Another Anti-Feminist Rant from an Ignorant Journalist

Yesterday, on the day of my first wedding anniversary, my friend Kola sent me an article titled "Why Your Marriage Sucks." I don't know whether this was a coincidence or he was trying to tell me something, but I decided to read the article anyway. As I suspected, this piece by Amanda Fortini turned out to be yet anothere instance of anti-feminist propaganda aimed at convincing women that if they work and have careers, this will necessarily be horribly detrimental to their personal lives.

Fortini, an author who is "bored . .  . by the man-hating clichés of old-style feminism" tries hard to convince herself that

we currently inhabit a vast and bleak landscape of marital discontent.

As many ignorant anti-feminists have done before her, this journalist disregards the vast body of XIXth century literature dedicated, in a great degree, to demonstrating that marital discontent is in no way an invention of the XXI century. She insists that

Contemporary marriage, all signs would indicate, is a long, tedious slog toward sex-starved paunchiness via an endless, embittering negotiation of banalities: who will shuttle the kids, walk the dog, prepare the meals, wash the laundry.

Contrary to all evidence, Fortini seems to believe that this kind of relationships is a very modern invention. Of course, she needs to think that in order to make her most important point: since women started having careers, marriage has been doomed. Fortini's ravings about the detrimental effects of cell phones and work obligations tell us less about any general tendencies that can be observed in our society than about her own miserable personal life and her exceptional ignorance about the subjected that she, for some unfathomable reason, feels prepared to tackle:

When the bureaucratic nightmare that is everyday life has become so intrusive, when both parents work out of the home, the circumstances that allow for intimacy and passion are imperiled. When are we to form deep connections? How and where is this hot sex supposed to happen? You can't stay up all night when you have to wake up and go to work the next day; no one is going to grant you a leave of absence for passion. We have, you might say, been forced to adapt to a world that is hostile to romance, our lives full of ever-clamoring responsibilities: bills to pay, BlackBerrys to monitor, e-mails to answer.

Had Fortini done even the minimal research required to write a marginally well-informed article on this subject, she would know that the only generation of Americans that overwhelmingly practiced (in the 50ies and early 60ies) the format of marriage where a woman was a perennial housekeeper was excruciatingly miserable in marriage.  (See, for example, Betty Friedan's classic study The Feminine Mystique.) The idea that people who have lives outside of home are somehow less capable of forming deep connections than people whose entire sphere of interests is limited to doing the laundry and washing the dishes is risible. It is equally ridiculous to suggest that the need to monitor one's BlackBerry would prevent people who are passionately in love from having sex. (I can easily believe, however, that checking one's e-mails might be a lot more attractive to any one than having any kind of interaction with Fortini.)

Fortini's deeply puritanical attitude to human sexuality becomes evident in the following pronouncement:

If you want an intense, consuming passion, you're probably not going to be as productive, to put it in mundane terms.

If Fortini were at least a little less ignorant than she obviously is, she would know that her ideas of passion robbing us of energy needed to be "productive" have long-standing roots in Puritanic thought. Volumes have been written on the significance of the produtivity and money exchange terminology being applied to sexual activities by the English-speaking protestants. As much as this journalist wants to believe that she has invented the wheel here, that is not the case. For centuries, her fellow Puritans have been referring to sex in exactly the same terms.

Whenever one turns these days, there are scores of articles by people who attempt to explain their own miserable lives through some invented societal trends. It would have been a lot more honest on Fortini's part to write simply: "People, my personal life sucks. Can anybody tell me why?" At least then her article might have had some positive effect. As it is, it just makes her look pathetic and ridiculous.

Biblical Marriage: A Hilarious Video

While my students were writing their mini-quiz, I was surfing the Internet and discovered the following video. Only a super human effort of willpower helped me avoid roaring with laughter. Enjoy!

I'm So Sorry for Poor Tiger Woods

Poor Tiger Woods just announced that he is taking an indefnite break from golfing. The recent media howling around this great sportsman has been nothing short of disgraceful. People are so horrible to him, and why? Just because he cheated on one Barbie doll with a dozen or so other Barbie dolls.

Of course, if the initial Barbie doll divorces him, he will lose most of his hard-earned money. As a result, he must now withdraw from playing golf and dedicate himself to mending fences with the Barbie doll # 1 who is using this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to renegotiate her prenuptial agreement. Imagine what kind of an individual races to see her attorney as soon as she gleefully discovers that now she has the perfect excuse to milk her rich and famous husband for even more money.

Tiger Woods had to issue a statement that sounds beyond hilarious to my non-American ear. It starts as follows: "I am deeply aware of the disappointment and hurt that my infidelity has caused to so many people." I haven't heard anything quite so insane for a while. People who can be "hurt" by the infidelity of some one they have no relationship with are not normal. They need to go and get a life immediately.

These celebrity marriages are a total joke. They revolve around nothing other than money, fame, prestige, and who gets to milk the rich person for more cash. It sickens me that the very people who follow these stories on the news with so much dedication preach about the sanctity of marriage and vote against gay rights. Come on, people. Sanctity of marriage, my ass.

Bride's Special Day

I just encountered the following description on the site of a wedding organizer:

Thank You for looking me up. Hopefully this site will answer some of your questions about what I offer, rates and what other people have thought about my work. I love this job ~ Helping a bride organize her most special day is what I do. I have also done many wedding ceremonies. So if you're not having a traditional church ceremony let me know.

