The XX Factor: What women really think.

In Which I Read My Blog Post Aloud While I Write It

Willa, you bring up a great point about the attempts and failures by movies and TV shows to capture courtship and romance as it actually exists in 2009, in all its technological glory. That Drew Barrymore speech from He's Just Not That Into You annoyed me, too, because it's Just Not That accurately getting at the issue. For me, the problem isn't fear of rejection via "different portals." When a conversation meanders from Facebook to e-mails to texts to phone calls, I'm not really all that conscious that the portal is shifting. The problem is that, because of all the portals, the bar for rejection has gone from pole vault to hurdle to metal beam lying on the ground. We've come to expect constant communication and instant responses, which means that five minutes of waiting for a reply from a guy (via whatever) can be agonizing. The other day, I actually instructed gchat never to show my boyfriend in my list of friends, because I couldn't handle seeing that green "available" ball next to his name without wondering why he wasn't responding to that e-mail I'd sent him a few hours earlier. (After a few minutes I realized I was being crazy. But you see my point.)

If these new movies and shows don't capture the way love has changed in the era of smartphones, are there better examples out there? Surely not the early attempts like You've Got Mail (does anyone actually read IMs aloud while typing them?). Quarterlife and Gossip Girl seem to understand how people actually use their computers and cell phones, but both treat all things social as if they are tied to a single Web presence, which isn't quite right either. The stars of One Tree Hill are too incestuous to bother with dating sites and too up in one another's faces to need cell phones or e-mail. And on Grey's Anatomy and Scrubs they're still using pagers!

Has anyone actually seen a movie or TV show that does this well—shows people meeting and communicating online or by cell in a way that doesn't make you cringe? Accepting nominations in The Fray!

I'm Just Not That Into You

OK: So I caved in and saw He's Just Not That Into You. Which was actually better than I expected. But what's most notable about it is how the film tries to negotiate its requisite happy ending while continuing to position itself as a somehow "authentic" vision of dating culture today. This is a romantic comedy, after all. So it has to find a way to fulfill the usual girls-meets-boy, girl-hates-boy, girl-marries-boy structure. In this regard, it might be instructive to compare HJNTIY to Bride Wars, which faces a similar problem: It both wants to puncture the bubble of bridal fantasies and blow that bubble up even bigger. Two isn't a trend, of course, but what both He's Just Not That Into You and Bride Wars do is invent a "realistic" twist that isn't expected—in the first case, it's that boys/men are going to be mean and indifferent to girls/women over and over, and women better stop sugar-coating the real truth. (E.g.,"You're just too mature and pretty for him.") In the second, it's that even a fairy-tale couple can come unraveled in the midst of wedding planning. Spoiler alert, but Anne Hathaway doesn't end up marrying the seemingly sweet guy she gets engaged to.

We all know romantic comedies can't stand much realism. But rom-coms are often the best window onto the subterranean gender issues in the culture. (Think about all those screwball comedies.) And both these films are strangely pernicious, I think, because after patting themselves on the back for giving the viewer a dose of bitter medicine, they turn around and get ... super-conventional, in a super-fantastical way. First, both main characters end up happily in love with the right guy. Just a few short months after Anne Hathaway dumps her fiance, she gets together with her best friend's brother; they're married (and pregnant!) a year later. Second, and worse, they end up with the right guy in the most joyless fashion; there's hardly a lot of fun along the way—as there is in, say, His Girl Friday. Third, everyday gender relations seem awfully screwy, too—in ways that would mess with my head if I were a guy. In He's Just Not That Into You, there aren't any guys who call a girl wanting her to go out with him only to find she doesn't want to. In the film's gender lexicon, this isn't even a plausible scenario—which must be leaving some real-life men feeling they fall short of the male Lothario standard set here. In Bride Wars, neither Kate Hudson nor Anne Hathaway do much of anything but catfight and micromanage their weddings, but by the same token, the men in the film seem largely checked-out. They're neither witty nor deeply insightful, though Kate Hudson's beau seems ... adequate, I suppose.

Who would want to be the kind of arrogant, emotionally deaf doofus that all these people seem to be? Maybe what's really bothering me is that these films seem spiritually bereft. While pretending to be about the joy of love, they are peddling a kind of weird fear and self-loathing. If a third comes along, we'll have a trend. Call it the year of the romantic tragi-comedy.

He's Just Gotta Be Into You

How Women Talk to Women About Men

So, who saw He's Just Not That Into You last weekend? I had all the complaints I thought I would. The 8,000-person cast meant no character or storyline could develop beyond the fairly superficial. Vague jobs requiring scant hours and minimal concentration somehow paid for breathtaking apartments. And no group—women, men, gays, Africans—escaped total stereotype.

None of those gripes kept me from getting sucked in and teary-eyed as I watched the characters fret their way through happy-hour courtships, sultry affairs, lavish home renovations, and general realizations about love. What made it more than your typical rom-com was the use of themes and taglines from the book of the same title on which it's based (which itself was based on a Sex and the City episode)—a gimmick that starts in the surprisingly insightful first scene. In the opening, a mom tells her adorably expressive prepubescent daughter that the boy who pushed her on the playground did it because he has a crush on her. (You can watch it in this preview.) The playground gives way to a montage of various women advising their female friends on love problems, all by making excuses rather than delivering the obvious truth that, cue the title screen, he's just not that into them. In other words, the white lies that start at childhood turn into a parade of convoluted, esteem-boosting reasons that women give one another throughout life about why guys are treating us like crap. ("Maybe he hasn't called because his cell phone died." "He may be avoiding commitment now, but that's what my husband was like, too, until he came around.") Well-intentioned, but detrimental, since those responses delude us into thinking that we will get to waltz away with a storybook ending to a bad romantic start instead of facing the facts and moving on.

But the well-delivered message of the introductory scene wasn't adequately resolved. The only character who ever offers those no-nonsense, hard-to-hear truths about how guys are feeling is a guy. So if the point is supposed to be that women should change the way they talk to one another about love, it doesn't seem that any of the characters got that message. (Or text. Or Facebook wall post. Or any of the other methods of communication that lead to Drew Barrymore's silly little drugstore rant.)

What do you all think? When a guy seems uninterested in your friend, is the best thing for you to do is say so? Or is there a value to offering possible excuses to preserve your friend's ego and keep her hope alive? After all, sometimes his cell phone really DID die.

Not Taking No Phone Calls For An Answer