vile day

If there's reason to hate Valentine's day, surely it's due to the women who peddle gendered crap. Take, for instance, a story titled "Cracking the Cupid Code" in today's Boston Globe. Monique Doyle Spencer clues us in on how "women" see Valentine's Day:

[W]omen use V-Day as the crystal ball of your fate. They peer into it and look for the Three Signs of Your Doom. First, the gift you give is gravely less expensive than the one you were given. Second, your gift is not wrapped. Third, you give an Idiot gift. My own husband gave me a duplicate pair of cheap earrings I already have "because you like them so much."

She also gives us such gems as:

If you send her a dozen roses, be sure to send them to her workplace. Making her female coworkers feel bad will delight her.

and

Do not, under any circumstances, put any gift in a ring-shaped box. Even if you buy her the biggest diamond earrings in the solar system, you must still remove them from their ring-like box. Otherwise, you will hear the words Y-E-S, Y-E-N-T-A, A-I-S-L-E, and V-E-I-L. Avoid taking her to N-E-V-A-D-A for the same reason.

Ugh. this is supposed to be humorous, but it's just nauseating. Spencer then proceeds to advise against shopping at Victoria's Secret unless you're at least engaged (huh?), but says you still have to give a "romantic" gift if you give lingerie, like a book of poetry.

Folks, not all women delight in romance novel trash, being petty and making others jealous. All this after an oh-so-enlightening story yesterday ("Hooking Up Is the Rage, But Is It Healthy?") about how hooking up is bad for girls because they are more emotionally attached to sex than guys (that story also would have you believe that the hook-up trend is so prevalent that no one young has relationships, yet the only people interviewed are two women in *gasp* relationships).

Oh, Globe, you really don't know what the kids are up to these days, do you?

Anyhow, more power to people who enjoyed a happy, sappy day, today or any other day, regardless of gender (I'm so sending flowers, giving lingerie and putting something in a ring-like box for some boy next year). But me, I'd prefer a pleasant surprise any other day of the year. At least tomorrow brings the joys of half-price chocolates. Mmm, chocolate.

nonmarital bliss

I was editing a profile of Sandra Bullock today (sorry, I know, I know), and there was this quote in which she was talking about how there's a real expectation that women get married at 22, start having babies, and that there's a lot of pressure from other people to sort of adhere to this "norm," and what bullshit that all is.

It occurred to me right then how happy I am to be surrounded by a supportive community of friends and family who would never even think to say something as stupid as, "So, when are you gonna get hitched?" Apart from my grandfather, no one's ever even suggested I need to get on with my life and start a family (as though there's no real direction or point to another type of existence).

Even my nonpolitical friends back home, most of them are single, and those who are paired off have done so in more nontraditional ways. None of my good friends there are married or have kids, but it seems like everyone else we went to high school with has had at least one kid, and half of them are single parents (a recent discovery when I found a whole slew of people on the voyeuristic time-suck that is MySpace).

So, I guess a big up to all the people in my community. Sometimes I'm kinda down on a lot of aspects of it, but then there's these reminders that snap me back into the reality of how much more it sucks out there in the larger world (some guy poked his head under my umbrella today and called me "baby." It caught me so off guard, all I could do to was just scream "fuck you" at him as he walked in the opposite direction. Ugh - do people ever actually respond positively to this sort of behavior?).

So here's to the never-gonna-get-married crowd and all the people who aren't interested in having kids and agree that the world is overpopulated as it is. Cheers!

marriage vows to be only means to healthcare

Domestic partner benefits were pioneered in Massachusetts; it's a natural progression that Massachusetts also is the home of the first state-sanctioned gay marriages (in this country, anyway).

But "state-santioned" is the operative phrase here - and the problem.

In today's Boston Globe was a story about the inevitable fallout of gay marriage: namely the loss of healthcare benefits for unmarried partners. Because both gay couples and straight couples in Massachusetts now can be married, companies are cutting the ability for employees to share health insurance with unmarried partners. They say this is a move to re-level the playing field.

It's a move in the wrong direction, but it was the inevitable side effect of gay marriage. Unfortunately in this society, marriages are sanctioned by the state (and often a church), and with the state's blessing come privileges.

At this point in history, it was a more reasonable goal to move toward equality by allowing gay couples to participate in existing establishments rather than to try to dismantle those establishments. But it ends up being a "one step forward and two steps back" situation. On the surface gay marriage appears incredibly progressive, even radical. But it means we give up some benefits gained by unmarried people. Regardless of whether those benefits were initiated for people who could not legally marry, they also served those people who consciously chose not to marry, including polyamorous people (who also can't legally marry); atheists and pagans who see marriage as a function of the church, historically sexist and patriarchal; and people who don't think the government has any business sanctioning their relationships.

People shouldn't have to be married to get heathcare benefits, hospitial and jail visitation rights, rights to court-protected privacy in conversation (wife/husband conversations are treated like doctor/patient and lawyer/client conversations - they are confidential and the court normally cannot make you discose such conversations), tax benefits, pension benefits (if the receiving member dies, pensions almost never would go to a homosexual partner of the deceased, let alone an unmarried heterosexual partner, and of course not any combination of partners) ... the list goes on.

The privileges are an obvious incentive to get married, and the government has an obvious interest in offering privileges to people to maintain the expected and "desireable" societal norm. So if you were wondering what that second step back was, this is it. So long as people feel they are being accomodated and that the government isn't preventing them from doing this thing that is normal in society, so long as their life is comfortable enough (and probably insular) that they don't have to see society's ills, they will remain complacent and the structures of power and domination will remain. We can't break the chains if people are under the illusion that there are no chains.