The process of
socialization is polymorphic. From observations, school lessons, and shared
experiences, to on-the-job training and parental “teachable” moments, all can
be a part of general social learning. Socialization is primarily used
systemically as a mechanism of social control, giving individuals investment in
a societies social order by manipulating them (beginning at birth) to follow
rules, regulations, and cultural norms, with the hope that those norms get
internalized into a drive and determination to benefit society. In essence, socialization
seeks to create a law abiding productive acceptable member of a society within
an established order. The more rigid the order, the more acute its socialized
messaging. This paper is an examination of the impact
the Romantic Comedy film genre has on the creation, maintenance, and
reinforcement of problematic gendered messaging in the process of socialization
through its narrative arcs, marketing, and characters; all while normalizing emotional
terrorism against women, coercing girls and women into the Patriarchal bargain,
and viewing all women through the lens of the rich white straight “Karen”.
A BRIEF THORETICAL INTERLUDE
Gender
Socialization is the process by which individuals learn what it means to be
male, female, masculine, feminine, trans, and non-binary along the
gender spectrum. While
these definitions, concepts and identities are fluid at their core, the process
of gender socialization has the same goal [as socialization] of fitting someone
into an established social order. So, even though this process is a social
construction, able to become anything as open and free as one’s heart desires,
it often is restricted by a power system of institutions and organizations that
harness and cultivate an exclusionary understanding of gender, sexuality, race,
and disability that is exceedingly recalcitrant. This power system reinforces a
genitally focused, biologically deterministic binary understanding of identity,
creating arbitrarily irrational differences between and among the categories of
gender it has validated (through various societal rewards and opportunities) as
being acceptable. What results is a genderist, sexist, racist, ableist latticed
institutional apparatus; what bell hooks (2000) called “the
white supremacist capitalist [Heterosexist, Able-bodied] patriarchy”.
General messages
Each social
system dictates the social learning process and the overall messages
individuals will receive. The more egalitarian the system, the more benevolent,
open, and accepting messages they will receive. The more exclusive messages, the
more discriminatory, closed, and alienating the response will be. In “the white supremacist capitalist
[Heterosexist, Able-bodied] patriarchy”, the limits are heavily compounded. In such
as system, those socially labeled at birth (by presumed visible genitalia) to
be “girls,” are consistently given the message that their chief value resides
in their body; either as a sex object for someone else (usually Cisgendered heterosexual
men) or as a vessel for the next generation (that they are supposed to want and
bear children), and be in a constant state of potential pregnancy. Because of
this objectifying valorizing, girls start to form a self-identity based around
their relationship to other people. Their value is not in themselves, their
value is in what they are and worth, to boys and men. This system rewards girls and women for accepting,
promoting, and securing their place among men, while sanctioning, resisting, or
restricting any behavior outside of those relationships, especially complete
independence. Additionally, since these messages are not exclusive to one
gender, girls also learn the messages for boys and men[1] so that they too can
participate in masculine policing through various sanctions. Like all
sanctions, these restrictions can be overt (blatant, visible) covert (subtle,
invisible) individual or institutional. However, when policing gender, for the
sanctions to retain their hold, a system needs to be implemented to assure
compliance.
Gender Feedback Loop
According to Crawley,
Foley and Shehan (2008) The Gender Feedback Loop is a mechanism of
surveillance, social control, disciplining behaviors, and ideas of the self. The general messages that girls and
women receive is then internalized in themselves through the cultivation
of a gender self-identity. Then, the expression of that identity is carried out
on their bodies which then become messages for others.
Messages to Selves to Bodies :
This general process is common regardless of the level
of restriction a system imposes. However, in a restrictive gendered system like
we have in the US, the messages, selves, and bodies require daily affirmations
and confirmations at each stage. Each of the “messages” require conformation
that they are being properly given, the “selves” require confirmation that they
have been properly received, and the “bodies” are policed to maintain “correct”
expression based upon the system its reinforcing.
This is a panoptical surveillance that sees
this body expression as passive; docile gender bodies (Foucault 1990). The
Foucauldian “bio power” envelops this loop defining the ways that the body is
considered “normal” by the way it expresses gender. The surveillance of
womanhood begins at birth and includes every woman’s behavior (Crawley et al
2008: 93). Girls and women are called upon to cut, pluck, pull, wax, fast, and
kill themselves into a “perfect” body. To accept the creation of masculine
social bonds through their objectification and violation, girls and women promote
masculine power for economic, social, and political stability. Women are required
through this surveillance to actively practice femininity through what they do,
how people respond to them, and how they respond back. They cannot just be “not
men”, they are required by the system to “become their own jailers.” (Crawley
et al 2008). Girls get acquainted with
this Prison and self-sanctioning at a very young age.
