What do Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Lopez, Kate Hudson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Drew Barrymore and Meg Ryan, to name just a recent few, all have in common? Cinderella.
As a little girl, I watched Cinderella. I also (and so did all females, including my kids) watched Snow White, Jasmine in Aladdin, Ariel of Little Mermaid, Belle from Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, and, even now, the tradition continues with an updated and hip Princess and the Frog.
But now I’m grown up and we adult women have the RomCom, Romantic Comedy. Rehashed Cinderella stories for the over-10 crowd. Both have the same initials. Unquestionably more watchable to us now (and my teenage daughters), the objects d’esire have real hunks, not stiff cartoon men of honor and perfect hair who live in castles. These men take off real shirts and have real sexy pseudo-fornication scenes too, while retaining their rugged handsomeness.
Beyond my obvious cougar-like imagination of the things I would do to Zac Efron and in a much more mature way to Clive Owen, the only thing these movies offer are the same old rehashed dream that has been inbred in us girls from day one. Kiss some frogs, meet some loathsome guys, best an untamed wild man and LOVE IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER with the perfect guy. Not a real prince…but our prince. The One, who will immediately change their selfish ways, dump their fiancé, make excuses to see us over and over, and fall in love with us. The only difference in these movies is the situation when or where which boy meets which girl.
And I consider it an affront to my movie-paying experience to see who is wooing Kate Hudson. Again.
Worse, we have transferred this Cinderella-like existence to our young women starting in infancy with the first princess movies, all the way up to junior and senior prom, where girls shop for months for a formal dress, take professional pictures taken with soft lighting and boas, and hire limos for the night. In what way is this necessary for high school graduation? (And don’t talk to me about rites of passage. I didn’t go to prom, and I graduated and started my period and…. I did NOT get laid though. Maybe that’s what prom is really for.)
Is this the dream we’re teaching our children to pursue? The dream of a perfect evening, perfect mate…perfect life?!
I want movies that make me think or make me feel. Not make me wish for an unattainable goal. Not set me up for an inevitable letdown by continuing to drill into our heads that the One is out there.
And I, for one, am sick of having some fairy-tale vision of the perfect mate shoved down my throat forty-seven years and counting.
Taul, a rant 
It’s like what I’ve always said, if you women would just lower your standards, I’m sure we can meet them!
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