To Whom It May Concern

Ranting and Raising Money

Last weekend I hosted my fourth complaint letters event, To Whom It May Concern, at my wonderful local book shop, Beaufort Street Books. I invited six people to write a letter of complaint about any subject of their choosing, and to dare to bare their pet peeves in front of a live audience. Ryan Steed complained about our culture of insincere over-politeness, in the context of his role as a teacher, talking to the parents of ‘spirited’ kids (aka buttheads); Mark Taylor had the audacity of addressing his complaint to me, for asking him to write a letter, thereby making him realise he really had nothing to complain about, and Anita Emor sang a song of protest (and hope).

Anthony Duckworth read a complaint letter he had actually sent to the Socceroos, expressing his outrage at their being renamed the Subway Socceroos (yes, after the fast food chain); Brett Mitchell complained about—among other burdens of temporary homelessness—being unable to find the light switch in the 2022 House of the Year, and Sarah Callaghan gave a wonderful spoken word performance about why we pretend to know how to adult, when we’re all, in fact, staggering about in the dark, looking for the light switches.

There was wine! There was laughter! There was consternation (someone pooped in a park…next to the playground)! And then there was more laughter. And we raised $500 for Indigenous Literacy Foundation. I’ll be organising another one of these later in the year so leave a comment below if you’d like to be notified when tickets go on sale.

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The Idea of You

and dating IRL vs the rom-com

For most of my life I have been a sucker for a great romantic comedy. Yes, the great ones are few and far between, but when they worked they always really hit the spot for me. Lately, however, I have felt my own romance with the romcom souring. For starters, after 5 years on and off online dating, I can confidently say that romance is absolutely dead in the water. A Tinder conversation that opens with ‘on a scale of 1-10, how horny are you?’ is hardly the stuff that meet-cutes are made of. I find myself infuriated by the scenarios I see depicted onscreen, in which women and men so easily meet and fall into relationships - a scenario that bears absolutely no relationship whatsoever to the reality I have encountered and discussed with countless other single women. Sarah Wilson recently wrote about this in her Substack:

I’ve given the sad sport [of dating] an unrelenting red-hot go with men spanning four generations and from all around the world. So I feel I’m qualified to make a few … observations. …One of the reasons I’ve hesitated in writing [this] series is that I couldn’t find a way to do it that would not see me accused of “man bashing”. For, invariably, my experience as a heterosexual woman is a profound disappointment in the courtship behaviour of (single, CIS) men.

In Mare of EastTown, for example, Kate Winslet walks into her crummy local drinking hole looking like she slept on a park bench. Sans makeup, dressed in old jeans and a flannel shirt, her hair is unwashed and her roots are in dire need of a touch-up. And yet, in a matter of minutes she gets picked up by Guy Pearce playing a university professor! Mare of EastTown is not a rom-com of course, but a scene like this would perhaps be a better fit in a fantasy movie.

Despite my cynicism, the part of my brain that was trained by society to perceive having another person fall in love with me as the ultimate aspiration still exerts a strong hold over my viewing choices, which results in me hate-watching films like The Idea of You, a new rom-com in which Hayes (silly name), the star of a world-famous boy band (played by Nicholas Galitzine, an actor so preposterously handsome he looks like he was created by AI), falls in love with Solène (pretentious name), a woman sixteen years his senior (played by Anne Hathaway).

To begin with, it is a stretch to put this film under the ‘rom-com’ banner because it offered very little that I consider romantic and even less that I consider comedic. In place of romance, we are offered sex (I concede the stars had good chemistry and Solène had beautiful underwear). And in place of humour, we are offered idiocy. (Though I have never been to Coachella —the site of their fateful first meeting—I’m going to go out on a limb and stake everything on the fact that the rock stars’ trailers are NOT adjacent to the public toilets). I’m not sure if I actually laughed at all, unless you count derisive scoffing.

Though I don’t look to rom-coms for incisive social commentary, the ‘issues’ in this film—the double standards about men, women, dating and age—felt very old hat. It is, after all, more than 20 years since Demi Moore married Ashton Kutcher, and though, in that time, the perception of women dating younger men doesn’t seem to have changed much, actual dating behaviour seems to have changed considerably.

In fact, one of the things that most surprised me when I started dating was how few men of my own age (mid-40s) I matched with, and how much interest I had from men in their thirties. It turns out the men in the forties were all chasing women in their thirties, while the men in their thirties were all avoiding the women their own age who were desperate to get married and have kids. One man I went on a date with told me every date felt like a job interview. He said it was a relief to go on dates with women who’d already been married and had children and weren’t putting any pressure on him to deliver those things. Based on these experiences it was not a surprise to me that Hayes fell in love with Solèbe. What was much more of a mystery was what she saw in him.

It seems to be a truth universally acknowledged—by women at least—that most men tend to lag behind us in emotional maturity, as captured aptly in this Mother’s Day Instagram post:

https://www.facebook.com/thesarcasticgirl/

One of the most common phrases I see on men’s dating profiles is: I don’t do drama, which roughly translates to, I’m unable to talk about my feelings and I don’t want to hear about yours. Unfortunately, in our patriarchal society, men don’t receive social rewards for emotional intelligence, so often they don’t develop that muscle until they’re in a long-term relationship. Which means that a 24 year old dude who’s been in a boy band for a decade is very unlikely to have a level of emotional intelligence that would satisfy a 40 year old woman. Of course, Hayes could be an exception to the rule. Spoiler alert: he’s not. For example, he doesn’t have the maturity to realise that Solène might feel a little out of place sharing a villa with his boy band bros and the girls they are ‘hanging out’ with, aka sleeping with. He doesn’t have the maturity to shut down the conversation when the gang starts talking about how much more fun he used to be when he was slutting it up with the rest of them. Bottom line, he doesn’t have maturity. So while it’s not hard to imagine Solène enjoying a fling with him, it’s almost impossible to imagine they could really have a satisfying relationship.

Finally, since I can’t avoid noticing it, I might as well talk about it: The Idea of You, unsurprisingly, yet still disappointingly, indulged the time-honoured Hollywood trope of the effortlessly thin woman. In one scene, for example, in which we see our lovers lounging in bed in a hotel room, ordering room service, she orders a BLT with a side of fries and a plate of cookies as a chaser. You don’t have to be a dietician to know that at 41, Anne Hathaway does not maintain a body like that by alternating between fatty carbs and sugary carbs. If we have to live in a society where thin bodies are held as the highest ideal for women, can we at least be realistic in depicting the work it takes to have those bodies?

Questions Have you seen this silly film? Did it annoy you as much as it annoyed me? Am I ridiculous to expect anything more from a rom-com than pure silliness? Are men actually extremely emotionally mature and I’ve got it all wrong? I want to know your thoughts and feelings!

There were other things I was going to talk abut but it turns out I had a heck of a lot to say about The Idea of You, so I will leave you with this quote from Paul Lynch’s staggering Booker-Prize winning novel Prophet Song.

What is left behind will not be left behind at all but will continue to grow in weight and be carried forever on their backs.