The Media as an Agent of Gender
Socialization
According to Kilbourne (1999) the media as an agent of socialization, acts twofold:
The media gives us knowledge without experience. This means that the media we consume (through smart phones, tablets, laptops, TV, film etc.) provides us with passive information about the world. Passive information is any type of information that is easily captured.
2. The
media does not just show entertainment nor does commercial advertisements just
sell products; they sell images of class, race, gender, sex, ability,
disability, beauty, honor, adulthood, relationships, morality etc. Defining for
us what we consider normalcy.
For the gender socialization of girls, this begins
with the media consumption of “The Princess Culture”.
From Princess Culture to the Rom Com
The Princess Culture can
be defined as the commercialization of the fantasy princess narrative
identifying the feminized ideas of beauty standards, physical perfection, and passivity,
as a source of young girl empowerment (Orenstein 2011). It is through this princess culture,
especially the one that has been dominated for nearly one hundred years by a
single company (Disney), that girls learn that they can wait for their literal
“Prince Charming” to come and rescue them: from
death, sleep,
or
poverty and abuse. Then, [in the more recent Disney
Princess Films][2]
believing
he is worth altering your body to be with him or staying in an
emotionally abusive relationship because
you believe you’ll be able to change him.
The Princess Culture is not
only validating the aforementioned passivity but supports the establishment of
the Patriarchal bargain for girls at a young age. The Patriarchal bargain, coined by
Denzi Kandiyoti (1989) to explain the way different forms of
patriarchy present women and girls with distinct "rules of the game";
calls for different strategies to maximize security and optimize life options
with varying potential for active or passive resistance in the face of their oppression.
Basically, through this bargain, girls and women support and promote the
patriarchal system with its misogynistically violent behavioral rhetoric, and
in exchange, are granted access to male power through the relationships they
cultivate with them. The unfortunate irony being that the patriarchal bargain
isn’t an active choice. Instead, girls and women are just playing out the
passive scripts and validations that they have already been given. They are
accessing power through relationships with men, rather than cultivating power
in and of themselves.
Additionally, the Princess
accouterment has also been co-opted by
the Purity movement,
which, in another shitty Patriarchal “deal”, girls and women are convinced to
relinquish their sexual agency and give the power of their body autonomy to
their fathers; who become “chastity cops” of their daughter’s virginity. “The
fathers plucked silver tiaras from a basket and “crowned their daughters”
(Orenstein 2016:91). This again, reinforces the image of Princess purity that begins
with the (Typically Disney) Princess culture, and then is retooled and
repackaged for First Communions, Quinceaneras, Bat Mitzvahs, Homecoming, Proms,
and the White Wedding (Ingraham 2008). “The Princess” then at this point, is
beyond its basic royal title. Through the constant bombardment of imagery, and
the cultural “practice runs” in preparation for virginal heterosexual white
marriage, the princess is the pacifier that it has become the foundation for
Cishet white femininity on which The Romantic Comedy stands. Along the way,
marketed as lighthearted relational entertainment, the romantic comedy since
its inception, has followed in the tradition of the princess culture in form,
and messaging.
THE ROMANTIC COMEDY
The sub-genre titled the Romantic Comedy, or “Rom Com”
has existed in various forms for over 100 years in the United States. In that
time, a
lot has been written
about this very popular subgenre, that always seems to be “on
the back foot”. While there have been subtle shifts in
the organization of Protagonists, updated cultural references, and change in
narrative storytelling devices, these are still genre pictures that follow set
guidelines to obtain/retain the “Rom Com” classification. The typical Romantic
Comedy is often identified as a comedy sub-genre of films that add romantic
subplots to [typically] slice of life stories in which two, usually well-liked
characters are united and or reconciled by the end of the film.
While not exclusive, many of these stories tend to
involve:
·
Younger protagonists
·
Seemingly meant for each other but kept
apart due to circumstances and plot contrivances
·
The Surmounting of all odds (class differences,
concurrent partnerships, unaccepting family, geographic difference, or a
volcano) they reunite by the end of the films in a typical fairy tale style
happy ending
·
A wedding, or they get married soon after
reconnecting.
