2. The sex
It’s not a popular topic, we know, but if sex does happen in a rom-com, even in 2024 it is often still very focused on the man. He kisses her passionately, they enter the door taking off half a piece of clothing together and then he often puts her against the wall and it is over after five movements and some moaning. Now a woman doesn’t always have to have the big ‘O’, but going to bed with each other remains a very man-focused thing and that is so strange for a genre that mainly appeals to women.
You can argue that it might not be as sexy the longer it goes on or that depicting the things that often happen to give a woman an orgasm might be less suitable for a rom-com, but isn’t that just because that wham-bam- thank-you-mom mentality is so deeply rooted in -mainly- rom-coms? Time to change that, we often see in series that even when it comes to the female highlight, it can be shown in a few seconds (and in a neat way).
3. Americans travel abroad for… each other
While zombie apocalypses and alien visits always only take place in the United States in films, in rom-coms we often see that Americans travel somewhere and then all meet foreign people from the country they are traveling to, but who actually only serve as a kind of lackey. Because Americans like Americans. Now it’s a bit different in Lonely Planet, because he’s not completely American of course, but he does have to represent a kind of American. If you think about this concept for a long time, you realize how crazy it is that we keep watching movies where Americans travel around the world filled with fantastic people, only to find each other again.