The ad is part of a heinous new breed that allegedly speak the language of modern women but really only reinforce the warped notion of some ad exec (who may even be a woman herself) about how simple and predictable women really are. But taken in the context of how lousy most romance movies are today -- specifically, romantic comedies -- the ad is insulting to both sexes. Because romantic comedies have become so dismal, so laden with lame humor and couples that barely spark and so transparent as flimsy therapy substitutes designed to make women feel good about themselves (the assumption being that we all feel bad to begin with), that it's often surprising that anyone, man or woman, finds them acceptable.

In their glory days, in the 1930s, romantic comedies were made for, and enjoyed by, men and women alike. In his perceptive 1987 history of the genre, "Romantic Comedy," James Harvey writes about how the comedies of the early '30s (movies like Ernst Lubitsch's "Trouble in Paradise") paved the way for the later screwball comedies (such as Howard Hawks' "Bringing Up Baby," George Cukor's "Holiday" and Preston Sturges' "The Lady Eve" and "The Palm Beach Story"), which showed a more complicated view of love than they're sometimes given credit for. "The comedies of the early thirties are moving ... toward a romantic-comic version of love that is neither sentimental on the one hand nor cynical and mocking on the other," Harvey writes. "Toward a notion of love as something that is not only not inconsistent with 'grace,' dignity, common sense, and self-respect -- but that even somehow leads to higher, truer forms of all these qualities." Romantic comedies weren't devised as strictly feminine entertainment (that was the province of movies like "Imitation of Life," "Stella Dallas" and, later, "Mildred Pierce"). The assumption was that you only had to be human to be interested in them.

Romantic comedies mutated over the years, but even as late as the '80s, it wasn't so hard to find pictures like "Tootsie" and "Moonstruck" that kept the essence of the genre alive. But sometime in the early '90s, almost without warning, romantic comedies became ineffably stupid. Around the same time, they also became vehicles targeted mainly toward women: "chick movies," as Tom Hanks in "Sleepless in Seattle" derisively refers to them. "Sleepless in Seattle" itself, released in 1993, could be considered the mother of all chick movies, the hen responsible for any number of subsequent rotten eggs -- from "While You Were Sleeping" to "You've Got Mail" to facile exercises like "As Good as It Gets" and current stinkers like "Notting Hill" and "The Love Letter." With "Sleepless in Seattle," the earmarks of the modern romance movie started to become drearily predictable. Their heroines tended to be cutie-pie moppets with impish grins (Meg Ryan) or dazzling brunets who needed to be costumed in schleppy clothes so they'd seem more "real" (Sandra Bullock) -- women who could in no way be interpreted as "threatening" to either men or women. The witty repartee usually consisted of the female lead standing up to the male lead in an argument, possibly stamping her foot for emphasis (a clear assertion that she's a "strong" character who's not going to take any guff from a man). When things got a little slow, there was always the obligatory Motown -- or, better yet, Aretha -- sing-along.

In "Sleepless in Seattle," Ryan's character was supposed to be a modern, take-charge woman because she saw the man she wanted and went for him, using the resources available to her as a newspaper employee to find out where he lived so she could follow him around, everywhere, surreptitiously. In some quarters, that would be called "stalking": Think how creepy a male character, even an appealing one, would seem if he used the same tactics. But because this character was played by Meg Ryan -- she of the crooked smile and undimmable twinkle -- no one thought twice about it.

There's an air of desperation about Ryan's character in "Sleepless in Seattle" that seems to have become not only acceptable but desirable in most modern romantic comedies. On a good day, you might be able to convince yourself that writers simply want to give us women with real problems, real fears: It's not unnatural for unattached women (or men) to fear growing old alone or missing the chance to have children. Nor is it unnatural for married women (or men) to wish for maybe just a little more than they actually have or, sometimes, just something different. But it's gotten to the point where the mining of insecurities has become nothing more than a slickly disguised marketing ploy -- as if we needed these movies to tell us, "See, this woman's a lot more pathetic than you are, and even she managed to find a guy!"

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