·
A marketing strategy where the trailers
and posters of the films are indistinguishable from each other.
When looking at the Romantic comedy as an extension of
the Princess Culture to be used as another mechanism of gender socialization
for girls and women, the similarities of the fairy tale are often present. Firstly,
the Princess imagery recreated in the Rom Com through its common white wedding
ending. In these endings, Ingraham’s (2008) retooling of “the princess culture”
for women is on full display. From the dress, the setting and staging of the
wedding and, because it is typically the final shot/scene of the film, there is
an invocation of the Fairy Tale end phrase “And they lived happily ever after…”.
This maintains the myth, power, and importance of love and relationships to the
learning of and participating in feminine gender performances; through the lens
of “the Princess” without any real strategies for building and cultivating legitimate
relationships.
“…we have grown up in a culture that
told us that no matter what we experience in our childhoods, no matter the pain,
sorrow, alienation, emptiness, no matter the extent of our dehumanization,
romantic love will be ours…we believe “someday our Prince may come.”
(bell hooks 2001: 170)
Here hooks (2001) is putting love in context, while
displaying how we often take love out of it. One of the typical narrative arcs
is the “love will conquer all” thematic, where, as stated above, love develops
regardless of class status, geography, Political affiliation, racism, or ableism
in the family. The implication being that love is something cosmic, beyond the
socially constructed institutional limiters we simple humans place on the world
to have it make sense. Yet, it is also something that is framed as beyond our
control, seen as something that we do not choose…. we “fall” in love after all
(hooks 2001). This implies that we do not have any control when it comes to the
subject of love[3],
we are not active in its process, and we like to believe that it just happens.
Girls and women have been conditioned through gender socialization, to internalize
this myth of love to the point that they relinquish their agency and body
autonomy for a boost of oxytocin.
Hooks (2001) also points
out an additional allure to the mythologizing of love is a diffusion of
responsibility. Love is often referred to as a drug; that the individuals who
are “in its thrall” or “under its spell” act irrationally, reckless, and out of
character. Although, with that also
comes a sense of boundless freedom and experimentation, many of those actions
and behaviors would not be as readily accepted outside the context of “being in
love”. Because of this, any rational evaluation of a partner
from a foundation of care, knowledge and respect is often portrayed in the Rom
Com as distant, cold, and coercive. Instead, in the Rom Com genre, a woman
without a partner, (regardless of how occupationally successful she is) is
somehow unfulfilled.
The Rom Com as a Product
In a capitalist system,
profit is motivation for action, response, creativity and creation. To that
end, we’ve monetized the gender social learning process to the point that we
have gendered
everything to double the revenue. Therefore, it cannot be
overlooked that the success and proliferation of the Romantic Comedy for a
century is due to the intersection of gender socialization and Capitalism. The
Romantic Comedy is a product, and due to the aggressively predatory nature of
capitalism, that product needs to make a profit.
On the very rudimentary
level, as a product of an industry, the film needs to make money (financial capital)[4] beyond its budget. In this
regard, the livelihood and trajectory of the romantic comedy has been volatile
to the point that nearly every single decade, someone writes a think piece
about how “ the rom com” is
dead
or is
dying, or something
saved it from dying. And even though the public taste for the
Rom Com waxes
and wanes[5],
it will never truly die because of the cultural social and symbolic capital of
the genre (Bourdieu 1987).
The value of the Rom Com
as a mechanism of gender socialization is in its ability to maintain the
acceptable vision and gendered messages our society deems acceptable. In this
context, the Rom Com is successful when it either establishes or reinforces
these messages, doing its part to turn them into norms. This is the function of the rom com’s
cultural and social capital. According to Bourdieu (1987), cultural capital is
the value of knowledge skills and experiences, whereas social capital is the
value of social relationships. Thus, the Rom Com genre’s Cultural capital can
be determined by its impact on how we think, and importance we place on
romantic relationships and value them in our lives. A Rom Com genre’s social
capital is determined in the way that it impacts the relationships we have.
Hefner and Wilson (2013) found that the greater exposure to romantic comedies resulted
in a stronger endorsement of romantic ideals. Also, Johnson and Homes (2009)
state that:
“
Films appeared to depict relationships as progressing quickly into something
emotionally meaningful and significant, but there was little shown to explain
how or why this was the case. Adolescents using these films as a model on which
to base their own behaviors, expecting that in doing so their relationships
will progress in kind, are likely to be left disappointed” (p368)
Moreover, According
to Heriot Watt University's Family and Personal Relationships Laboratory,
misconceptions of love and romance depicted in romantic comedies are common
struggles relationship councilors face with their clients. It is this
inaccurate representation of how relationships work through the Rom Com, that hinder
our ability to create healthy relationships.
