oursin | Troubling trope (Reply)

I was bothered by reading this the other day: U Be Dead is a TV drama based on the real-life case of a stalker and her victims.

This seems to me one of those tropes where the fictive presentation of same is inversely proportional to its real-life occurrence - see also, for another example, The Story of Adele H, also 'based on a true-life case'.

And I have been thinking that (probably) most rl instances of stalking are men-on-women. But the other way round seems to be more popular as a narrative trope (cf the Saracen lady who pursued her crusader from Jerusalem to London knowing only his name and whence he came).

And then it came to me while cleaning the kitchen today -

Woman stalking man = UNNATURAL!!! she is pathetic creature whom nobody could actually love anyway. The very fact that she is interested in a man who barely recognises her existence is a clear sign of pathology and her utter failure to conform to appropriate feminine role of waiting around like a flower for a bee to pollinate it.*

So the trope has creepy yet pathetic vibes.

Man stalking woman = ROMANCE!!! book after book and movie after movie and song after song tell us that if he only persists long enough in hounding her footsteps, making unwanted declarations, leaving embarrassing gifts, etc, she will melt into his arms, because Teh Wymmynz really like creepy stalker-like manifestations of devotion from men whose existence they have barely noticed. Or have noticed only to shudder.

Or am I missing something here?

*Except in the few cases when she is pursuing some male with whom there already exists a state of reciprocal passion but from whom she has been torn apart by events beyond either of their control, see Saracen lady above, at least in the version in Thomas B Costain's The Black Rose.