Then there’s Wade. His family is loving, but they have also experienced very little stress on their family system. Water people were the first to arrive in Element City, and their primacy is never questioned. He falls in love with Ember with a gentle naïveté. He keeps insisting that it could work, that fire and water could mix, that everything is going to be okay. There is a moment when he says to Ember—in front of a full crowd of Fire people, nonetheless: “I love you, Ember Lumen. And I’m pretty sure you love me, too.” Only someone with secure attachment—like really secure attachment—could say such a thing.

I don’t always watch reality TV dating shows, but when I do, it’s Love is Blind. It’s absurd, high-drama schadenfreude, but there’s also something very real about watching these imperfect people try to figure out the braintwister that is modern romance. The concept is simple: couples meet and get to know each other through a wall and may only see each other in person once they’ve proposed. If they’ve gotten engaged, sight unseen, they have a month (a month!) to get to the wedding day.

For me, empathy is a deeply spiritual practice. It’s a process of stepping into the shoes of another, of showing up without judgment to what’s happening emotionally in the moment, not only for the person I’m trying to empathize with, but for myself, too. This requires that I be able to feel my own feelings and take responsibility for them while opening to the feelings of the other. This is easy enough when I am trying to empathize with someone I love and share values with. It’s a more challenging practice when my reaction involves fear, hate, disgust, or confusion. 

There’s no evidence witchcraft as a specific religion ever really existed, though as a young teen who would light candles and try to cast spells while blasting the angsty strains of Alanis Morissette, I still can’t help but yearn for a ritualistic practice that literally gave women power. Magic wasn’t really what was being hunted, though: it was any form of power that could belong to a woman, especially if it related to her reproductive abilities.

Get Out is a delightful, genuinely scary “social thriller,” as its director Jordan Peele calls it, that cost $5 million and grossed $172 million. It is 2017’s most profitable film, according to TIME. That’s because Get Out does what every good horror movie should do: it pinpoints something about our culture that makes us feel really uncomfortable and then it makes us feel better about it, all while confirming a moral structure we already agree with.

Blade Runner 2049 depicts a world so steeped in misogyny that the women are mostly either naked and helpless or murderous bitches. The men don’t fare much better: they march along melancholically, covered in blood and dirt, following orders. Some are human, born of mothers, but many are replicants, powerful bioengineered androids created for human use, made to look, act, and even feel convincingly human. This is a world where no one’s body really belongs to them, so loving can truly only mean being a stranger. In this way, Blade Runner 2049 does what the best speculative fiction does: it warns us about the dangers of the world we already live in.

Which is when I realized the true reason women like me love RuPaul’s Drag Race and Queer Eye: we get to watch all of our traditionally feminine anxieties about having a perfect body, a perfect wardrobe, and being a flawless homemaker displaced onto men. We get to feel delighted by the runway looks on drag queens and then judge them savagely, shouting at the screen with a slosh of wine in the safety of our own homes. We get to consume the trappings of femininity we’ve always been sold while projecting the attending anxieties onto men’s bodies instead of our own.

The ghost of George shadows Joe, highlighting what I’ve learned from movies and TV about what I’m supposed to want from romance. You points to the monstrousness of men like George and Friends’ Ross, the men we’re supposed to see as harmless, willfully blinding ourselves to the violence and entitlement seething just beneath the surface. But it doesn’t give me an example of what I could want, if I could step outside of the narrative of possessive, violent romance.

I’m sure contestants can leave whenever they want (and there are quite a few people that we meet in the first episode who we never hear from again) but there’s a distinct feeling that the only way to escape this dystopian dating prison is to propose to someone. And it makes a sort of sense, even within the bananas logic of the Love is Blind universe: getting engaged does feel like the key to escaping the terrible merry-go-round of swiping, meeting, dating, and hearts breaking. Love is Blind appeals to an audience of online daters: people with excessive options paralysis, for whom the next better option just might be around the next corner. Perhaps the heart of the show’s experiment is: If we were forced to commit, could we let go of the anxiety of options?

Perhaps the reason the ocean chooses Moana is that she is excellent at the sort of emotional labour that’s needed to get a huge jerk to do what you want without getting hurt. Throughout the film, Moana employs her super skills of intuition, listening, cajoling, placating, agreeing and being generally cute and non-threatening (not to mention tiny). These skills get her past her angry father, the demigod Maui, the fire-throwing Te Ka, and even the crabulous drag queen Tamatoa, who “loves bragging about how great he is” and can be distracted by a good listener asking the right questions.