Soap operas are the worst in my opinion, because they show instability, cheating, and constant relationship turmoil as the norm.

Stable relationships built on values and committment are boring, therefore they dont play well on television. This is far worse than 'happily ever after' as a fantasy.

Stable relationships work in family sitcoms.

I agree, though. My husband and I couldn't stand Mad Men with it's whole "Don cheats because he's so deep and tormented!" thing going on. My husband especially hates shows where cheating is glamorized, but I don't care for it either.

Related: http://memeheroes.com/c/63483-unrealistic-unhealthy-and-unfair-standard-of-beauty-vs-he-man.jpg

Just in case anyone thought swashbuckling women in revealing costumes are a 21st century phenomenon, here's a 1724 engraving of real-life pirate Anne Bonny:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bonney,_Anne_(1697-1720).jpg

By the power of Greyskull, Barbie is such a babe! :)

Each gender has its sexual Disneyland.

I think romance novels-to-porn is a fair comparison, and it's one which I've made when women, on another blog I'm on, rant about porn and what they see as the unrealistic expectations it creates in men.

Also, consider fairy tales and who they may affect the most. I've never heard a man say he is dreaming about meeting his "princess" but I've heard plenty of women mention the "prince" (or "Prince Charming") they hope to meet.

Anne Bonney? Wasn't she the inspiration for that Scottish folk song...

Oh Bonney lies over the ocean
Oh Bonney lies over the sea
Oh Bonney lies over the ocean
I wish Bonney would lie over me.

I have to wonder: Just WHY are women buying romance novels these days?

From what little I've been able to stand glancing at, the romance novels of the last 25 years or so (regardless of when they're supposed to take place) are, as a rule, NOT at all romantic! I don't understand what women are getting out of them.

But, old or new, one thing they all have in common, I guess, is that the man's always at least tolerable to look at, youngish, and (eventually at least), rich, sensitive, and...monogamous. Not too believable. As one Dave Barry female character (divorced from her philandering husband) once said to a man: "Never marry an incredibly handsome man."

"I won't," he said.

BTW, conservative columnist Betsy Hart wrote this in 2011 about "chick flicks":

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2011/07/22/beware-romantic-pornography/

Excerpts:

...That's where the pornography comes in. Just as sexual pornography twists an understanding for men about real women's bodies and sexual appetites, so romantic pornography twists the perception for women about real men and how they "ought" to behave toward women, which tends to amount to, well, behaving like a woman. I have a dear friend who once didn't like a fellow I was dating. Among other shortcomings, he didn't arrange spa treatments for me, she explained. Seriously. No more chick flicks for that girl.

The notion that the ideal fellow is sensitive and devoted to his woman didn't start with Nora Ephron or even Jane Austen, of course. Our true husband, Christ himself, "wept." And Scripture is clear that the ultimate bridegroom jealously pursues his bride, the church. In fact romantic pornography has a ring of truth to it, which is one reason it is powerful. A man in love with a woman is stubborn in his pursuit. Hence I've passed down to my children the maxim my mother shared with me: "Girls don't want a boy they have to call themselves."

But both kinds of pornography go wrong by portraying genders as unidimensional. And the unidimension of men in romantic porn gets magnified because our mainstream culture has a "man bad, woman good" view that opposes traditionally male qualities (unless they turn up in women, but that's another column). In a symptom of what's going on in the culture at large, "rom coms" and many television sitcoms denigrate such traits such as aggression, competitiveness, a certain amount of stoicism, and even the desire to protect and care for a woman...

(end of excerpts)

I wrote back and said:

...would you call “Pride and Prejudice” romantic pornography too? If not, why?

I mean, since when does any 28-year-old man who can’t imagine what’s wrong with his (insulting) marriage proposal even WANT to change his ways?

(end)

Elsewhere, I said that in real life, Mr. Darcy would just shrug and move on to someone with less self-respect. Of course it would have been right for Elizabeth to reject him even if she weren't mistaken about a certain detail, but she didn't do so in the expectation that he would change his ways - and no one, then or now, should have such unrealistic expectations. As I see it, the idea that a woman can and should "civilize" unwilling boorish male peers instead of simply shunning them when they already know they're being rude is a combination of Victorian masochism and pseudo-feminism; the idea is that if a woman can't reform at least one cad among her peers, she has failed as a moral woman. "Civilizing" unwilling human beings is what adults do with CHILDREN, not adults.

Anne Bonney? Wasn't she the inspiration for that Scottish folk song...

Per Wikipedia: The origin of the song is unknown, though it is often suggested that the subject of the song may be Charles Edward Stuart ('Bonnie Prince Charlie'): after the defeat of the Prince at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 and his subsequent exile, his Jacobite supporters could have sung the tune in his honour; and thanks to the ambiguity of the term "bonnie", which can refer to a woman as well as to a man, they could pretend it was a love song.

Heather Mallick (In a review of About a Boy in the Toronto Sun [emphasis mine]:

"But there are very few novels written about men who would not be played in a movie by Bruce Willis. Ordinary men are not represented in fiction. It has only just occurred to me how destructive this must be for men."

"As rotten as it may be for women to have to look at endless images of unreally sexed-up women, how terrible it must be for men who are force-fed a diet of action men and high-earners."

"Face it, if I want to be more attractive, I can help things along by, for one thing, quitting stuffing my face. I have that option."

"But if I look at the way men are represented in the endless novels I am sent for review, I know this: If you men want to be more attractive, you have to foil the blowing up of American embassies worldwide or you have to earn at least US$200,000 a year. You have to be expensive meat."

it would have been right for Elizabeth to reject him even if she weren't mistaken about a certain detail,
_________________________

I should have said "even if she had never heard of that detail."