do with differing demographics. Romance novels are aimed overwhelmingly at women, so you get fantasies in which normal, non-Hollywood-hot women date perfect male specimens who can see the beauty not just in their personalities, but in their deviations from tyrannical beauty standards. The only surprise is that Hollywood doesn’t tap into this pretty simple fantasy more often — an indication, perhaps, that having films directed and produced almost entirely by men does in fact have a noticeable effect on the content of even films supposedly targeted at a mixed audience (like “Love Actually”).
So (het) men prefer fantasies in which schlubby men get hot women, and (het) women prefer fantasies in which schlubby women get hot guys. That seems predictable enough. But what’s maybe a little surprising is that, in other respects, the genders’ ideal fantasy is congruent. Or at least, both Hollywood and romance fiction seem to agree that the ideal romantic pairing is one in which the guy is substantially richer and more powerful than the woman.
The magnitude of the difference here can vary a good bit. The reductio ad absurdum is Twilight, with the fabulously wealthy and superpowered vampire sweeping the simple high school student out of the prom and into eternal life. But the meme hold up to one degree or another both in “Love Actually” (where Hugh Grant gets to crush on his secretary, Alan Rickman, as noted above, is flirting with his secretary, and one of the other characters falls in love with his maid) and in the romance novels I’ve looked at. As I mentioned last week, in Jennier Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation, the heroine is a struggling filmmaker while the hero is the town mayor. In Pam Rosenthal’s “Almost a Gentleman” the hero is a cross-dressing man of fashion, but the hero is a powerful, wealthy lord with extensive property. Cecelia Grant’s guy in “A Gentleman Undone” is not rich…but her heroine is a a courtesan whose status is precarious enough that the guy seems relatively well off. Beverly Jenkins’ Indigo goes the full-bore 50 Shades route; the heroine is an ex-slave barely maintaining herself in the middle-class, while the hero, a New Orleans freeman, has apparently limitless wealth and resources.
Again, the fantasy here isn’t hard to parse; if you can marry for true love and fabulous wealth, why settle for just marrying for true love? The guy having wealth and power is also a useful narrative convenience; it’s a lot easier to have a happy ending if someone can wave his checkbook at the finale and make most of the problems disappear. Really, what’s odd is that romantic fantasies for men don’t take this practical approach as well. Why don’t all those guys making Hollywood movies ever have their homely guys fall for some woman who is not only young and beautiful, but incredibly wealthy as well?
But that’s not how it works. In their fantasies, women imagine handsome, powerful men, while, in their fantasies, guys imagine men who are powerful, if not always quite so handsome. Everybody seems to agree, though, that powerful guys are more romantic.
That agreement is an agreement to, or about, patriarchy. Men=power; power=manliness. As I suggested in my piece about Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation last week, a good part of the rush, or allure, of these het romance novels, at least, seems to be not just the love story, but the way the love story turns into a story about women becoming powerful through men; you pick up the phallus to pick up the phallus. That’s a story about women’s empowerment, certainly, but it’s also, or along with that, a story about women endorsing power as defined in pretty straightforward patriarchal ways. Romance is good at giving women what they want. But to the extent that what they want is both men and power, it seems to have trouble in not conflating the two.
” Why don’t all those guys making Hollywood movies ever have their homely guys fall for some woman who is not only young and beautiful, but incredibly wealthy as well?”
Isn’t that the case in Notting Hill? Movie star Julia Roberts falls for dweeb Hugh Grant? I’m sure there are other examples.
Haven’t seen that one! It’s not the norm, but good to know that Hollywood is looking out for male financial fantasies on at least some occasions.
Some food for thought: The most successful pop-culture romance story over at least the last two decades was Titanic, and it turns several of the conventions you cite on their ear. The leading man is more physically attractive than the leading lady, he’s dirt poor and convinces her to reject wealth as a value, etc. It’s a romantic melodrama and not a romantic comedy, but in general the two modes play by the same rules apart from the tones and endings.
I liked the the article a lot… just some corrections….:
“…In Pam Rosenthal’s “Almost a Gentlemen” the hero is a cross-dressing man of fashion, but the hero is a powerful, wealthy lord with extensive property. Cecelia Grant’s guy in “Almost a Gentlemen” is not rich…”
So, there are two book with the same name? :-)
Actually the book title is “Almost a Gentleman” with an -a…
No; Grant’s is “A Gentleman Undone”. I just read Rosenthal’s, and got them confused…sorry about that.
Robert, that’s a great point about Titanic. I haven’t seen that, I have to admit, but maybe I should.