Whether that is by confusing erotic attraction, or basic human
compassion with love, to the lack of active and purposeful communication,
relationships suffer because of the cultural and social value of the Rom Com
itself (hooks 2001, Walker 2020). Yet, it is through the symbolic value where
the Rom Com becomes truly dangerous.
The Rom Com is “the Karen”
of the Film industry
According to Bourdieu (1998)
Symbolic capital is the value of demographics that when used, creates various
forms of privilege and barriers. This is employed so often that it can create
“symbolic violence” instituted through the adherence that the dominated cannot
fail to grant to the dominant (Bourdieu 1998:35). To that end, the symbolic
capital of The Rom Com is in its promotion of a white supremist heterosexist,
able bodied capitalistic patriarchy, which not only legitimizes the symbolic
violence people experience, but may result in symbolic annihilation and the omission,
trivialization, and condemnation of any group or person outside of this system
(Tuchman 1978).
The Rom Com as a genre is
incredibly white. The films featuring Black Indigenous People
of color (BIPOC) are infinitesimally fewer, with smaller budgets. Until the
recent resurgence
under Netflix, the majority of the Rom Com Catalog for
the last 100 years has been all white. With that amount of volume, whenever
anyone makes a “best
of “ Rom Com” list, it will inevitably feature 95% of white
actors in both roles. This not only normalizes whiteness as having ubiquitous complexity,
but it forces people of color to, once again, find some kinship and comparison
with white protagonists while not seeing themselves or their story on screen.
Like The Princess
culture, the Rom Com also exclusively traffics in Cisgendered
Heteronormativity. Most Romantic
comedies only include cisgendered females seeking social and emotional refuge
from their life (regardless of how occupationally successful they are) in the
arms of a cisgendered man. Many of the traditional cisgender norms are played
out, reinforcing gendered stereotypes about emotion, self-fulfillment, and
success, that reinforce the gender binary convincing girls and women into the
trap of “have it all” sexism.
As I explain
in a previous essay from 2013:
"Have
it all" Sexism is a term that refers to a new type of sexist female
representation in the media that requires female characters that are shown to
have careers (with varying degrees of power, agency and autonomy), or who are
being portrayed as physically strong (or strong willed), must also identify (or
in some cases learn to identify) with traditional female gender norms and
scripts. The message is that it is OK for girls to
have agency and social power in our society as long as they don't forget that
they also have to be wives and mothers (i.e. sex objects and
reproductive vessels.) This maintains the value of women to be in their body,
and their representation as full and complete human beings is a distant
second.”
Additionally, regarding Heterosexism, LGBTQ
romantic comedies are fewer and far between, many of them only
beginning to be released in the last 25-30 years.[6] Also, many of these
stories fail in their representation because they tend to hire straight actors
to play gay characters and Cisgendered
actors to play Transgender characters; many of them garnering
Oscar recognition. Thankfully, in 2022, 110
years since the start of the Rom Com as a genre, we
are getting our first romantic comedy with a Transwoman in the lead.
Disability is rarely
provided a positive portrayal in film. Too often, we are villains, “techno
marvels”, saintly sages, or regarding our sexual abilities, either considered
asexual or “damaged goods” (Norden 1994, Blackburn 2000). Because of this we
are often not the protagonists of romantic films and are even rarer in Romantic
Comedies. When we are in these films, the portrayal often activates the gag
reflex of any Disability activist or Ally; because
the disabled protagonist often ends up dead. This lack of representation, like the other
groups mentioned above, reinforces the “otherness” of disability, as not being
worthy of love, being too much of a burden, and therefore only regulated to
being “Inspiration porn” for able bodied people. Additionally, many of these stories are about
the disability. Rarely do we see a story about disability in film that does not
feature the disability as a major plot point or character motivation. If we are
to take the RomCom structure of a “slice of life” focus, then the disability
would be as essential to the plot as someone just moving from one room of their
house to the other. Thankfully, as with the other marginalized groups discussed
above, we are seeing some small steps forward in not only showing the full
Disabled personhood of an individual, but their enriching
inter abled relationships that they have cultivated.
