10 Things I Hate About You (1999) is undoubtedly one of the most classic teen films ever. It is a fun high school romance set in Seattle about the school bad boy Patrick Verona being paid to date the headstrong and antisocial Kat Stradford. All of this is set up so that Cameron James, a nerdy and awkward transfer student, can date Kat’s sister Bianca, who can only date if Kat does. Kat and Patrick fall in love, but she learns about his bet and their relationship seems to be over. Despite this, he redeems himself and they rekindle their relationship, leaving us with a happy and satisfying ending. But what makes this predictable teen romance different from other teenage rom-coms?
10 Things I Hate About You is loosely based off of the play The Taming Of The Shrew (1550) written by William Shakespeare. The play is set in Padua, Italy, and follows a young woman named Katherina who is ill-tempered and refuses to receive orders from men, therefore being titled as “the shrew.” Due to her personality, no man is willing to marry Katherina, while the opposite is true for her younger sister, Bianca, who is drowning in suitors. Bianca is told that she may only marry after Katherina does, and after many suitors, they finally meet Petruchio who is willing to marry her. Petruchio’s way of handling Katherina’s behavior is by starving and sleep depriving her so she is forced to be more dependent on him, giving her the illusion that he is there for her support. In the end she decides he’s a man worth loving and they marry at the end of the play.
While the play was popularized as a comedy during its time, it is now notoriously considered very sexist because of its expectation of women to obey men, and these sexist stereotypes continued to pop up in the most popular teen movies. While the play doesn’t portray women in a positive light, 10 Things I Hate About You makes intentional changes to the story to represent women in a more accurate and clever way.
Instead, Kat Stradford is portrayed as someone who refuses to take orders from anyone and separates herself from her peers to remain her level of independence. She shuts down the possibility of a relationship because she fears letting her guard down, and when she meets Patrick she feels as though she is safe enough to do so. Instead of controlling her, Patrick immediately starts to develop feelings for Kat, and his way of getting her to open up is by taking interest in her interests, and bonding over the fact that they are both feared by their high school peers. In the end, Kat realizes that maintaining a happy relationship isn’t a loss of self control, and that she can still remain independent while having someone she can lean on. In the words of Savannah Perkins 26′, “Kat is very vulnerable, and Patrick responds to her vulnerability without being super macho, but instead supportive.”
In other words, The Taming Of The Shrew is about a woman who needs to give herself to a man and obey him completely, while 10 Things I Hate About You is about a headstrong young woman who learns that she can fall in love while still being her own person.
What 10 Things I Hate About You does differently from other teen rom-coms, is that it doesn’t just focus on the romance, but also focuses on changing the stereotype of how femininity is expected to look. So, if you can’t think of 10 reasons to watch this movie, there’s one.
