I think my least favorite Hetero Trope is when the girl eats a burger or whatever and the dude is like “Wow, I like a girl who can eat” like what the fuck did your last girlfriend do, photosynthesis?
I was just thinking the other day about how they do a very similar thing with men in the media as well. It may not be as prevalent as with the female characters, but you almost always see superheroic male characters with extremely toned physiques in bars, drinking beer and eating pub food, portrayed as “man’s man” types who let their scrappy lives give them saran wrapped eight packs, when in reality the actors playing those guys are on extremely specialized diets coupled with intense workout programs. At the same time, “gym rat” characters who are actually shown doing the work a person would actually need to to maintain bodies like that are almost unilaterally made out to be stupid, vain, often meanspirited meatheads.
I remember watching the behind the scenes footage of a Jason Statham movie where he’s complaining about only being allowed to eat a plate of steamed veggies while the entire rest of the crew was having a party with cake or something. In the same movie his character is pretending to eat and drink things that real dude Jason Statham was not allowed anywhere near to maintain the idea that regular blue collar working class movie character got sweet abs by drinking beer and driving fast cars.
Then there’s the issue of these actors being harassed in real life when they don’t upkeep their intensely high-maintinence bodies between movies. Like, The illusion has been created that the jacked up bodybuilder physique is their effortless natural state of being, so any deviation from that must be caused by flawed behaviour and you see constant articles about how “[Popular Action movie guy] Really Let Himself Go” or people bombarding the actors’ personal accounts with fat jokes and accusation about their lifestyles
I guess the overarching issue is, people seem to be fed this idea that attractive qualities people may posses are only valid if they came naturally and effortlessly. The person with beautiful hair is desirable, the person who spends an hour making their hair beautiful is “self obsessed”, the person with the athletic body is hot, the person who goes to the gym every day and works on being more athletic is “a dumb jock”. It’s all appreciating the results while devaluing the effort it took to achieve them.
