“You’re just another victim.”
-House of Pain
Millions of American women
will celebrate Valentine’s Day Friday with their boyfriends, husbands
and significant others, all the while completely oblivious to how oppressive,
degrading and dangerous this holiday is.
Valentine’s Day, of course,
aims at celebrating romance – that complex dance between two people falling
in love. What most women don’t realize is that romance is an unnatural
idea created by patriarchal institutions to keep women in their place.
Gloria Steinem, long-time
feminist activist, is one of the few people to see through the surface
of romance to expose the debilitating undercurrents it entails. She describes
the horrors of romance in her 1992 book, Revolution From Within.
Romance, according to Steinem,
is little more than a political ideology which reinforces the patriarchy.
“Romance itself,” she writes, “serves a larger political
purpose by offering at least a temporary reward for gender roles and threatening
rebels with loneliness and rejection.”
It’s so obvious when you think
about it – romance is a form of blackmail. Either conform to the patriarchy
or forget about having any more dates. What an insidious plot! But it
gets even worse.
“(Romance) also minimizes
the very anti-patriarchal and revolutionary possibility that women and
men will realize each other’s shared humanity when we are together physically
for the sexual and procreative purposes society needs.”
Whew! Steinem’s hit the mother
lode. Now it’s clear why men never quite seemed human. It could have been
just a misunderstanding, but now Steinem has proven it’s the oppressive
ideology of romance. Now you know too – pass it on.
By now you might be thinking
something’s strange here. Some women don’t seem to find romance such a
bad thing. A few even seem to be enjoying it! How could that be? Leave
it to Steinem to peer into our hearts and diagnose the true problem.
“The Roman ‘bread and
circuses’ way of keeping the masses happy – and the French saying that
‘marriage is the only adventure open to the middle class’ – might now
be updated. The circus of romance distracts us with what is, from society’s
point of view, a safe adventure.”
Romance is like a bad sitcom.
It lulls you to sleep so you forget how depressing the evening news was
and makes you forget you’re dating evil male oppressors. Love truly is
blind!
Romance does something far
worse than merely further women’s oppression, however. It turns them into
bloodthirsty killers. It’s amazing no one noticed the connection before.
“Though women mainly
become violent in self-defense or in defense of their children, the power
of romantic obsession is so great – and women are so much more subject
to it – that even ‘feminine’ nonviolent conditioning can be overcome.
When women do commit violent crimes, they are even more likely than a
man’s to be attributable to romance rather than economics, whether that
means the rare crime in which a woman kills out of jealousy or the more
frequent one in which a woman is an accessory to a crime initiated by
her husband or lover.”
What an incredible explanation
for violent crime by women. Why do some women kill? Romance made them
do it. Sure beats the Twinkie defense, though the famous Fuhrman-frame
up is still far and away the best answer.
This does help explain an
interesting result of studies of violence between couples. Researchers
such as Richard Gelles report that women and men tend to commit violent
acts against each other at almost identical rates. This is a mystifying
result until you realize both are slaves to the romantic impulse. Then
it all starts to fit together.
Don’t think you’re getting
off easy if you’re gay or lesbian. The problem with gays and lesbians,
according to Steinem, is that not only do they internalize the bad romantic
habits their parents might have engaged in, but some gay and lesbian couples
exaggerate romantic gender roles.
“Sometimes, gender roles
produce an exaggerated version known as doubling, in which two men together
become twice as aggressive, unempathetic, unavailable for intimacy, but
promiscuous about sex; or two women together may become twice as passive,
dependent on one another, and focused on intimacy, with or without sex.”
So this Valentine’s Day remember
– you may think you’re an independent woman and you may even think women
have made enormous progress over the last 30 years, but as far as Steinem’s
concerned, you’re just another victim.