Helpless Heroines

After hearing this Brad Paisley song on the radio multiple times, I got annoyed enough to rant about it:

Little Moments

"I live for little moments like that" sounds like a tender sentiment. The intended point of the song seems to be that "little imperfections" make the beloved person human and therefore more interesting. Perfection would be "boring." Nothing unsound in itself about those statements. But the lyrics come across to me as showing something different from what they're telling.

What does the narrator of the ballad actually show us? His wife or significant other dents his truck, burns the birthday cake, and gets them lost by misreading directions. In short, he sees her as an incompetent klutz. He doesn't portray himself as loving her in SPITE of those mishaps. Regardless of what the last verse claims, the overall impression isn’t that he sees her flaws as incidental quirks that are endearing because they’re part of her personality. "I LIVE for little moments like that"—as far as the action depicted in the song demonstrates, he loves her BECAUSE she's incompetent. And this is supposed to be romantic? Nowadays if a romance novelist created a heroine whose main attraction was helplessness, most readers would throw the book at the wall.

I'm reminded of the Japanese concept of "moe":

Moe

A moe character in manga or anime appeals to audiences by her or his (usually her) cuteness arising from an air of immaturity and a need to be protected. It seems unlikely to me that a country music star's work would be overtly influenced by Japanese popular culture. So does some segment of American popular culture still cherish the mindset of songs such as the tearjerker "Honey," from my teen years, in which the narrator fondly recalls how cute it was when his now-deceased young bride wrecked his car?

Of course it feels good to be able to protect and take care of the loved one. And it feels good to be taken care of sometimes, too. In modern romance, however, whether in fiction or other media, shouldn't we have grown past accepting a scenario where all the taking-care-of goes in one direction, infantilizing one partner (usually the female one)?

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt