Another Hollywood Conspiracy Perhaps

In Time essay, Where Have All the Cary Grants Gone, Belinda Luscombe puzzles over how “The shift in power between the sexes has nowhere been greater than in romantic comedies.” Where “The men are about as useful as a pitcher of spit, while the women have careers and well-furnished apartments and vast freighters of wisdom.”

Though she acknowledges that, “You don't have to talk to smart single women for long before the subject moves on to the difficulty of finding even a standard-issue male. The more powerful the woman, the more elusive the match,” She can’t understand, “who, settling into the center of the fifth row on a Friday night, Junior Mints and large diet soda in hand, wants to be reminded of real men? Why do we have to keep seeing in movies the people we sneaked out of the house to get away from?”

I think it’s a cheap trick: if enough women watch these chick flicks where powerful women fall for loser men, perhaps women might adapt and gladly put up with Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job and Guys [that] Just Want to Have Fun.