Boy meets girl. Boy likes girl. Boy does everything he can to get girl. This is the structure of pretty much every love story, from fairytales to romantic comedies, from The Graduate to Love Actually. As a result, it’s the dynamic most of us have grown up as thinking as the norm, even the ideal: the man is the active subject, and the woman is the passive object, who must be persuaded into love.

Caroline Kepnes’s ludicrously readable 2014 novel, You, which has been made into a Netflix series, opens with a classic romcom meet-cute. Handsome bookstore manager Joe spots pretty Beck when she walks into his shop. They banter among the bookshelves, he teases, she – he thinks – flirts back. And so the pursuit begins, with Joe finding out where Beck lives so he can walk past her door – except he doesn’t just walk past.

“We’ve all grown up watching those movies dozens of times, in which a man pursuing a woman, and sometimes even being horrible to her, is portrayed as romantic,” Kepnes says. “I wanted to look at where that would lead when taken to the extreme.” Joe watches Beck for days before eventually breaking into her house. When she comes home unexpectedly, he hides in the shower. “I’ve seen enough romantic comedies to know guys like me are always getting into jams like this,” he muses.

There might be something alluring about the idea of a man liking you so much he runs across New York City on New Year’s Eve to declare his love for you, as Harry (Billy Crystal) does in When Harry Met Sally (as opposed to Hugh Grant’s character in Four Weddings and a Funeral, for example, so haplessly passive he merely waits for another wedding, or funeral, where he might bump into you). But where does flirtation end and harassment begin? Take Will Smith’s supposedly charming narrator in the 2005 movie Hitch for example: “She might say, ‘This is a really bad time for me [to date someone]’, but she’s lying to you. It’s not a bad time for her. She doesn’t need any space,” he declares. A 2016 study concluded that this kind of narrative “can lead to an increase in stalking-supportive beliefs”, and it is these ideas that are explored in Kepnes’s novel and the new series. “I think part of the popularity of romcoms is that they reflect a lot of women’s subconscious beliefs that they should accept this kind of behaviour from men,” Kepnes says. “We’re told that a good man is hard to find, so it’s easy to think: ‘OK, I should like this guy who seems to like me so much.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Billy Crystal and Megan Ryan in When Harry Met Sally.

Objections to the creepiness of romcoms always lead to some people arguing that such cynicism proves romance is dead. “Did feminism kill the romcom?” one British newspaper asked last year, as if it were mere political correctness that makes storylines like a man convincing a woman with amnesia that she is his wife (1987’s Overboard, remade and not improved last year), or a man following a woman he hardly knows to a cabin in the mountains while she’s on a minibreak with someone else (St Elmo’s Fire) look odd. Smart movies also fudge the line between seduction and stalking: in Groundhog Day, Phil (Bill Murray) time travels for the purpose of seducing an unwitting Rita (Andie MacDowell). In Say Anything, the response of Lloyd (John Cusack) to being dumped by Diane (Ione Skye) is to stand outside her house playing the song they once had sex to. This image of Cusack is still regularly used as a symbol of romance, but without the romcom tinted spectacles it is flat-out weird.

Hollywood has always romanticised physical violence and psychological manipulation from men in the name of romance

Defenders of the genre argue that older romantic comedies, often starring Rosalind Russell and Katharine Hepburn, showed women with more agency, and men with less self-entitlement. But Hollywood has always romanticised physical violence and psychological manipulation from men in the name of romance, whether it’s Rhett Butler raping Scarlett O’Hara into happy submission in Gone with the Wind, or Tony Curtis seducing Marilyn Monroe by pretending to be alternately her female friend and a British millionaire in Some Like It Hot.

In You, one of Joe’s favourite references is Elliot, the character played by Michael Caine in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters. Elliot doesn’t just seduce his wife’s sister Lee (Barbara Hershey), he stalks her: “He waits near her apartment and stages a run-in. Brilliant, romantic. Love takes work,” Joe thinks. But one of the more telling moments in the TV series comes when Beck recognises him on the street, after he has been following her for some time. She approaches him and says hello, then apologises for sounding like “a stalker”. Unaware that he has been masturbating outside her house, she is worried that she’s the one who comes across as overly keen.