Get it? Helping a BRIDE organize HER special day. Evidently, there are people who do not find this weird, perplexing, or offensive. I mean, why is the bride organizing this on her own? is she getting married to herself? Or is this supposed to be a woman's job somehow? And why is it HER special day? What kind of day is is supposed to be for the groom? Non-special? Routine? Why on earth would anybody want to participate in a marriage ceremony that is special to only one of the people?


Every day we are bombarded by TV shows, movies, websites, articles, etc. that tell us how women are desperate to get married and men are either reluctant or, at best, indifferent. So many women start believing this unhealthy hype and become convinced that it is their sacred obligation to hunt for a proposal, kill herself organizing an elaborate wedding, and tolerate a man who is not all that invested into this whole thing. My question is why don't more people find all this profoundly humiliating?

The Groom on Top

 Notice how the groom's information is placed above the bride's? I've searched many of these marriage application forms and for the most part they look like this, with the groom sitting consistently on top of the bride, or, in the best of cases, the bride's and the groom's information sitting next to each other. It would only be fair to have a couple of application forms where the bride would be on top, but somehow they are nowhere to be found.

 

So what good can any one expect from an institution that puts a woman in a secondary, subservient position from the very beginning? And don't even start me on the barbaric custom where women abdicate their own last names in order to signal that they are a man's property.

Mothers and Weddings

When I was getting married (many many years ago), my mother took me shopping for a wedding dress. Since I had no interest in the dress, the wedding, or the marriage itself, it was entirely my mother's project and she was passionately invested in it. So while she was flying around the wedding-gown store, snatching dresses, throwing them down, criticizing gowns for not being good enough and me for not being interested enough, I had the following conversation with the store owner.

Store owner: Your mother-in-law is a very difficult person.
Me: Oh, it isn't my mother-in-law. It's my mother.
Store owner: Poor child! If this is how your mother treats you, I can't imagine what your mother-in-law should be like.

The point of this little anecdote is that often mothers have profoundly unhealthy attitudes to their daughters' weddings. This tendency is especially strong in cases of women who arrive at middle age with no life of their own. I often see my friends' mothers go completely nuts over their daughters' weddings. We live in a culture that repeats obssessively how a wedding is a most important day of a woman's life (which sounds prety scary. Does it mean that it's all downhill after that? That nothing of importance will ever happen to you again?). For the most part, women come out of weddings profoundly disappointed. The actuall wedding day turns into being all about the invitations, the menu, the center-piece, and the myriad little details that are boring, annoying , and have nothing to do with love and romance.

Women feel cheated out of this profound, crucial and life-changing experience that they were promised on a wedding day. So when their daughters get married, they see it as an opportunity to relive the experience and finally try to make it right. And, of course, it still doesn't work because they way weddings are traditionally envisioned, organized and experienced can only lead to disappontment and frustration.

Then again, there are always the granddaughters.

Marriage

As we all know, marriage is an institution that is beneficial to men and detrimental to women. Married men live longer than single men, while married women live shorter lives than married women. Married women still do most household chores for the family, so while men gain a cleaner and a cook, married women lose time and energy needed to serve two people instead of one. As Susan Faludi demonstrated in her great book Backlash (which reads like a mystery novel, so I highly recommend to any one), single men suffer a much higher rate of depression and neurosis than married men because of their single status. Single women, however, suffer from depression due to their single status a lot less than single men.

Since the institution of marriage is so detrimental to women and beneficial to men, ideological devices needed to be created in order to make it seem desirable to women. In our societies, marriage is presented as the only way for a woman to gain an acceptable status and a certain legitimacy as a member of society and a representative of her gender. We are bombarded with TV shows, movies, articles, books, etc. that show us an endless succession of women desperate for a marriage proposal. Why that proposal is a good and a necessary thing for a woman is never explained. The way ideology works is by presenting something as simply existing. As a result, it never occurs to most people to question why these movie and book characters are so desperate to enter an institution that will shorten their life span and bring them a lot more boring housework.

These ideological devices often go to ridiculous lengths to make their point. We have all watched Sex and the City, a profoundly patriarchal show that has no connection to reality. In real life, beautiful accomplished women like the characters of this show receive marriage proposals by the bucketful from a very early age to the day when they die. Never would women like Carrie, Miranda and Samantha have to humiliate themselves for the sake of getting some loser to validate their existence by an offer of a relationship. Still, the television and the movies create an alternative reality where women are desperate to get a proposal pretty much from anybody. As a result, women see themselves as incomplete without being married and consent to getting married so much more readily.

Of course, there is always another side to this story. Women would not participate in the "get-married-or-society-will-see-you-as-worthless" ideology if they didn't gain something from it. Marriage is such a nifty little institution that it manages to accomodate everyone. What women as a group gain from it occurs precisely at the point where they lose something else. We have known at least starting with Aristotle that human beings are social animals. We all need to feel socially accepted and validated by our peers. Getting married is pretty much the only way for a woman to feel that she has been successful as a member of society and a representative of her gender. As limiting as this is, it is also very easy. Proving your social value through working, through having a career, through having enough money to maintain yourself and your family (which is the only way that men have to prove their social and gender worth) is a lifelong enterprise. It is something you have to engage in on a daily basis. No matter how successful you were yesterday, if you lose your job today, you will feel like a lesser citizen and a lesser male. Getting married, however, is a one-time thing. You do it once, prove your worth as a member of society and a woman, and you are pretty much done. If you lose your job, or fail to graduate, for example, it will be painful for you, but no woman (that I know of, at least) feels less of a woman because of unemployment.