I grew up watching movies in which women found it flattering when their pursuers showed up uninvited to hold a boombox under their window, or broke into their bedrooms to watch them sleep, or confessed their feelings via posterboard while their love interest’s husband sat in the next room. So I found it flattering, too. I sang along with The Killers’ “Change Your Mind” (“If the answer is no, can I change your mind?”) and Fall Out Boy’s “7 Minutes in Heaven” (“I keep telling myself I’m not the desperate type, but you’ve got me looking in through blinds”) without a second thought about what the lyrics implied.

Allegations of sexual harassment have been pouring out of the entertainment industry, among others, in recent months. But while predatory male behavior has been condoned and covered up behind the scenes, it’s also been glorified on screen and on the page and on the radio. As my colleague Lenika Cruz put it to me: “Rape culture, actually, is all around.” The narratives of a culture help to set its norms. Research has already found that romantic comedies can normalize stalking behavior. It’s not difficult, then, to imagine that toxic love stories can also normalize coercion. That they can make people—women, especially—question when and whether their boundaries have really been violated, when they should be flattered and when they should be afraid.

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It’s worth beginning with the more shocking examples of how pop culture condones and redeems violating behavior: In a number of cases, sexual assault is treated as the start of a love story. On General Hospital, the longest-running soap opera in production, the tale of the “supercouple” Luke and Laura started in an October 1979 episode—when Luke raped Laura at the disco where they both worked. Eventually the show began recalling the incident as a “seduction” rather than a rape, and the two fell for each other. They later married in a record-making 1981 episode watched by 30 million people. The rape was “romanticized to my great regret,” Anthony Geary, the actor who played Luke, has said. But in the same interview he described Luke as “a classically romantic character, a classic anti-hero.” General Hospital portrayed sexual assault not as a definitive shattering of trust, but as a foundation on which a relationship can be built—a model embraced by other shows and films as well.

For example, in the 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner, the protagonist Rick Deckard at one point forces himself on an android named Rachael. But the moment is portrayed as romantic—it’s even soundtracked with a sexy ’80s saxophone. Casey Cipriani at Slate writes of the film’s 2017 sequel, Blade Runner 2049, that “a big part of the new Blade Runner’s plot relies on the belief that Deckard and Rachael fell in love in the first, [but] their ‘love’ is the result of a coercive sex scene.” Similarly, in the first season of Game of Thrones, the relationship between Daenerys Targaryen and Khal Drogo—which is portrayed as a great love, one through which Daenerys eventually comes into her own as a ruler—begins with a wedding night on which the teenage girl cries and tries unsuccessfully to keep Drogo from undressing her. (This is a departure from the book’s depiction of that scene.)