Kanye, the Tinder Swindler and the Death of the Fairytale Prince
Even as a child, I sensed that something was seriously wrong with the gender politics of romantic comedies. As a boy, rom-coms taught me and the rest of the world toxic ideas about love and romance that were troubling at best and dangerous, even deadly, at worse.
I was taught by the movies that love justifies everything, so it’s impossible to go too far in pursuit of the man or woman of your dreams. I similarly learned that no gesture could possibly be too big or too dramatic when it came to winning or winning back your soulmate.
Lying, manipulation and even light stalking were depicted as decidedly less than admirable but one hundred percent forgivable and permissible if the lying, manipulation and light stalking were in service of true love.
One of the many wonderful results of #MeToo is that it has forced us, as a culture, to really examine cultural and pop-cultural ideas about romance and power and how they mold and shape how we see the world, ourselves and each others.
It has afforded us the distance and the perspective to see that what is often depicted as romantic and admirable in movies is actually terrifying and scary in real life.
Romantic comedies taught us to never accept no from the people we are in love with, and to see boundaries as nothing more than hurtles to leap over madly in pursuit of l’amour fou.
Feminism and #MeToo, on the other hand, have preached righteously that you should ALWAYS accept no and that boundaries should be respected and adhered to, not seen as mere obstacles on the path to romantic bliss.
Pop culture has played a role in killing the toxic fairytale depicted in cinematic romances in other ways as well. In a pre-#MeToo era there’s a pretty good chance that the media and the public would see Kanye West’s attempts to win back the mother of his children the same way that he does.
In an alternate universe with no #MeToo the culture might look at Kanye and see a brilliant, mercurial billionaire genius rebel Prince , half Christian Grey and half Thomas Crown, who swoops into the lives of the world’s most beautiful women and seduces them with his passionate intensity, wealth, talent and generosity.
In a post #MeToo world, thankfully, Kanye is seen as something very different. The consensus seems to be that West is someone struggling with mental illness who is psychologically terrorizing and threatening Kim Kardashian in a way that reflects terribly on the rapper-producer and has generated nothing but sympathy and goodwill for Kardashian and her new boyfriend Pete Davidson, the innocent target for much of Ye’s fury.
A wised-up public knows that Kanye’s disturbing, limit-testing, headline-grabbing behavior is motivated by a dark desire to control Kim Kardashian rather than love.
Once upon a time Kanye buying a house directly across the street from Kardashian’s and giving her a truck full of roses on Valentine’s Day might be seen as the height of romance. Today it’s rightfully seen as stalking and intimidation.
Kanye isn’t the only would-be Prince of romance exposed as a creep. The Netflix hit The Tinder Swindler focusses on a man who presents himself as a tech-savvy Prince Charming who will do anything to win the hearts and minds of gorgeous women but who is actually a sociopathic con man and career criminal.
And a muckraking mini-series about Hugh Hefner put the final nails in the coffin of the Playboy founder’s finely-wrought image as a romantic, glamorous figure surrounded by beautiful young women excited to have an opportunity to live the Los Angeles high life.
We’ve learned over and over again that men pretending to the dashing romantic hero are, in fact, actually villains. Hopefully we’ll be more cautious in the future because pop culture fairy tales have a disconcerting and predictable way of turning out to be nightmares.
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