A Love Story
A lot of people assume that a couple consisting of a German and a sex blogger must surely engage in plenty of Kinky Fun Times, right? The truth is much more boring than the perception.
If a debate is started in our apartment, it will be finished, so all the more reason to not start it in the first place when there’s work (in the most liberal sense of the word) to be done. Tonight, we got to discussing Jessica Valenti’s piece on why she’s not participating in tomorrow’s More Magazine panel about young feminism. I’ll be there, as planned, but Jessica is opting out because she does not wish to legitimate a conservative panelist’s claim to “feminism”. The conversation about her blog post somehow devolved (or evolved, depending on the point of view) into a two-hour debate about whether ideological labels serve any purpose or whether there is such a thing as the feminist movement and if one actually exists, whether women constitute a useful analytic category. Also, we conducted an exegesis of Catharine MacKinnon’s Toward A Feminist Theory of the State, which I originally thought was a good summation of all the running arguments we’ve had over the course of the past two years. (FYI, I was wrong and I now think the book is kind of a cop-out, but I can still see the purpose of MacKinnon’s attempt to reconcile Marxism and feminism.) And then we talked about what actually constitutes activism and whether activism — in its current incarnation in the democratic, capitalist system — is an effective political method. Simone de Beauvoir, for example, was not an activist, and yet she is indisputably one of the greatest contributors to feminism, is she not? This point, like many others, was abandoned as a tangent to a bigger debate about whether the feminist movement is one worth fighting for. And that bigger debate, of course, has been unresolved and going on between us for years. Two steps forward, one step back, every time.
While I would not quite characterize the first year of our relationship as a “reeducation” per se, dating, living, and talking with Patrick is certainly responsible for elevating my feminist views from the self-centered personal to the universal political. We didn’t know anything about the other’s political philosophies when we met. I could barely articulate my own. I knew intuitively that my experiences with sexual double standards and slut-shaming were not unique, that they represented a widespread problem confronted by many women and queer people, yet it wasn’t until I started dating Patrick that I really thought about the roots of sexual repression and oppression.
That first year, the German and I argued endlessly about education, marriage, pornography, sex work, welfare, the American Dream, employment, and democracy. He has a few years and a Master’s degree on me, so I scoured the shelves at Strand for classic feminist texts, reread my coursepack from Introduction to Studies Of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and tried to reconcile the often opaque theory of academia with the imperfect practice of activism. I came to a conclusion — not entirely, independently — that the root cause of the silencing and stifling felt by women like me isn’t a vague and shadowy bogeyman who goes by the name of “Patriarchy”. “Patriarchal” is just a description, nothing more than an adjective; it’s not an explanation in and of itself. I had to concede that gender-based oppression is, in fact, just another expression of the consequences to a market economy that does not recognize sex differences, such as a woman’s biological inability to participate in the labor market when pregnant or after childbirth. Equal treatment, in other words, does not lend itself to equal ends. To me, this dilemma represented the continued need for feminism — perhaps a feminism that is awakened to its anti-capitalistic roots — but to Patrick, this demonstrated the movement’s futility and failure.
Our first year together was the same year I spent on academic leave from Harvard, and I maintain — even after my insane senior year schedule of intensive German classes and thesis writing — that the time I spent falling in love contributed more toward my intellectual and ideological development than all of college up to that point. I don’t know if this says more about my relationship or higher education.
