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ljwritesValentine's day was lazy and wonderful. I spent it with the spouse doing nothing productive or glamorous, sleeping in, playing the mobile game Princess Rush side by side (ironically it's a game about fairy-tale princesses beating up on Prince Charming), and eating homemade canafe for dinner while watching Deep Space Nine. As I once told a friend, marriage for me is like having a sleepover every night with the best friend I ever had. I am grateful every day that I have such a wonderful relationship with such a wonderful person.
The awesome that is our marriage is a direct result of my husband and I having feminist beliefs. I use "feminism" here in the primary dictionary sense of gender-egalitarian thought. It also works in the sense Mary Shear wrote, "the radical notion that women are people." I couldn't have married my husband, nor would our marriage be so happy, if it weren't for this idea. Let me count the ways:
1. Feminism made our marriage possible
When I started dating my now-husband Mark, I assumed it would never last. I thought it would go on for a few months, maybe a year, and then we'd go our separate ways. I am older than he is, have had more education, and hold a professional degree where he doesn't. Everything I had been taught--the traditional ideas I had been brought up with--said I should marry an older man who had at least as much schooling as I did and had better earning power. In fact I was originally resistant to Mark's advances because I thought I was too old, at twenty-nine, to be dating someone I would not be marrying. Eventually my attraction overwhelmed me and I asked him out first, thinking I'd get these feelings out of my system and let the relationship run its course. But I still didn't think he was marriage material.
It was only later, when I realized I was in love with this guy and these feelings were only growing stronger, that I dared to question my ideas about marriage. Why was it so important that I marry someone "superior" to me? Was I somehow better than Mark because I earned more than he did? Was it really true that marriage could only be happy if the man was dominant?
I'd identified as a feminist since at least college, but this was the first time I applied feminist ideas to a major life decision. If I had not been exposed to feminist ideas I would not have been able to question the conventional assumptions that had been drilled into my head since I was a child. Four years into the relationship, I decided this was the man I wanted to spend my life with, convention be damned.
Convention wasn't so easily dismissed, however. It had a formidable presence in my life in the person of my father, as loud a proponent of hypergamy as you ever saw. I fought a pitched emotional and verbal, and later physical, battle with him about the marriage, fleeing the house at one point to get away. The experience reminded me of the connection between patriarchy and abuse, about how my father felt entitled to control my choices despite the fact that I was an adult. Of course my father is a narcissist who sees other people as his extensions and tools, but patriarchal ideas gave him the language to justify and reinforce his control of me. Breaking free of those holds to marry Mark was a political as well as personal liberation.
2. Feminism gives us flexibility in our life arrangements
Unlike a fairy tale, our lives went on after the wedding march faded away. The idea that we were equals, not bound to rigid gender roles but free to figure out our own lives, helped us keep the "happy" in our "happily ever after." There was a period when I stayed at home and did most of the housework while he worked outside the home; that has now changed, as I will discuss below. There was never a sense that it was wrong either way, that I had to stay at home and he had to work in an office, or that keeping house was my job. At each point in our life together we did what worked for us, given our situation at the time.
The fact that our roles were not determined by our genders means that neither of us took anything for granted, and everything is up for conversation. If I need him to do the dishes, or if he needs me to pick up extra work to make ends meet, that's something we can ask of each other and not a source of shame. This is our life we're building, after all, not someone else's conception of what married life should look like.
All this makes us sound like we're some sort of gender-egalitarian New Types who don't feel the pull of the society we live in. Not so: I had plenty of internal arguments with the inner critic that told me housework is my job and something is wrong with me if I need my husband to help me. Similarly, now that my husband is out of a job he fights a sense of inadequacy that his wife is earning the regular income that we depend on. We are the products of a sexist society, after all, and as a result we have internalized ideas about what a man or a woman should be like. Our self-conception as equal partners helps us push back against those traditional gender roles when they don't work for us.