Thanks. Thinking about it some more, though, it may just be a different set of genre conventions. Titanic is a woman’s coming-of-age story dressed up as a romantic melodrama. Those tend to have leading men who are more attractive than the women (at least superficially), and life lessons that involve rejecting false values. There’s Titanic. You also have An Education, where for all the efforts to turn Carey Mulligan into Audrey Hepburn at points, she’s never as glamorously good-looking as Peter Sarsgaard. Twiliight may qualify, too, although I haven’t seen the films or read the books. Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner seem far bigger sex symbols than Kristen Stewart.
Bella is supposed to be blindingly hot in the books, and Kristen Stewart fits that portrayal pretty well, I think. I haven’t seen An Education, though.
“You can’t destroy the master’s house with the master’s tool?”
Ahuh huh. He said “tool”.
To be fair, asking a work of genre literature to destroy the master’s house seems maybe a little unfair. I think women as protagonist/women making their own choices pushes back against many other cultural narratives. It’s just that, in trying to defend the genre, folks sometimes make pretty sweeping claims about its liberating potential….
Strange cultural dichotomy.
For millenia (literally)in Western culture women’s wealth was subsumed to her husband’s, via dowries or statute law.
Back soon.
I’ve heard that Bollywood romances reverse this– that the heroine always comes from a greater position of money and privilege than the hero. I’d be interested in hearing more about this, because I imagine it ties in with historical understandings of caste, or narratives about it… but I haven’t seen many Bollywood films, so I wouldn’t know.
I think Disney princess films oscillate between ‘richer guy’ and ‘richer girl’ narratives. As well as ‘equally rich.’ Aladdin, Tangled, and Frozen would be examples of Richer Girl. Cinderella (obviously), Snow White, Mulan and The Princess and the Frog are examples of ‘richer guy.’ Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid have comparatively rich heroes.
It’s worth noting that the two most recent examples– Tangled and Frozen, feature Disney Princesses who couple with less advantaged heroes.
Not that it has anything to do with the major point of this piece, but in Love Actually (which is NOT a holiday classic for me) the of course gorgeous Laura Linney has the hots for the even more spectacular himbo Rodrigo Santoro, and she was definitely playing the average woman role.
isn’t that Katherine Heigl movie with whatshisfattyface — Knocked Up? — a movie where the woman is a successful yuppie and he’s some drop-out? isn’t that a general thing with Apatow and his fellow travellers? (I’m genuinely asking — my knowledge of any of those films is, like, third-hand at best)
PS: Fuck Love Actually
Heidi, you’re right; that guy is spectacularly hot. However…she doesn’t actually get that guy. Fwiw.
“The leading man is more physically attractive than the leading lady – See more at: https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2014/01/romance-and-male-fantasies/#sthash.qsTsSF1O.dpuf
As a heterosexual male I’m propably not the one to judge but is he really? I find Kate Winslet incredibly atractive in that movie. I guess DiCaprio is more somewhat more atractive but is it really in comparable with pairings we usually see when genders are reversed?
I always wondered why we don’t see more traditionally unatractive women with hot guys in fiction that often. I would like to think that it’s not just a shitty double standart and that writers would like to write more of such stories but it’s hard to find such actresses. Of course, if that was the case, why wouldn’t we see more of that in animated works and comic books? They can make their characters look however they want.
I’m pretty sure it’s a double standard. The fact that there aren’t a lot of big marquee female character actors is part of the double standard, rather than a reason for it, I’d say.
It totally is. What I meant is that the writers aren’t always the ones to blame for it. That they don’t always want to promote it but have to work with what they have.
Well, the thing about institutional sexism is that it’s institutional; there’s not necessarily any one person to blame. In this case, I think that it’s part and parcel of the fact that most writers/directors/producers/etc. are male. In romance fiction, where most of the writers are women, you have different results.
But like I said, if that was the case, why we don’t see it often in comics or animated stuff (I have read somehwere the Big Two artist are forbidden to use less traditional bodytypes because it’s not “marketable” though)?
That’s no excuse IMHO. As I said, I’m a heterosexual male and this shit is the main reason I want to become a writer someday.
No, no; it’s not an excuse. It’s pointing out what can be done to change things. The studios need to start hiring writers and directors who aren’t men, is my point.
FWIW, a real life example of the schluppy-but-powerful guy getting the beautiful woman seems to be going on in France right now.
I am a fan of Vadim Babenko, vadimbabenko.com. I think his novels are romance, but they fool me. There is enough mystery and thrilleresque parts that really make great reads for guys that want some love in their novels. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that, but I recommend his style of novels, he writes fantastic.