While these positive strides
to bring visibility to more marginalized groups in the RomCom genre, the
continued presence of binary focused gender stereotypes, and normalized white able-bodied
heterosexism, the Rom Com becomes exclusively marketed to cisgendered affluent
white women. And as we all get sucked into its orbit through wide and continued
distribution, we can never fully escape the “Karen” of the film industry.
The Rom Com, and The Rape
Culture
Aside from the
exclusionary and harboring the unfortunate vestige of “The Karen”, romantic
comedies in its reproduction of the white supremacist heterosexist capitalist
able-bodied patriarchy, also reproduces, supports, and expands the rape
culture.
The Rape Culture can be
explained as “a complex set of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression
and supports violence against women. It is a society where violence is seen as
sexy, and sexuality is violent. In a Rape culture, women perceive and
experience a wide continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual
remarks to rape itself. A Rape culture condones physical and emotional
terrorism against women and presents it as the norm.” (Buchwald Fletcher and
Roth 2005: xi) This is both continuous and compounding overtime, leading to Psychological
Trauma, and is a part of the overall “Female Tax” women emotionally pay for
existing in such a society.
Much of the gendered messages learned through
the Princess culture are the tools that are used as weapons against girls and
women in The Rape Culture. Passivity: “Why didn’t you fight back?” Wealth and Status:
“Emasculation by proxy”, “You should have known better, ” Empathy and
Compassion: “Why didn’t you leave [him]?” The draw and crave for public attention
through the beauty and body norms, fed by the princess culture, is transformed
into a false sense of public ownership over a woman’s body, men feeling
entitled to a woman’s body in public. This
is just one of the social conditions that create the domestic terrorism of
everyday violence that women and other marginalized groups experience.
According to Kolysh
(2021):
“Everyday Violence includes commonplace behaviors
many people consider acceptable and normal. It is violence not only because
each act is violent, even if not in the traditional sense, also because the cumulative
effects of these interactions keep women and LGBTQ folks in a near constant state
of self-surveillance, being at the ready, and prevent their full participation in
public life and feed into violence across society (p17)
One of the significant (but far from only) Catch-22’s
that is created from a binary constructed genitally focused gender
socialization, is the perception that “the world” is a dangerous place for
women. Part of the gender socialization process to a rape culture for girls and
women, is learning this danger…and then being blamed for it.
xTx (2018) discusses
the “lessons” girls are taught to be a girl:
1. Sometimes
you will be forced into things that you don’t want to do.
2. If
boys want something, they can take it. What girls want is irrelevant
3. If
you do nothing, its your fault
4. You
are a thing a boy can use to make himself ejaculate
5. It’s
fucked up that this happens, and you just deal with it. Move on.
(p118-127)
Because “the dangerous
world” model is taken as fact and not what it is, another mechanism to control
women’s bodies, women are forced to develop various defensive and protective strategies
to simply exist within that world. Many of these strategies include classics
like: not putting your drink down at a party, or going to the bathroom in
groups, to more “advanced methods” through Surveillance apps to “walk
home safely at night” or
the
multitude of articles discussing the safety and security of
female travelers, women are encouraged to read before they depart for literally
anywhere. Of course, in our Predatory Capitalist structure many of these
strategies are also commodified and monetized, adding to the overall Female Tax[7] women experience. This is
like buying bandages for a gaping festering wound, and that still seems more
plausible than realizing the truth.
Feminist scholars
have tried to tell us the truth. The problem, is men. Toxic forms of
Hegemonic Masculinity that is initiated through the gender socialization
process of men and boys to be precise. The general valuing of men and
masculinity along with the promotion of alcohol consumption, violence, and
sexual conquest as behaviors to regain/establish their masculinity to the
public when it is threatened, or even questioned (Connell 2005). Regardless of
whether or not boys and men fully, partially adopt or reject these ideals and
behaviors, they will still be judged by them, and sanctioned accordingly. Even
though many men may not directly engage in these Toxic forms of masculinity,
they still contribute to the overall patriarchal system of oppression by existing
in its embrace. Once such response is
the Incel movement.
As I wrote in a previous
piece in (2018)
“Incel”s (short for involuntary celibate) are
a relatively new form of misogyny. They are a subsect of “beta” male sexism
that is adopted by men who do not fit the masculine beauty or body standards.