3. Feminism gave us the freedom to pursue our dreams and talents
This flexibility in arranging our lives together means we also have freedom to shape our individual lives. After much talk and contemplation, my husband Mark quit his job about a year into our marriage to pursue a new career in translation and game publishing. It was something we had discussed before we married, and I gave him my full blessing. I knew he hated his corporate job, and I made enough for the two of us. Besides, Mark's working from home would give him the flexibility to take the primary responsibility for child care if we had children, something he is sure he wants to do and I'm sure I don't. It may sound horrifying to folk who believe following gender roles is the key to happiness, but this is a plan that works for us given the lives we lead and the people we are.
This isn't to say that everyone necessarily has to go against gender roles in order to make a feminist statement or whatever, far from it. Most heterosexual couples are probably comfortable with traditional gender roles. The one-breadwinner family may be increasingly rare, but the brunt of earning an income falls on the husband in many cases, while childcare and housework are women's primary duties in many marriages. That's fine by me. All I'm saying is that family roles should be shaped to the individuals and families involved, rather than ideas about gender that might or might not be adaptive. Whether for social or biological reasons, and I'm guessing both play a role, traditional roles do work for a large number of families and I'm aware that my husband and I are outliers in this regard.
However, I do think that even happily traditional families could use some flexibility. Even the most macho man in the world might want to spend more time with his kids, and even the June Cleaver-est woman ever might have interests outside the home. Taking family roles as negotiable and malleable, not a God- or nature-ordained absolute, opens families up for conversations about their needs and wants. Feminism is a huge boon for atypical men and women like Mark and me, to say nothing of same-sex or genderqueer couples who need a whole new template for managing relationships. It could also help out more traditional couples, too.
4. Feminism lets us relate to each other as human beings.
The greatest benefit of feminism in our relationship is perhaps the least tangible. Remember Shear's definition of feminism above, the notion that women are people? I believe that true gender egalitarianism is similarly humanizing for men. Just as women in feminist thought are no longer just objects to satisfy male sexuality or vessels to bear offspring, men should similarly be more than a paycheck or a status symbol. That's not to say that childbirth or work or any of the rest is bad. I only mean that human beings are more than the sum of their utility and no person should be treated as a tool to fulfill some desire. Only when we relate to each other as human beings can we truly talk, rather than haggle.
I think that's the basic reason why Mark and I have a good relationship, that we see each other as people--as ends in ourselves and not the means for some other end, to use Kant's formulation. Neither of us sees the other as being here to fulfill gender-based functions, so for me Mark's hating his job wasn't something to be dismissed with "You're a man, and a man takes care of his family." That's not to say the decision we made was the only valid or moral one, but rather that our decision was based on the assumption that Mark's well-being and dreams matter because he matters, for his own sake.
Similarly, our relationship worked in the first place because Mark saw me as a person. I still cherish the way he first told me he loved me, almost seven years ago now. It was a beautifully heartfelt confession where he made himself completely vulnerable, telling me exactly how he felt and what he wanted, then left the choice to me. He didn't try to game me, searching for some code or cheat that would make me love him. He didn't obsess over what women want under the assumption that we're alien creatures who want something radically different from what human beings (read: men) want. He was truthful and decent. He put himself out there. He fell in love with me for the person I was, and I fell in love with the person he was.
Some might say all this has little to do with feminism, that it's about being a good person, and about love. I agree that in the end love and human decency are the only things that matter. That's why you don't have to be a social justice crusader to be a good person, and why being a feminist doesn't excuse you from ethical obligations. Feminism is one of the means to be a decent person, not an end in itself.
The thing is, sometimes society and history can cloud our view of what it means to be a good person, whom we can love, and how we love. Plenty of slave owners thought owning slaves was the loving thing to do. The great insight of the modern social justice movements is that social systems--racism, sexism, ableism, classism, and more--can hold good people back from the fullness of their decency. Between men and women, similarly, even good men and women in love could be made miserable because of ingrained gender assumptions, seeing each other as a man or a woman first and not a full person who might not fit within those lines. For Mark and me, feminism provided the tools to see past those gender expectations to the individual.
These are the gifts feminist thought gave us in our relationship: The possibility of a relationship starting int he first place, flexibility in assigning family roles, freedom to be ourselves, and the ability to relate to each other as human beings. Of all the reasons for me to be a feminist, this is the most selfish and the most fulfilling, that I was able to muster the courage to make a lifelong commitment to the love of my life, and to shape our lives in a way that brings us both joy. We are two imperfect people trying to build our lives in a way that works for us, and we are helped every day in that effort by the radical notion that we are both human beings.
