For an idea of how manhood and sexuality have changed in America over the past 50 years, it’s insightful to examine two popular films . In both 1977’s Saturday Night Fever and the just-released No Hard Feelings, the male protagonist is 19 years old.

In both movies , the men encounter older women who are teachers to them and who become love interests. Yet while Stephanie, the female in Saturday Night Fever, offers maturity, wisdom, and an intimacy that comes after the man has done the hard work to appreciate herfully, in No Hard Feelings, Maddie, played by Jennifer Lawrence, is vulgar, promiscuous, and infantile. In 2023, the cure for a man’s ills is not, as in Saturday Night Fever, learning the difficult ropes of true romance. It’s in prostitution and pornography. For his part, the male protagonist in No Hard Feelings is weak, passive, and clumsy. We’re a long way from Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. We’re even a long way from the 1970s.

In Saturday Night Fever, one of the decade's best films, the main character, Tony Manero, famously played by John Travolta, struggles to flourish in an urban environment of dead-end jobs, drugs, and bitter young men. Tony is a dancer, a star at the local disco, and a man filled with raw sensuality. He does not lack for passion, just the proper way to channel it. He meets Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney), an older dancer. Stephanie is not easily impressed, yet she is not negative or rude either. She’s not a modern feminist Mary Sue character like Rey in Star Wars, who can do everything perfectly and has biting contempt for the hapless men around her. She’s far too human for that kind of lazy broadside.

Stephanie and Tony partner together for a dance contest, both learning new moves from each other and pushing the other’s creative boundaries. Stephanie is not interested in Tony romantically, but this changes when all their hard work and practice pass off on the dance floor. In what I consider to be one of the greatest romantic sequences in the history of film, Tony and Stephanie dance perfectly together, climaxing in a dip. The color palette changes from kaleidoscopic to cool blue as the two dancers embrace and then, in slow motion, kiss.

By channeling his passion, not the dance, and submitting himself to the knowledge and wisdom of Stephanie, Tony has become a man. In comparison, Percy in No Hard Feelings is so dorky and helpless that he can barely function. Both he and Tony are 19, yet they are almost like two different species. Percy is so impotent in all areas of life that his parents hire Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence), a sexy older woman, to have sex with him. While Stephanie in Saturday Night Fever presented the challenge of a shrewd and self-confident woman, Maddie is crude, irresponsible, and juvenile. This is progress?

In their book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, psychologists Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette explore the archetypes that make for healthy men. The authors argue that masculinity is made up of four male energies that serve different purposes. The models are king, warrior, magician, and lover. To simplify greatly, men flourish when they attain these models while avoiding the dark side that can come with them.

Films like Saturday Night Fever and No Hard Feelings dive into the energy of the lover archetype, yet both are representative of their times — in the case of No Hard Feelings, sadly so. In the archetype Moore and Gillette celebrate, the lover is expansive and poetical. "Nothing is out of bounds for him." Men in 2023 are boxed in by overprotective parents, the addiction to pornography, and humorless women made brittle by feminism. Today it’s difficult to avoid the negative side of the lover archetype, the "addicted lover," who is obsessively stopping every 3 feet to smell the roses to the point where the rest of life is ignored.

When Percy does finally have a sexual encounter with Maddie — well sort of — it has none of the spiritual power and grace of the dance scene in Saturday Night Live. It’s crude, off-screen, and over quickly. Percy can barely hold a joystick, much less dominate a dance floor. From Tony and Stephanie in the 70s to Percy and Maddie in 2023, it’s been a long and painful devolution.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.