This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves.

This is the waves. Welcome to the waves, Slate's podcast about gender, feminism, and the evolution of the

Meekute, Manic Pixie Dreamgirls, and Airport Chases. Every episode you get a

new pair of women to talk about the thing we can't get off

our minds and today you've got me Lily Luftboro, a staff writer here at Slate, where I write about

news, culture, culture comedy and politics.

And you've got me, Nicole Perkins, writer, culture critic, and host of This Is Good for You,

a podcast about the pleasures of life.

I also used to co-host Thirstaid at Slate where Bim Edowin and I talked about all the ways pop culture shaped desire.

And today we're talking about the state of the Ramcom past and future. I'll just come right out and

say that romcoms were hugely important to me growing up in the 80s and 90s.

They were the only movies and I'm only exaggerating a little, queer women got to be protagonists.

And the fantasy at the core was pretty simple, right?

Like it was that someone will love you, not despite your clumsiness or your type

anus or whatever your flaw is as a romcom heroin but because of it.

And so the message was allegedly, it's okay to be you.

But it's kind of a sneaky genre, right?

Because let's face it, while a lot of romcoms are, at least on the surface about men realizing their mistakes and chasing the female protagonist through airports to explain their epiphanies and win them over, That's not always the deep work they're doing.

Yes, it's what happened to Mr. Darcy, or to Harry, and when Harry met Sally, to Mark Darcy

in Bridgetgens' diary. But so many of these movies were ultimately about gently but firmly disciplining the woman too, and maybe a little bit more insidiously.

In Sweet Home Alabama, Reese Witherspoon's character gets disciplined for daring to abandon her small town self and

succeed in the big city with its shiny men in its better fashion.

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