The awesome that is our marriage is a direct result of my husband and I having feminist beliefs. I use "feminism" here in the primary dictionary sense of gender-egalitarian thought. It also works in the sense Mary Shear wrote, "the radical notion that women are people." I couldn't have married my husband, nor would our marriage be so happy, if it weren't for this idea. Let me count the ways:
1. Feminism made our marriage possible
When I started dating my now-husband Mark, I assumed it would never last. I thought it would go on for a few months, maybe a year, and then we'd go our separate ways. I am older than he is, have had more education, and hold a professional degree where he doesn't. Everything I had been taught--the traditional ideas I had been brought up with--said I should marry an older man who had at least as much schooling as I did and had better earning power. In fact I was originally resistant to Mark's advances because I thought I was too old, at twenty-nine, to be dating someone I would not be marrying. Eventually my attraction overwhelmed me and I asked him out first, thinking I'd get these feelings out of my system and let the relationship run its course. But I still didn't think he was marriage material.
It was only later, when I realized I was in love with this guy and these feelings were only growing stronger, that I dared to question my ideas about marriage. Why was it so important that I marry someone "superior" to me? Was I somehow better than Mark because I earned more than he did? Was it really true that marriage could only be happy if the man was dominant?
I'd identified as a feminist since at least college, but this was the first time I applied feminist ideas to a major life decision. If I had not been exposed to feminist ideas I would not have been able to question the conventional assumptions that had been drilled into my head since I was a child. Four years into the relationship, I decided this was the man I wanted to spend my life with, convention be damned.
Convention wasn't so easily dismissed, however. It had a formidable presence in my life in the person of my father, as loud a proponent of hypergamy as you ever saw. I fought a pitched emotional and verbal, and later physical, battle with him about the marriage, fleeing the house at one point to get away. The experience reminded me of the connection between patriarchy and abuse, about how my father felt entitled to control my choices despite the fact that I was an adult. Of course my father is a narcissist who sees other people as his extensions and tools, but patriarchal ideas gave him the language to justify and reinforce his control of me. Breaking free of those holds to marry Mark was a political as well as personal liberation.
2. Feminism gives us flexibility in our life arrangements
Unlike a fairy tale, our lives went on after the wedding march faded away. The idea that we were equals, not bound to rigid gender roles but free to figure out our own lives, helped us keep the "happy" in our "happily ever after." There was a period when I stayed at home and did most of the housework while he worked outside the home; that has now changed, as I will discuss below. There was never a sense that it was wrong either way, that I had to stay at home and he had to work in an office, or that keeping house was my job. At each point in our life together we did what worked for us, given our situation at the time.
The fact that our roles were not determined by our genders means that neither of us took anything for granted, and everything is up for conversation. If I need him to do the dishes, or if he needs me to pick up extra work to make ends meet, that's something we can ask of each other and not a source of shame. This is our life we're building, after all, not someone else's conception of what married life should look like.
All this makes us sound like we're some sort of gender-egalitarian New Types who don't feel the pull of the society we live in. Not so: I had plenty of internal arguments with the inner critic that told me housework is my job and something is wrong with me if I need my husband to help me. Similarly, now that my husband is out of a job he fights a sense of inadequacy that his wife is earning the regular income that we depend on. We are the products of a sexist society, after all, and as a result we have internalized ideas about what a man or a woman should be like. Our self-conception as equal partners helps us push back against those traditional gender roles when they don't work for us.
3. Feminism gave us the freedom to pursue our dreams and talents
This flexibility in arranging our lives together means we also have freedom to shape our individual lives. After much talk and contemplation, my husband Mark quit his job about a year into our marriage to pursue a new career in translation and game publishing. It was something we had discussed before we married, and I gave him my full blessing. I knew he hated his corporate job, and I made enough for the two of us. Besides, Mark's working from home would give him the flexibility to take the primary responsibility for child care if we had children, something he is sure he wants to do and I'm sure I don't. It may sound horrifying to folk who believe following gender roles is the key to happiness, but this is a plan that works for us given the lives we lead and the people we are.