Women who pursue men in movies are routinely depicted as farcical (Bridget staking out Mark’s parents’ house in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) or psychotic. If Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction had been a man, and Michael Douglas’s a woman, that film could have been a romcom about a man wooing a married woman away from her life of boring domesticity. In Play Misty for Me, Evelyn (Jessica Walter) turns up at Dave’s (Clint Eastwood) office and follows him around town. This behaviour, the film says, should be seen as a red flag. But Evelyn looks like a mere amateur next to the men in Love Actually: Colin Firth pursues a woman he barely knows across France, and Andrew Lincoln secretly films the wife of his best friend and turns up to her home to declare his love for her while her husband is inside. What is psychotic from a woman is romantic from a man. “Girls are taught from a young age that if a boy is mean to you that means he likes you, and men are taught that if a woman seems obsessive that means she’s crazy,”Kepnes argues. The superlative TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend satirises this while also, to a certain extent, endorsing it: after all, the show says, the only kind of woman who would pursue a childhood boyfriend across America is, as the title says, a crazy one.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andrew Lincoln and Keira Knightly in Love Actually.

Some movies have reversed this gender dynamic. In Sleepless in Seattle (written and directed by a woman, the late Nora Ephron), Annie (Meg Ryan) becomes obsessed with Sam (Tom Hanks) after hearing him on the radio. This leads her to research his dead wife, find his address and watch him play with his son, Jonah. The movie ends with Jonah flying to New York to find her, in the belief she is meant to be his new mother. From another screenwriter this could have turned into a horror movie: a bereaved father rescuing his child from a deranged woman. As it’s Ephron, it ends with Ryan and Hanks falling in love.

In While You Were Sleeping, Lucy (Sandra Bullock) develops a crush on a stranger, Peter (Peter Gallagher). When he falls into a coma she allows his family to believe she was his fiancee. The ruse continues even after Peter wakes up and Lucy only confesses the truth at the wedding altar. In the real world, Lucy could be convicted of fraud. In the romcom world, she marries his brother (Bill Pullman).

Both of these movies were big hits, but by reversing the genders they inadvertently exposed the absurdity of romcom tropes. Audiences are very used to accepting men as pursuers, no matter how creepy their pursuit; to see a woman doing the same just looks weird, because it is weird. In Ephron’s next movie, You’ve Got Mail, she reversed the genders back to the more traditional convention, with wealthy bookstore chain owner Joe (Hanks, again) wooing independent shop owner Kathleen (Ryan, again) by pretending to be someone else online. When Kathleen finds out that the man who drove her out of business is her online mystery man, she falls into his arms and says: “I wanted it to be you.” There were, strikingly and predictably, fewer complaints about Hanks’s behaviour in this movie than there were about Ryan’s in Sleepless in Seattle. Kepnes deliberately gave her protagonist the same name as Hanks’ character in You’ve Got Mail: “I’ve watched that movie about 100 times, and everyone finds it romantic – but he is so horrible to her!”

Ephron was one of the earliest screenwriters to cop on to the snooping opportunities provided by the internet. In Sleepless in Seattle, made five years before Google was founded, Annie uses a newspaper’s computer database to investigate Sam’s personal life. In You’ve Got Mail, Joe exploits the anonymity provided by the online world to seduce Kathleen. In both cases, she made it look like a fun lark. Now everyone researches prospective dates, current crushes and exes online, scrolling through their old Facebook photos, checking their Twitter timeline. But as Kepnes shows in You, it is a disarmingly short hop from looking through someone’s Instagram photos to standing outside their house. Post #MeToo, it is easy to knock romcoms for romanticising stalking, but technology has normalised it. The truth is we’re all stalkers now

• You is available on Netflix now. You by Caroline Kepnes is published by Simon & Schuster.