Rom-Coms are Worse than Pornography

I watched Letters to Juliet and it utterly disgusted me as a Romantic

I am currently living in an idyllic medieval Italian town and thought that I would watch a cute little rom-com, love story set in Italy to relax and unwind…only to be bitch slapped by Hollywood for ever putting down a book and turning on a screen.

Everyone talks about how Hollywood is declining aesthetically but few are talking about how Hollywood has been writing toxic garbage for decades, and it’s just that the aesthetics no longer make their toxicity palatable. Ugly actors and colourless cinematography are simply physical manifestations of the rot that has always been at the core of modern western storytelling.

I have given many classic rom-coms a chance over the years, the Notebook, Notting Hill and Grease to name a few, but like toxic relationships that always promise they will be different this time, they almost always leave me with an unquestionable nausea, disgust, and churling bile of hatred and anger in the pit of my stomach.

I suffer, of course, because I am a lover.

I am a true romantic and therefore the words that these movies use, “true love”, “destiny”, actually mean something to me, whereas to these Hollywood movies, they are just window dressing for unrepentant cheating whores to use to justify their adulterous, superficial, narcissistic trysts that are little more than humiliation rituals for the male leads.

There are some good romance movies, very few, and I will reward my readers who read to the end with this precious list that I have walked over the broken glass of Hollywood trash to curate.

Much digital ink has been spilled over the last few years about how toxic pornography is for the mental and libidinal health of boys and men, but very little scrutiny has been given to the female counterpart, the more seemingly innocuous and therefore more dangerous cultural phenomenon of “the Rom Com”. Whereas a boy has to hide pornography if he watches it, a girl can watch a Rom Com movie like Letters to Juliet with her whole family in the room and no one suspects the way that it rots her brain, her heart and her soul in ways that are far deeper than actual pornography might. Whereas the lusts of pornography are primarily material in both origin and destruction, turning a man into a mere cuckolded voyeur of his own sexual desires, the rom-com justifies a woman’s worse vices to herself and thus prevents her developing the virtue that can guarantee any love in her life at all, not merely romantic, but any kind. The porn-addicted man feels a sense of disgust at himself that the rom-com appreciating woman never even acknowledges about herself.

In this essay, I will lay out the case in detail, using the 2010 film Letters to Juliet as my primary case study. (I wanted to do the Notebook as well but I got so angry thinking about it that I started to see red and I didn’t want to get a stroke). If a girl admits to loving either of these movies, she must be institutionalised to, at the very least, protect society from her destructiveness.