How could anyone view this movie as romantic?

Rating: 4/10 (4 December 2015)

I had the pleasure of watching Pretty Woman for the first time a few nights ago. I came away from it absolutely flabbergasted, trying to figure out what the people of 1990 could have possibly seen in this movie as appealing.
I've seen other reviews. People go for the easy shots, saying that it's "hokey", that Julia Roberts is too pretty for a hooker, but then people move past that and talk about how much they love the movie anyway. No one seems interested in discussing the absolutely horrifying implications about love and relationships that this movie presents.
But first, I do have positive things to say about the lead actors. Julia Roberts is adorable (and I'm not normally a fan of hers), and her cute, fish-out-of-waterness is really the only thing that can make this movie tolerable. And as for Richard Gere -- well, I'm absolutely delighted that he is no longer appearing in movies.
The idea that this is a love story is absurd. There is no love, here. Gere's character of Edward is acquiring a woman to suit his every need. And Roberts' hooker Vivian would have gone through the exact same experience with literally any rich man. Because Edward is literally any rich man. He has absolutely no discernible personality beyond doing generic rich person things. There is a peculiar escalation of culture throughout the movie. It starts with "I Love Lucy" in the hotel room, moving up into dinner parties, the opera (which Edward claims to be part of his soul, although his passion for it never comes up again), polo (does anyone actually do that?), and a particularly laughable scene of him reading to Vivian from a book of "Shakespeare's Quotations". That last one actually makes a great metaphor for Edward's character. He is a book of quotations without a hint of an actual play.
Vivian is a terrible prostitute. But really, that's not fair, because she's not a prostitute at all. Apart from her clothes, Vivian has nothing about her to suggest a life of prostitution. At no point in the movie is anything said to suggest her past sexual activity. There is no pimp, no past john returning for another go. She doesn't even get cat-called like the other anonymous hookers seen on the street in the film's opening. No, instead we get a conveniently monogamous atmosphere between Vivian and Edward, where we don't even see any sexual contact between them until they've fallen properly "in love". But there was sexual contact; that's important to remember. It's important to remember that when he says "I never treated you like a prostitute," that he has, in fact, been paying her for sex. I have to wonder what qualifies as treating a woman like a prostitute in his twisted mind.
This movie is terribly unfair to prostitutes. Not just because it whitewashes the vulnerable woman actually suffering on the streets with a cute Cinderella story, but it's also unfair to the legitimate, independent, professional escorts, who are being represented by a doe-eyed sugar-daddy-seeker who thinks she's driving a hard bargain by charging a multimillionaire $300 a night.
Being a prostitute is the least relevant part of Vivian's character, because she conveniently solves Edward's every problem: from giving him directions, to showing him how to drive a stick-shift (insert innuendo here), to helping him tie a tie (yes, the man who has been wealthy his whole life and spends all his time in high-powered business meetings doesn't know how to tie a tie). Edward treats Vivian as an asset, and doesn't show any real emotion throughout the movie. Vivian likes money, and she conveniently falls for the guy who provides that money and attends to her every need.
There is no romance here.