Spring Break
Matthew McConaughey is destroying the U.S.
Ryan Nowell
Issue date: 2/18/09 Section: Opinion
I've been taking the Geraldo route for getting your attention lately. How's it working?
A while back, I wrote an article on the "Twilight" series and its less than appreciated presence at the top of the bestseller list. For being an unmitigated wad of snark, the article drew quite a bit of thoughtful, even-handed commentary. Good for you, kind readers, for taking the high road while your intrepid editorialist chummed the waters.
I mention said incident because this week I'm going to be deriding yet another hallowed bastion of unbridled sentiment: the romantic comedy. You may be thinking "What's the deal? Why all the criticism for media with a female demographic?"
Before you call misogynistic shenanigans or start theorizing on any Freudian inadequacy issues being exorcised here, let me state that I'm trying to fill an article.
Phallocentric media, being much more overtly messed up, could probably deforest most of South America with the reams of sociological studies and gender critiques generated from one Yin Yang Twins music video. Porn and video games say a whole lot of not-entirely-flattering things about society and seeing as how we're already a quarter of the way done here, I just don't have that kind of time.
So, in an upcoming study to be published in "Communication Quarterly," researchers found that most Hollywood romantic comedies have certain behavioral patterns encoded in those stale plots and unthreateningly-kooky characters which may be causing avid chick-flick viewers to have unrealistic expectations of relationships and marriage, as well as exhibit dysfunctional behaviors based on those fictional standards.
Now if this isn't exactly rocking your world, I implore you to thumb through a psychology journal some time.
You'll find that every random, asinine observation you can think of has at some point been the topic of an extensive study, the results of which are all laid out for you in an ornately phrased train wreck of academic jargon, like "Communication Quarterly's" recent barnburner "Effects of Visual Spatial Structure on Textual Conversational Multitasking" (coincidently, also the name of the Yin Yang Twins' new single).
A while back, I wrote an article on the "Twilight" series and its less than appreciated presence at the top of the bestseller list. For being an unmitigated wad of snark, the article drew quite a bit of thoughtful, even-handed commentary. Good for you, kind readers, for taking the high road while your intrepid editorialist chummed the waters.
I mention said incident because this week I'm going to be deriding yet another hallowed bastion of unbridled sentiment: the romantic comedy. You may be thinking "What's the deal? Why all the criticism for media with a female demographic?"
Before you call misogynistic shenanigans or start theorizing on any Freudian inadequacy issues being exorcised here, let me state that I'm trying to fill an article.
Phallocentric media, being much more overtly messed up, could probably deforest most of South America with the reams of sociological studies and gender critiques generated from one Yin Yang Twins music video. Porn and video games say a whole lot of not-entirely-flattering things about society and seeing as how we're already a quarter of the way done here, I just don't have that kind of time.
So, in an upcoming study to be published in "Communication Quarterly," researchers found that most Hollywood romantic comedies have certain behavioral patterns encoded in those stale plots and unthreateningly-kooky characters which may be causing avid chick-flick viewers to have unrealistic expectations of relationships and marriage, as well as exhibit dysfunctional behaviors based on those fictional standards.
Now if this isn't exactly rocking your world, I implore you to thumb through a psychology journal some time.
You'll find that every random, asinine observation you can think of has at some point been the topic of an extensive study, the results of which are all laid out for you in an ornately phrased train wreck of academic jargon, like "Communication Quarterly's" recent barnburner "Effects of Visual Spatial Structure on Textual Conversational Multitasking" (coincidently, also the name of the Yin Yang Twins' new single).
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