This isn't to say that everyone necessarily has to go against gender roles in order to make a feminist statement or whatever, far from it. Most heterosexual couples are probably comfortable with traditional gender roles. The one-breadwinner family may be increasingly rare, but the brunt of earning an income falls on the husband in many cases, while childcare and housework are women's primary duties in many marriages. That's fine by me. All I'm saying is that family roles should be shaped to the individuals and families involved, rather than ideas about gender that might or might not be adaptive. Whether for social or biological reasons, and I'm guessing both play a role, traditional roles do work for a large number of families and I'm aware that my husband and I are outliers in this regard.
However, I do think that even happily traditional families could use some flexibility. Even the most macho man in the world might want to spend more time with his kids, and even the June Cleaver-est woman ever might have interests outside the home. Taking family roles as negotiable and malleable, not a God- or nature-ordained absolute, opens families up for conversations about their needs and wants. Feminism is a huge boon for atypical men and women like Mark and me, to say nothing of same-sex or genderqueer couples who need a whole new template for managing relationships. It could also help out more traditional couples, too.
4. Feminism lets us relate to each other as human beings.
The greatest benefit of feminism in our relationship is perhaps the least tangible. Remember Shear's definition of feminism above, the notion that women are people? I believe that true gender egalitarianism is similarly humanizing for men. Just as women in feminist thought are no longer just objects to satisfy male sexuality or vessels to bear offspring, men should similarly be more than a paycheck or a status symbol. That's not to say that childbirth or work or any of the rest is bad. I only mean that human beings are more than the sum of their utility and no person should be treated as a tool to fulfill some desire. Only when we relate to each other as human beings can we truly talk, rather than haggle.
I think that's the basic reason why Mark and I have a good relationship, that we see each other as people--as ends in ourselves and not the means for some other end, to use Kant's formulation. Neither of us sees the other as being here to fulfill gender-based functions, so for me Mark's hating his job wasn't something to be dismissed with "You're a man, and a man takes care of his family." That's not to say the decision we made was the only valid or moral one, but rather that our decision was based on the assumption that Mark's well-being and dreams matter because he matters, for his own sake.
Similarly, our relationship worked in the first place because Mark saw me as a person. I still cherish the way he first told me he loved me, almost seven years ago now. It was a beautifully heartfelt confession where he made himself completely vulnerable, telling me exactly how he felt and what he wanted, then left the choice to me. He didn't try to game me, searching for some code or cheat that would make me love him. He didn't obsess over what women want under the assumption that we're alien creatures who want something radically different from what human beings (read: men) want. He was truthful and decent. He put himself out there. He fell in love with me for the person I was, and I fell in love with the person he was.
Some might say all this has little to do with feminism, that it's about being a good person, and about love. I agree that in the end love and human decency are the only things that matter. That's why you don't have to be a social justice crusader to be a good person, and why being a feminist doesn't excuse you from ethical obligations. Feminism is one of the means to be a decent person, not an end in itself.
The thing is, sometimes society and history can cloud our view of what it means to be a good person, whom we can love, and how we love. Plenty of slave owners thought owning slaves was the loving thing to do. The great insight of the modern social justice movements is that social systems--racism, sexism, ableism, classism, and more--can hold good people back from the fullness of their decency. Between men and women, similarly, even good men and women in love could be made miserable because of ingrained gender assumptions, seeing each other as a man or a woman first and not a full person who might not fit within those lines. For Mark and me, feminism provided the tools to see past those gender expectations to the individual.
These are the gifts feminist thought gave us in our relationship: The possibility of a relationship starting int he first place, flexibility in assigning family roles, freedom to be ourselves, and the ability to relate to each other as human beings. Of all the reasons for me to be a feminist, this is the most selfish and the most fulfilling, that I was able to muster the courage to make a lifelong commitment to the love of my life, and to shape our lives in a way that brings us both joy. We are two imperfect people trying to build our lives in a way that works for us, and we are helped every day in that effort by the radical notion that we are both human beings.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-16 01:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-16 04:01 pm (UTC)