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[–]beholdyourheart 11 insightful - 1 fun11 insightful - 0 fun12 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

For a lot of this I think of it more as a misogyny thing than a heterosexuality thing. It's girls who are being socialized into the role of a wife (like you said) - the boys aren't receiving nearly as much of that messaging of life being centered around their future relationship. This is only tangentially related but I've always been frustrated by those posts online that are of some man acting horribly to his wife/girlfriend, and people make fun of it as being 'straight culture' when really it's just misogyny. I really feel bad for a lot of straight women honestly

But I do get what you're saying, I had all those experiences you mentioned growing up and it sucked. The shoehorned straight romance into every possible piece of media, even a lot of children's media, bothered me since I was really young and I could never put into words why; I just always said that I hated love stories. I don't mind heterosexual love stories now, but they have to actually be good and the vast majority of them really are not imo - I think it's the idea that a lot of writers have that if a man and a woman are interacting with each other, they must be in love, so there's no effort made to actually give the relationship any nuance or interest. I have a few clear memories of being young and reading novels with characters of the same sex who had a lot of romantic chemistry and thinking 'I bet if these characters were male and female everyone would call it a romance, but because they're not they're just considered close friends', and that was way before I realized I was gay lmao

[–]just_lesbian_things 6 insightful - 3 fun6 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 3 fun -  (0 children)

the boys aren't receiving nearly as much of that messaging of life being centered around their future relationship

There's some of it. The damsel in distress rescue is pretty common throughout male media. It's how you get the nice deeds should be rewarded by sex male logic.

[–]sootsprite 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Something I really hate is that every time you see a male and a female character fight and act horribly towards each other in media it's meant to be "sexual tension" and they usually end up hooking up. I HATE it.