InterNutter

Of all the romance tropes that exist, it's the older-guy, twenty-something gal that's the most irritating, and it ties directly to this trope here. Men get old, women get replaced.

It's almost as if all women are worth is how good they look. This is evidenced in all the post-makeover shots where the camera lovingly pans up the beautified girl in question from the tips of her toes... but doesn't always make it all the way to her face.

I call it "Pervy Cam" and have failed to find any reference to it anywhere. It also includes shots from the rear that linger on the lady's bottom as she walks. But that's a rant for another day.

You can actually look up graphs about this from multiple sources so you know this isn't bullshit.

You see it in game shows. You see it in Talking Heads morning shows. You see it in the freaking NEWS. Male anchors are allowed to age to retirement. Female anchors are not allowed to exist after they pass a well-preserved 40-something. They're more frequently not allowed to exist after 35. And they're definitely not allowed to exist past 5-months pregnant.

Why? Because the media caters to males. Males are the least likely to want to watch/spend their money on things, so the media lures them in with visions of young, "healthy"¹, smiling and theoretically available women.

Older women don't look sexy enough. Pregnant women past a certain point don't look sexy enough². Therefore, they're shunted off to the side and neatly excised from our screens.

This might be why films like Mad Max: Fury Road and Wonder Woman were so groundbreaking. They had a refreshing lack of this trope. Themiscera featured women of all colours and ALL AGES, being portrayed as EQUALS. Mad Max did the same. With older women turning up and being bad-ass with it towards the third act.

Further, there was no Pervy Cam in Mad Max or Wonder Woman. But that's my next rant.

Usually, if there's an older woman on the screen, she has little character to her other than to be Mom or Grandma and, almost always, die for The Feels.

We get it. Older women aren't sexy enough to be allowed to live. Thanks a bunch for that evaluation of approximately half of the human race.

What we need to do is keep pointing out this shit as no longer acceptable and demand at least an equal age peak for men and women on TV. Meatier roles for the ladies should be happening too. We can do these things. It's just that we too frequently don't.

We've all seen that movie. Action Guy and Action Gal or Damsel Gal do not get along for the entire firkin movie. Except near the third act when they kiss for no good reason and then suddenly have sex.

Sometimes, they don't even kiss. They just go at each other in a sudden and unexpected display of lust.

It's so far out of left field that it's circumnavigated the globe and come in from the right field.

And it's supremely annoying.

Especially

For those who haven't realised the predominance of dead Tokens, read here first in which the token black guy [and sometimes black gal] gets a target drawn on them the instant the Big Bad is out to get the good guys.

Running along side Bury Your Gays, the audience is pretty much trained to expect anyone not cis, het, and white to bite the big one when the stakes are raised. They apparently deserve it for not being cishet white people.

It's

Here's the link to educate yourself, but if you don't want to be bothered with the wiki walk: It begain in the Heteronormative 40's and 50's when people realised that women (a) actually do have sex drives, and (b) those spinsters sharing a house and a bunch of cats were doing way more than knitting and watching television together.

This is around about the time that Tragic Girl Romances began to come out in the pulp zines¹ in which the heroine