Consent in Hollywood

Allow me to preface this by saying that I actually enjoy a great many aspects of popular culture.  Even when I don’t necessarily agree with the representations present in a film or song, I often enjoy it anyway. So I do not intend for this post to just be anti-pop-culture or anti-Hollywood.  However, with that being said, I do believe that Hollywood has given us a toxic image of heterosexual romance and especially a toxic image of heteronormative, hegemonic masculinity and the heteronormative male pursuit of female affections.  Ultimately, I believe that the most common narratives of Hollywood romances discourage active and joyous consent and encourage some of the worst behaviors of men, ultimately contributing to rape culture.

Think about one of the most common Hollywood narratives: boy meets girl à boy approaches girl à boy attempts to gain girl’s affections à girl declines à boy persists, assuming that her “no” is not genuine à eventually girl “gives in” à boy gets girl.  Perhaps one of the more succinct representations of this is an opening scene from the Will Smith movie Hitch, below in which the main character’s dialogue could basically be summed up as, “Don’t believe her when she says no to you.  Don’t believe that she’s not interested in you.  Just be a good guy and you’ll get the girl because every woman is just looking for a man.”

Hitch

There are so many problems with this incredibly prevalent narrative, which is in no way limited to Hitch or even RomComs.  Firstly, the narrative tends to assume the “male aggressor/female resistor” mode of heteronormative relations.  In such a model, the male seeks female attention but the female must initially decline his advances because a woman who gives in too easily is a “slut” or “whore” and thus not to be respected because “good girls” don’t give in so easily.  Thus, in an effort to gain male respect (and especially the respect of the audience, always constructed with the male gaze in mind) the female must initially decline lest her chastity, which should be a relic of a bygone era, be put into doubt.

The biggest problem I think though is that the women in these narratives decline to consent to a relationship and the male protagonist of the film does not take her declination seriously.  This is a pernicious aspect of rape culture: that even when not assaulting a woman physically, one still assumes that a woman’s “no” is something other than a genuine declination of romantic affections.  And when we don’t take that “no” seriously we contribute to rape culture.

Let me say this as clearly as possible: consent is not something to be won; it is something to be given.  What the narrative described above represents is an effort not to be offered consent but to win it.  It treats romantic encounters as a competition between two people in which the male is the offensive player, seeking to break through the female’s defense.  The male “wins” when he fucks her, marries her, or somehow convinces her to engage in a romantic entanglement with him.  The insidiousness of this is that the female does eventually seem to consent to the relationship, and she is always presented as being happy with her choice.  This masks the rape culture that is in play here by a convenient “happily ever after.”  Even if viewers might be uncomfortable with the male protagonist’s initial behaviors (probably more often, they are not uncomfortable with it) this discomfort is assuaged by the happy ending.

In the real world though, we have to remember that women are regularly the victims of stalking, frequently have men refuse to leave them alone in a bar or other public space (or online), are the victims of street harassment as unwanted advances are thrust upon them, and that sexual assault and rape are all too real for most women, either as victims of these crimes are as potential victims who must deal with that possibility.  And narratives like this encourage men to engage in unwanted advances because the story convinces men that these advances are not “really” unwanted and that the “good guy” will “win the girl” if he is persistent enough.  But in reality, that kind of persistence beyond a “no” is a form of sexual harassment.

Is Hollywood really so uncreative that they can’t write decent stories based upon active and joyous consent?  Is Hollywood really so anti-feminist that we cannot imagine seeing a woman who engages in an active and engaged sexuality for her own pleasure as well as the pleasure of a partner?  Maybe, but I’d like to think not.  I’d like to think that if Hollywood began producing more films for something other than the “male gaze” that we would see far more narrative structures, producing far more interesting movies with a greater diversity of plots.  And wouldn’t that be nice?  And might that not appeal to especially female, but also male viewers?  And in doing so, might we not produce better interactions between real people mirroring the behaviors they see on screen?