VIDEO ESSAY: Romance is Dead: The Romanticization of Abuse

Great job with this video! Just watched it and found it to be so well made, glad someone is finally making a good video dissecting this!!!

Bi Bubble tea

Will add one more small thing: the teenage girls reading KS as romantic? I’m going to be a massive, but likely correct, asshole and assume most of them are white, cis, hetero, and VERY PRIVILEGED without realizing it. Because that group (white, cis, hetero) seems to be great at sweeping problems under the rug because they are “inconvenient” for the story they really want to hear. -_-

Courtney Rayle

Hi James! Thanks very much for the new video, even if the subject matter is very dark to me (and keep in mind I am a scared little bunny when it comes to things even brushing against the horror genre, so... yeah, you are braver than me, kudos). So, thought I’d throw some things out here that might give a different perspective. And before continuing, I 100% agree with you about everything in the video, this is not me playing devil’s advocate, this is me saying, “Oh, I have an experience that relates! Here, take and use it in the future, please!” First and foremost, and you touched on this, I’ve noticed that many women fetishize gay male relationships in a similar way to how men fetishize lesbians, with some projection (and odd mental distancing?) going on in both groups. And similarly, there seems to be some heteronormativity hidden in both those fetishes (and also, the people involved are always super pretty... by the standards of the opposite group; the gay men are just so darn cute and buff say the female fans, and aren’t those chicks totally hot and skinny state the male fans). Unfortunately, this actually seems to lead to the people within these groups being, honestly, more homophobic (and ESPECIALLY anti-asexual, I’ve found) because “if it doesn’t fit into this narrow definition, then it’s the WRONG type of gay.” Which, I think you also covered a bit in the Superheroes video (which was also excellent, BTW). So, it all links together in this weird thing where people who aren’t in the group and will always be excluded from the group fetishize and undermine the group. Jealousy, perhaps? (And now that I type this, Lindsay Ellis touched on this in her Daroga video when talking about harems, and how because men weren’t allowed in the harems, they MUST have been full of sex slaves and sexy times and all this other bullshit when no, it was just a place for women and their male relatives only. Odd, that aspect of human nature wanting to scandalize “the othered.”) Second, I think media puts so much emphasis on love and being in love and how love is just so the best and YOU’RE TOTALLY NOT A COMPLETE PERSON WORTHY OF ATTENTION IF YOU HAVEN’T AT LEAST TRIED TO FIND LOVE BECAUSE IT’S JUST SO EVERYTHING AND SHOULD TAKE UP ALL YOUR TIME YOU ARE WORTHLESS IF YOU DON’T HAVE LOVE, and this especially targets teenage girls (in the middle of figuring out what the fuck these hormones are doing MONTHLY FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES, OH FUCK) and so they tend to try to put a romantic, love-based spin on any relationship story, even very, very toxic ones. And the idea of someone’s complete attention being on them is very enticing, since honestly teenage girls get dismissed by everything from male classmates to their parents to society (“oh, you’re just hormonal,” “oh, you’re just too young to know anything,” “oh, you’re just a girl”). Even if that attention is toxic, they still desperately crave it, and assume that any such attention can totally be turned around into a good thing. And to be clear, young girls are often told to temper themselves, change themselves, “boys don’t like girls that X,” and all, so the idea that maybe, even though they are trying to mold themselves into (or being forcibly molded into) something society deems “worthy to exist and have a voice, but a small don’t-upset-the-status-quo one,” they could have some power to mold whatever life gives them into their dream/ideal, because they were forced to change, so it’s totally possible and most important healthy because society told me so and... yeah, I feel this is a pretty toxic cycle of deeply ingrained systematic abuse, and it just becomes super visible in fandoms like the one for Killing Stalking. I have more thoughts, but I’ve probably rambled on too long. Love your videos, your perspective, and thank you so much for tackling the difficult topics you have.

Courtney Rayle

I don't disagree. Some of my favorite media is terrible people doing terrible things (Horror movies, for instance). My favorite characters are mostly villains in one way or another. But I kind of have a hard "no" when it comes to rape and sexual assault. As a man I've grown up in a world where those acts are, in many cases, worse than murder. So when I see sexual or emotional abuse in fiction, I almost can't forgive it. So I have an immediate negative reaction when I see people romanticizing it. With Killing Stalking, in particular, I see a female author writing about the abuse of a gay man and it just seems so... detached. Like I say in the end of the video, why did it have to be gay? Why couldn't she have written this story about a man and a woman? I think, and this is just my opinion, she wrote it as a gay relationship because culture has been so conditioned to see any abuse from a man toward a woman as unforgivably bad. It really gets my "Leave The Gays Alone" alarm going.

Hey James! This was a good thou I'd like to make some counter-arguments here. Choosing patreon because well, I'm not some random troll on youtube nor I want to just fan the flames here. I also apologize in advance since English is not my first language and I tend to mess up, so sorry for that, hope it's not too much of a problem. Some points: The idea that romance needs to always portray some healthy endgame is somewhat.. reductive. Specially because we tend to label stuff woman consume as romance. It's somewhat tied to the idea that shipping is always romantic: a lot of the shipping just wanting fucked up people doing fucked up things together. It's not always supposed to be a marriage and kids with a white picket fence endgame, you know? There is a terrible lack of exploration of when you just want to indulge in your self destructive urges in a safe, sane way. And well, fiction scratches the itch for a lot of us; However, since it's tagged/viewed as romance, suddenly "we are doing it wrong". If the endgame needs to be healthy, it also gives us this idea that every material is sort of moralistic tale in some way, like it is all for education purposes. Why can we have terrible relationships like in franchises like Hellraiser? Suddenly if it is for women/by women exploring queer themes, suddenly it's bad. It falls terribly close together in us having to explain why we like things, without anyone ever allowing us the space to simply have a power fantasy of sorts. A power fantasy, Sula? Well, you know, you just outlined how we have a built-in expectation of fixing the abuser in some ways. This need to critically analyzed sure, but if not all media is meant for educational purposes, but can't we have a moment where we see things going our way at least some of the time? I'm not young, nor new at relationships (I've been married 15 years now), and fiction for me is a way to mess up in ways I will never be able to in real life. Letting go out the hypervigilance and 'always being the bigger person' and putting up with all the mistakes and just enduring it all, sometimes the fantasy IS being able to fuck everything up and shed this outer layer of sociability; Is it a problem if it is also horny and with horror themes? And alas, it's all fiction. This is definitely not a role model for relationships, that much is made clear by every way possible, including the author's interview and warnings on the work itself. But somehow we always end up with the 'oh but you're bad if you like this this way' that I don't see thrown at other demographics quite in the same way.

SulaMoon

Amazing video, James! It really has me thinking about the difference in which my adult self consumes and digests disturbing content versus how my teenage self did.