UM: ‘You’re Never Ever Getting Rid of Me;’ Men overstepping boundaries in Film, TV, and Theatre
This article was published in Unknown Magazine Issue 8, ‘Boundaries,’ in June 2018. Read more articles here.
Amazon Prime Video: Waitress the Musical Proshot (2023)
One of my favourite musicals at this point in time is the 2015 Tony-nominated musical Waitress, written by and starring Sara Bareilles. The music is catchy, the characters enjoyable, and the emotions high. After discovering the soundtrack a few months ago, I have been listening to it non-stop, enjoying almost every song.
However, there is one song that doesn’t quite sit well with me, and that is the song ‘Never Ever Getting rid of me.’ It is sung by a male character, Ogie, who has come to ask for a second chance from a female character, Dawn, after a disastrous first date. Despite Dawn’s repeated avoidance and rejection of him, Ogie refuses to leave her place of work until she agrees to go out with him again, declaring his undying love for her.
We are meant to see this as endearing. Ogie is a non-threatening, almost pathetic kind of man, who we should feel bad for if he doesn’t get the girl. We are not meant to see this as scary. But how would you feel, if someone you barely knew stalked you to your place of work, clearly overstepped your boundaries, and claimed that they would never leave you alone until you agreed to a relationship with them? In many cases, terrified.
Because this is something that women in our current society have grown to fear.
In 2014, Stop Street Harassment commissioned a 2,000-person national survey in the USA with surveying firm Growth From Knowledge. The survey found that 65% of all women had experienced sexual harassment. Among these women, 23% had been sexually touched, 20% had been followed, and 9% had been forced to do something sexual. 50% of women in the workplace have been harassed, and the most common cases of women’s rape have been by men that they already knew, who just wouldn’t take no for an answer.
And yet in media such as theatre, TV, or film, this is a common trope. A man falls in love with a woman, and knows that they are destined to be together. Only one problem: she doesn’t feel the same way. But our plucky male protagonist, again, won’t just take no for an answer. He will stalk her, pressure her, perform public acts of love so she feels compelled to do what he wants, and won’t give up until he gets the girl. And we are supposed to relate to this. We are told by this trope to root for the guy, and to not worry about the woman’s safety or wishes.
There are a number of films and TV shows that follow this trope exactly: Groundhog Day (1993), The Notebook (2004), The Big Bang Theory (2007-2019), Stranger Things (2016-), even dating back to His Girl Friday (1939), and so on. There is also another trope that unifies these products: the woman always says yes in the end.
Within all of these texts the main guy and his ‘quest’ of a female character end up together. In Groundhog Day, despite Rita continuously slapping Phil across the face to let him know she’s not interested, he stalks her through every repeated day until he knows every little thing about her, and is rewarded by her happily kissing him at the end of the movie. In The Notebook, after Allie has already turned him down, Noah threatens to kill himself by falling off a Ferris wheel unless she agrees to date him. In His Girl Friday Walter Burns attempts to win back his ex-wife Hildy Johnson through irreprehensible actions that we are supposed to find charming, such as getting her current fiancé arrested. And, to add insult to injury, when he stops this damaging behaviour, Hildy bursts into tears, worried that he no longer cares about her, encouraging the idea that women long for this treatment.
In Stranger Things and The Big Bang Theory, the writers try to remedy this through the use of lamp-shading (making it obvious that what they are doing is creepy), by having Max call Lucas a stalker, and making Howard an intentionally ‘hilarious’ pervert respectively. The act of persisting until the girl finally gives up is also lamp-shaded in The Big Bang Theory when a stranger asks Leonard how he got Penny to go out with him, to which she replies, ‘He wore me down.’ And the audience laughs.
This in no way challenges their behaviour. Max still ends up with Lucas, despite him stalking and trapping her in the back room of an arcade, and when Penny calls Howard out on his perversions, he falls into a depression, and she has to apologise to him. A perverted man’s feelings are taken into more consideration than a woman’s safety.
We are meant to feel for Leonard, Howard and Lucas, and expect Penny and Max to see their actions as ‘cute.’ All of these examples present their male characters as harmless, maybe even slightly geeky, so we aren’t supposed to see them as threatening. But their appearance does not detract from the harmful behaviour and mind-set they exhume.
As the studies have shown, women clearly do not enjoy this sort of harassment. Even actress Sadie Sink, who plays Max in Stranger Things, was against the idea of kissing co-star Caleb McLaughlin, who plays Lucas. This was only when their kiss was suggested. The writers, the Duffer Brothers, knowing that she wouldn’t like it, chose to make her kiss him as they thought her feeling uncomfortable was funny, which they have admitted in interviews.
In real life, often the times women do agree to date persistent men is because they fear he will get violent if she continues to say no. All the while, this trend within different forms of media is telling men that it is okay to overstep a woman’s boundaries, that she in fact likes it, and that if she says no, she is simply playing hard to get. This helps to keep a culture where women live in fear of sexual harassment, and congratulates men who take part in that culture, asking us to both relate to and root for those characters.
Media influences society. If we want women to feel safe in society, we must allow them to feel safe in media.