How Hollywood Ruined Men for Dating

The death of the lovable loser hero and the rise of untouchable icons have men convinced rejection is inevitable — unless they're perfect.

This is a guest post by Joseph Holmes.

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“Why don’t men approach us anymore?”

I see this question from women all the time now, whether it’s on TikTok or think pieces like the New York Times’ Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back. As a guy who lived through the #MeToo movement, it causes me a certain amount of whiplash. There was a time when all it seemed I heard from women–in person or online–was about how guys approaching girls in public was unwelcome and made life a hardship for women. Now–seemingly overnight–women online are constantly not only bemoaning the fact that men have backed off, but seem bewildered as to why it happened.

And this is not simply anecdotal. According to the Institute for Family Studies, less than half of men have been on a date in the past year. (Even less for women.) And according to a widely-cited report from DatePsych, less than half of men 18-25 had ever approached a woman in person.

Guys have been more than eager to explain why they’re not approaching. Whether that’s not wanting to be seen as creepy or the normalization of tearing down men (even while you’re dating them). Men will also sometimes note that close to half of young women are depressed. And because they’re feminists, they will largely blame their male partner for their unhappiness. So men feel like they have a choice between being rejected and being in a relationship where they’ll be constantly mistreated.

But most men and women don’t seem that impressed with those excuses. After all, isn’t part of being a man doing hard, risky things? And how risky is it, anyway? Most women under 40 want men to approach them. There are plenty of tools out there to help men learn how to not come off as creepy. And most of the “male-bashing” by women is just talk. When women get married to men, they consistently shift toward men’s values and political views.

That’s why culture critics like Rob Henderson often argue that men’s real reasons for not approaching women are simply cowardice. “What’s really happening is that many men are anxious about approaching women and are relieved to find a socially acceptable justification for that anxiety. It’s not that I’m afraid, they tell themselves; it’s that I might get humiliated or posted online.” The same IFS report agrees that self-confidence is one of the main drivers of young people not dating.

But if men are cowards today about dating, I think we overlook one major reason why: Hollywood. As a male culture critic, I can attest to the fact that Hollywood has consistently lied to men about romance. And when those lies fall apart, it leads to disillusionment and confusion. Part of fixing dating is understanding how men got lied to and telling a better story to those men.

Some voices today think it’s the absence of Hollywood romantic comedies that is causing the dearth of romance. Reese Witherspoon argued that we used to learn dating social dynamics and skills by watching rom-coms with the likes of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

But the truth is, we learned false dating dynamics. One of the best analyses of men’s changing romantic fantasies came from Charlie Houpert of Charisma on Command. He notes that romances in the 2000s were dominated by “average guy gets hot girl” romances. These movies featured awkward, nerdy, klutzy, boring, and guys — typically unsuccessful with girls — who get to win the most desired girl over the traditional hot jock. Comedies like Girl Next Door, She’s Out of Your League, Knocked Up, There’s Something About Mary, adventure movies like Spider-Man, The Lord of the Rings (Samwise Gamgee), Harry Potter (Ron and Hermione) Kim Possible, Scott Pilgrim vs the World. The list goes on and on. But what those guys did have was initiative. Whether Matthew Kidman or Samwise Gamgee, or Ron Stoppable, they took the risk and made the first move and were rewarded for it.

But modern movies are different. The male leads are ridiculously attractive and cool. They are Jack Reacher, Tony Stark, Captain America, Thor, Henry Cavill’s Superman or Witcher, Paul Atreides, or The Mandalorian. Chris Pratt traded out the lovable goofy and paunchy Andy Dwyer–who still pulled the enviable April Ludgate–for the ripped and cocky Star Lord. Even the rom coms–which used to have leads that included Kevin Hart and Jack Black–are now populated entirely by “Chads” like Jonathan Bailey (Bridgerton), Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal (Materialists) or Glen Powell (Anyone But You). They are the cocky jocks that the previous films made the bad guys. It’s no wonder in this environment that we see the trend of “looksmaxxing”, made more famous by figures like Clavicular.

