I’ve been watching a lot of movies over break. Mostly because I can stream them from the library, I picked movies that are available rather than necessarily selecting by interest alone. This gives an opportunity to look under the pop culture hood.

Movies like “The Answer Man” are reinforcing the notion that love can conquer all. It portrays an older, fairly angry man who is rescued out of his life by a younger pretty woman. It is a message that might’ve kept me longer in relationships that were not good for me because I had learned to believe in this kind of transformational power of love that doesn’t really exist except in movies. The message is that I, as a woman, am a failure if I cannot transform a man with my love. And it’s an utterly ridiculous message. Yet it is a message that is told by movies over and over again. And that repetition leads us to believe it without questioning it, when questioning is really what is necessary.

These types of movies also sent messages to men that they only have to find the right woman in order to be transformed. Which is also rather dangerous. While we can be helped by another person to change, especially if that other person is a skilled counselor, ultimately it is us who is doing the work, and often it is hard work, to change.

Ultimately, we have to address our sense of not being enough. And this sense might be a creation of the Western world rather than something innate, something natural. And that’s an idea worth exploring in another post, though I’ll need to think about it more first…

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