Their ideology sees women’s bodies as a product that they pay for with dinners,
vacations, clothing etc. So, from this perspective, if these men provide
material goods for women, then they should be given access to their
bodies. They believe that if they are
nice to women and are “supreme gentlemen”, then they have claim to them. Often,
“Incel” men frequent predominantly online spaces like 4chan and reddit from
which this isolated subculture has developed this new warped sense of toxic
masculinity that is both fragile (able to be deconstructed with the slightest
slip up) and preyed upon by our veracious capitalism. The result of which is a
group of emboldened misogynists who’s lack of “sexual conquest” of women they
believe is due to feminism. In their
mind, feminism is a movement that hates men; and that any feminist progress is
one that hurts men’s sexual access to women.
Thus, when their masculinity is shattered by women being able to have
free and equal choice, these men have lashed out violently due to the imagined
slights by women that they have falsely perceived.
Because film is a cultural product, The Romantic
Comedy is another space in which this gendered oppression plays out in a
variety of ways.
Because
a lot of Romantic Comedies have a “slice of life” narrative, the men of this
genre consistently participate in Everyday Violence (Kolysh 2021). The men of
these Romantic Comedies are:
gaslighting, coercively
duplicitous, incel
adjacent, man
babies that are looking more for a mother whom they can fuck,
rather than an actual competent, self-possessed and independent partner. Women
in these stories learn, and therefore teach their female audience to look past
flaws, and personality defects because being
with someone is better than being alone. Given that women
are happier and healthier when they are childless and single,
whereas men’s life expectancy rises when they are married (mom they can fuck) with
children (secure their legacy). This anti-
single, “warm body is good enough (sometimes)”
messaging girls and women receive through the RomCom, is more about maintaining
the health, wellbeing, and stability of the patriarchy. Once again, even
stories about and marketed to women, are really about men.
This mechanism has become
so integrated it is difficult to see a way out. What we need is a culture
shift; to Redo
Gender. Instead of the strict
binary, we need to begin at a more open and fluid starting place. This is
because the limited nature of the binary system inevitably will lead to
feelings of discomfort and gender dysphoria for those who do not see a place
within it (Darwin 2022). Instead, it is far more economical and inclusive to
start from a space of broader understanding and acceptance. We need to start in
the liminality of the nonbinary space and cultivate allyship that will lead to a
greater acceptance of authentic identities wherever in the spectrum they might
lie.
CONCLUSION
The Romantic Comedy genre,
through its structure, narrative arcs marketing and characters reinforces and
retains the white supremacist, capitalist heterosexist able-bodied Patriarchy
acting as a gendered trap to supply men with compliant sexually desirable motherly
servants. This process begins with the basic messages through gender
socialization and continues to build and sustain the Rape Culture. While we can
take some solace in the examples of current romantic comedies that break out of
this mold, and are more inclusive, thereby increasing representation; the retrogressive
messages of the Rom Com have unfortunately continued due to their popularity regardless
of the messages being flawed.[8]It seems we will have to
wait until the more progressive Rom Coms become equally quotable and a part of
film culture for there to be a necessary seismic shift. Love is love, and all
our films should reflect that openness.
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[1] The
general message for boys, their message is that they are valued by virtue of
being men. Meaning, it doesn’t matter what men do, it’s that they do it. If
they don’t do anything that is considered feminine; those behaviors are heavily
policed.
Boys also get socialized to a specific form of
masculinity. While there are many forms of masculinity that exist, the type of
masculinity that gets reinforced is “Toxic” to both men and women. It is this
type of masculinity (that is reinforced among men) that glorifies alcohol
consumption, violence and the objectification of women.
[2] I understand
several of these things have started to change, and we are getting better
representation. But that seems to be a function of the acquisition of more
boy-related IP by Disney and then trying to “reclaim the label of Disney
Princess” to apply to other more diverse representations (Princess Leia)
[3] How commonly is love defined as
irrational, reckless, making people wacky etc.?
[4]
Many of the top grossers making between 152-241 million dollars
[5]
The height of the modern Rom com being in 199 with 11% of the film market share
at the time.
[6]
Granted this might be due to the fact that Federal
protections of Gay Marriage are only 7 years old. And now look like
they could also be threatened
[7] Sometimes
referred to as “The pink tax” that women are generally quoted and have to pay
more for consumer products. “The Female Tax” can also refer to the more money
women have to spend out of pocket just to live. This includes the cost of menstrual
products, safety and security, and maintaining beauty and body norms
[8] Geography matters,
be yourself online, men and women can absolutely be friends and DO NOT jump
into a Volcano