Moreover, these new leads rarely take the initiative. Reacher and Geralt both have love interests, but almost always, the women take the initiative. Jane Foster kisses Thor first. Chani kisses Paul first. But more often than not, even when men do initiate, romance is largely absent –particularly in Marvel films–until the third act when they abruptly kiss.

Why did the male fantasy change? I think it’s pretty obvious: we tried the old one, and it didn’t work. When I started really asking girls out, I mostly got turned down. The guys I knew who I saw as like me–“average guys” like the protagonists in the movies–also got turned down. The guys who had the most success with girls–particularly the girls everyone wanted–were the “cool guys” who were the “bad guys” in the movies we grew up watching.

What we learned from that was that what Hollywood–and often the well-meaning women in our lives–had told us wasn’t true. We don’t get the girl by “being ourselves”. You get the girl by being the kind of attractive guy she wants.

Different guys responded in different ways. Some gave up on girls entirely. Others–like me–decided to work on ourselves to become more attractive. But given that all this was happening during the rise of the internet, it’s no surprise that a lot of this took place online. For the men who gave up, this led to the incel and MGTOW (men going their own way) movements. For those who dedicated themselves to self-improvement, this led to following self-help figures like Jordan Peterson, Chris Williamson and–yes–Charlie Houpert.

I found a lot of good living through this era of men’s “self-improvement” culture online. The old male fantasy that you could be a conventionally unattractive guy and still get a conventionally attractive woman was honestly not fair to women. Why should she have to settle? Men leaning into self-improvement gave men the responsibility to grow and empowered them to do so. But it did so while also teaching them not to blame themselves for everything or despise their masculinity. Finally, it glorified the process of growth, rather than simply the results. And we know that most growth happens when you fall in love with the journey and not just the destination.

But there were also problems I didn’t always see until my guy friends challenged me. When you decide you won’t pursue girls until you become the ideal guy, it’s too easy to just… never seriously pursue girls. There’s always more you can do to improve. This is especially true the more time you spend online. You base your idea of who can get girls–and what girls are worth pursuing–on people the algorithm pushes at you. So you just stay on a hamster wheel that never ends. The consequence of making marriage a “capstone” rather than a “cornerstone” and always moving the goalposts on the “cap” is not usually a better relationship, but no relationship. And ultimately, it’s one reason we’re headed for increased loneliness and population collapse.

The truth is, it’s so easy for self-improvement just to be another way to avoid pain. The fantasy of “becoming the chad” is the fantasy that it’s possible to become the kind of guy that girls won’t reject, who won’t call us the “mediocre men” in every Sabrina Carpenter song. It’s avoiding the pain of feeling worthless because you’re always the person desiring, not the one being desired.

But nobody avoids pain. You just get better at handling pain the more you experience it. You don’t grow by avoiding real-life scary stuff, but by doing the scary stuff. You learn to fall in love with really amazing women by getting to know real women. You learn in what ways you need to grow by having real-life friends and mentors who tell you what you need to hear–not what the algorithm knows you want to hear–and testing it out in the real world.

When dads left home for work during the Industrial Revolution, dad-style parenting fell off and became stigmatized. Dad’s rougher, tougher style of parenting that focused on training boys to be men, and going on joyful supervised adventures, was considered harsh and–at worst–abusive. But rejecting dad-style parenting created a generation of men who never gained the competence and confidence they needed, and retreated into video games, porn, and movies where they could have fantasies of what they wanted rather than the real thing. Setting up expectations that were easy to dash and leave them disillusioned.

Hollywood is great at capturing our hearts with fantasies. And some of those fantasies are good. Social media is good for strategies. And some of those strategies are good. But the future belongs to those who dream and do things in real life. Even those who do it mediocre.