Cracked.com disses all romance writers, ever.

[LJ_Reloaded]

This article fails right from jump. Let's deconstruct the first of the five myths in this article. It's a doozy. And I put this on cracked, too.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19785_5-ways-modern-men-are-trained-to-hate-women.html

5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women

#5. We Were Told That Society Owed Us a Hot Girl

Does it seem like men feel kind of entitled to sex? Does it seem like we react to rejection with the maturity of a child being denied a toy?

Well, you have to keep in mind that what we learn as kids is really hard to deprogram as an adult. And what we learned as kids is that we males are each owed, and will eventually be awarded, a beautiful woman.

We were told this by every movie, TV show, novel, comic book, video game and song we encountered. When the Karate Kid wins the tournament, his prize is a trophy and Elisabeth Shue. Neo saves the world and is awarded Trinity. Marty McFly gets his dream girl, John McClane gets his ex-wife back, Keanu "Speed" Reeves gets Sandra Bullock, Shia LaBeouf gets Megan Fox in Transformers, Iron Man gets Pepper Potts, the hero in Avatar gets the hottest Na'vi, Shrek gets Fiona, Bill Murray gets Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters, Frodo gets Sam, WALL-E gets EVE ... and so on.
Hell, at the end of An Officer and a Gentleman, Richard Gere walks into the lady's workplace and just carries her out like he's picking up a suit at the dry cleaner.

And then we have Star Wars, where Luke starts out getting Princess Leia (in The Empire Strikes Back), but then as Han Solo became a fan favorite, George Lucas realized he had to award her to him instead (forcing him to write the "She's secretly Luke's sister" thing into Return of the Jedi, even though it meant adding the weird incest vibe to Empire). With Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling played with the convention by having the beautiful girl get awarded to the sidekick character Ron, but she made it a central conflict in the story that Ron is constantly worried that, since Harry is the main character, Hermione will be awarded to him instead.

In each case, the woman has no say in this -- compatibility doesn't matter, prior relationships don't matter, nothing else factors in. If the hero accomplishes his goals, he is awarded his favorite female. Yes, there will be dialogue that maybe makes it sound like the woman is having doubts, and she will make noises like she is making the decision on her own. But we, as the audience, know that in the end the hero will "get the girl," just as we know that at the end of the month we're going to "get our paycheck." Failure to award either is breaking a societal contract. The girl can say what she wants, but we all know that at the end, she will wind up with the hero, whether she knows it or not.

And now you see the problem. From birth we're taught that we're owed a beautiful girl. We all think of ourselves as the hero of our own story, and we all (whether we admit it or not) think we're heroes for just getting through our day.

So it's very frustrating, and I mean frustrating to the point of violence, when we don't get what we're owed. A contract has been broken. These women, by exercising their own choices, are denying it to us. It's why every Nice Guy is shocked to find that buying gifts for a girl and doing her favors won't win him sex. It's why we go to "slut" and "whore" as our default insults -- we're not mad that women enjoy sex. We're mad that women are distributing to other people the sex that they owed us.

Yes, the women in these stories are being portrayed as wonderful and beautiful and perfect. But remember, there are two ways to dehumanize someone: by dismissing them, and by idolizing them.

First of all, this passage fails to explain exactly how men feel that they are entitled to a beautiful woman. Fails, epically. The article shows a huge correlation between heroic behavior by the male and his increased odds at achieving romance. That's all this writer shows.

You'll find the same correlation in just about every romance book ever written since the first female pen ever hit papyrus back in Egypt. To say nothing of the 20th and 21st century. If Han Solo went away all alone, FEMALE VIEWERS would have called for George Lucas's head.

None of these examples show male entitlement. They show, at worst, that no man ever finds love unless he EARNS it. Not one cited example goes outside that formula. Clue for feminists and everyone else out there: earning something is not being entitled to it. In fact, the two are completely opposed. Being entitled means you are owed a hot babe because you are male. Absolutely NOBODY believes that, and nothing like that was expressed in the examples the author cited. Of course, modern feminist thought argues that there is also no such thing as earning love. It is not illogical to argue that love isn't some vending machine where you insert enough niceness coins to get something out. Granted. If this is what the author intended to say, then he would be right. But he didn't say that. He made the outrageous claim that men feel ENTITLED to a beautiful woman.

We all grow up knowing that only a select few of us will ever find love. Only 40% of men even contribute to the continuation of the species; compared to 80% of women. Yeah, men don't feel entitled to anything, but to be an abused worker drone and to die earlier than women, in hardship no less. If women had to live like this, the suicide rate would skyrocket. Now what if I were to tell you that the Patriarchy does NOT benefit any men except the top 1%? Your head would explode, Mr. David Wong.

Taking Mr. Wong's argument even to its nearest-term conclusion, no matter what the hero does, he should not end up with anyone. That's what the fans got with the game Red Faction, when Parker saved the world and tried to kiss his fellow heroine and partner-in-battle Eos and she rejected him. That ended well - in the third iteration of the game, decades had passed, she died somehow, and Parker was an old and bitter man. Bastich had it coming, right ladies? Mr. Wong, care to explain to your readers exactly how many romance books do we have out there on the market where things end this way?

Now, for the worst part of this article? The across the board assumption that Princess Leia, along with all the other women in these stories he mentioned, didn't have a choice in who they got with. Compatibility didn't matter? Huh? What. The. Effing. Eff? Really? No, really, that is what David Wong has asserted here. From Princess Leia to our flannel-wearing female lead in An Officer and a Gentleman, these women all had no choice but to date the hero? Really, Mr. Wong, crack open an fraggin' romance book WRITTEN BY WOMEN. Any one, at random. Show me one in which the woman goes with anyone BUT the hero. And everyone on here just swallows this without even an ounce of critical thinking. The author is asserting that Princess Leia was powerless to choose someone besides Han Solo. Because George Lucas was at fault. So what, if a woman had written this and Leia still went with Han Solo, what would it be then? Would a woman writer have written it so that the guy who did nothing to save the day? Because if he worked his ass off and got a woman, he must have felt entitled? Or wait, they should have written it where there was no romance at all. An Officer and a Gentlemen, too.

Those movies would have tanked at the box office, but hey, nobody would be accused of coddling the evil male sense of entitlement, right?

Wake up, readers. Wake up!