Another Valentine’s Day commercial…….

So it’s the day that people have been awaiting its approach, Valentine’s Day. There are those who are walking around starry eyed over the gifts, candy, flowers, and special dinner dates they get to spend with that special someone.  Then there are those who just want to stay inside and pretend like its just another day and for it to be over and done with.

Over the past few weeks I have been seeing the increase in Hallmark Valentines card commercials, chocolate candy commercials, and the one type of commercials single people dread, the online dating/ matchmaking site commercials. These online dating sites/ matchmaking sites around this time of year will

have “Valentines Day sales” so you can find that special someone. So I wanted to learn more about these online dating sites so I looked up to see myself what advice do they really give to people who are single.

And I Don’t Even Know My Last Name

I’m obsessed with Pinterest from crafting, to recipes, to ideas for my future home I’ll pin it all.  This includes wedding ideas, something that girls are supposed to be planning from birth, and Pinterest is a wonderful conduit for it this obsession.  The infinite ideas for invitations, receptions, and pictures makes any warm-blooded female go gaga, or at least that’s how we’re supposed to react.
Once again that boisterous inner feminist of mine seems to be chomping at the bit to start analyzing things, including the trappings of marriage.  All you have to do is turn on TLC Friday night and see the fascination that our society has with weddings, Four Weddings, Say Yes to the Dress, and my Big Fat Gypsy Wedding all speak to this cultural phenomenon.  Yet, one has to begin to wonder what are we really promoting?

It’s not just about love

Not Another Valentine’s Day Rant

With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, love is in the air—and I refuse to inhale and catch the second-hand high.  In fact, I’m going to let this post serve as my literary “gas mask” with the intent of deflecting the prevailing, albeit cheap, Hallmark-endorsed sentiments of romantic dinners, flowers, and boxes of chocolates, which somehow articulate undying love.  Contrary to popular belief, all these superficial gestures do is contribute to my undying battle to avoid going up a pant-size.

well, Ryan, when you put it that way…

I’m sure some of you are probably rolling your eyes by now:  “Christ, here’s another Bitter Betty who’ll stay at home on ‘Singles’ Awareness Day’, drown her single-girl sorrows with a bottle of Pinot, and play 500 Days of Summer and The Breakup into the wee hours of the night.”  Slow your roll, pal.  My beef with February 14^th has nothing to do with my relationship status, and everything to do with the fact that we’re selling ourselves short, thanks in large part to media-propagated ideals of what constitutes a “happily ever after”.  Granted, this notion is projected all three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, but what better time to examine it than nine days before the year’s biggest scam known to consumers—I mean, Valentine’s Day?

dinners and movies and gifts, oh my!

As a disclaimer, I’m not slamming the ladies and gents who are gearing up for a night of fun activities next week.  I would like to point out the reasons why this holiday mirrors some repercussions that make me uncomfortable, though.  First and foremost, I resent the way society morphs intimate relationships, particularly the woman’s role, from TV shows, to movies, to those stupid “He went to Jared!” commercials.  They all seem to revolve around material possessions.  While I’d like to assume that most ladies are going to put more stock in their relationship than what they unwrap on commercialized holidays, we have been conditioned to make the association, at least to some extent, between what (and how much) we get, and how much we’re loved.

I recently had a conversation with one of my female friends, which consisted of a fifteen-minute soliloquy of all the things her boyfriend bought her in preparation for Valentine’s Day.  The long-awaited dismount was short, and cringe-worthy:  “I just love him!  I can’t even begin to explain it.”…What?  You just sat there and gave me a laundry list of the shit he bought you, and the places he took you for dinner.  And recalling these gestures prompted a testament to how special he is, and how much you love him?

Being “The Feminist Girlfriend”

I have a boyfriend.

This really isn’t news to most people who know me, but as I’ve only been writing for ShoutOut! for a few weeks now, it’s probably news to a lot of you. I have a boyfriend. When I say it’s not news to most people, I say that because I’ve been dating this guy since July 2010 and we’re still going strong. You don’t need to know the details of the relationship — just that we knew each other in high school and it’s long distance but we’re good. He’s a wonderful partner who supports everything I do and is stupidly proud of what I write and post on here.

So why am I writing about my relationship to all of you?

Working Women and Feminism: Patricia Meyers

The name of the woman I’m featuring this week, Patricia Meyers, will probably sound completely unfamiliar to all of you. That’s because she is my paternal grandmother.

My grandmother, my brother, and I at Thanksgiving, 2007

It probably seems like a stretch for me to feature my own grandmother in one of my posts. But for the last 3 days, I’ve been awaiting a phone call from my parents telling me to head up to Philadelphia for her funeral. As I type this, she’s on her death bed. So I felt like the best way for me to express both my grief and my admiration for her was to feature her in this week’s post.

Do All Little Feminists Dream of Their Wedding Day?

All I’ve heard about for the past 2 months has had something to do with somebody’s “big wedding”. Royalty, celebrities, and even my older sister have thrown their wedding plans all over. To make it better, my sister has asked my opinion on everything. From the dress to save-the-dates and even to the ring. Happy to oblige and simply picking things that matched, I thought, am I supposed to know anything about this stuff? Am I supposed to care?

Everyone has heard that saying, “Every little girl dreams of her wedding day”. This just sounds odd to me because I don’t remember ever imagining my wedding day as a kid (although marrying Justin Timberlake at 13 was a frequent dream that I actually had). I don’t think I even thought about it until TLC bombarded TV with guilty pleasures like “Say Yes to the Dress”. It’s because of this saying and these projected ideas that women have been trained to cherish that one day of our lives since before we can remember. We dressed up and pretended to marry our neighbor or played M.A.S.H. to see who we’d marry and where our life would lead. Dreaming about our wedding is an ideal that has been planted in our head since we were little. Therefore it’s not shocking that most women still anticipate the day, but what about the rest of us who didn’t constantly dream of that? Are we wrong?

The Great Name Debate

I remember the first time I told my mother I am a feminist. Although the standard pieces of imagery that normally accompany a statement like this have floated out of my memory (what I was wearing, where I was standing), I still vividly remember the conversation and her reaction to my “coming out.” She asked me if my boyfriend and I got married, would I change my name? At that time, my parents and I had only just gotten to the point where we can have “adult” discussions where I actually feel they appreciate my contributions without brushing them off as responses from “The Child.” So, I was honest with them despite feeling like I was disturbing the peace. “I’m not changing my name. It’s awesome!”

Millionaire Matchmaker: Respect for Women Mismatched?

My mom always told me “Em, if you ever and I mean EVER beg a man for a date like the women on those trashy TV shows do, I will kill you.” And while I always knew that my mother would never harm a hair on my head, she meant business. But ever since The Millionaire Matchmaker on Bravo has made it into my series of guilty pleasures, I wonder…what would happen if I begged a millionaire for a date?

I mean, there are quite the winners to choose from after all. I could have my pick of two strapping individuals from an episode this season conveniently called “The Chauvinist and the Playboy”. Now, I don’t like to ruin the story line for anyone but it’s pretty easy to guess how these two millionaires have treated their past lady friends.

Patti introduces her eager millionaires to the gold-diggers of the week

Bitchin’ Table: Love, Actually… Not.

Hello, good readers!

Welcome to another Bitchin’ Table, where 2 of your favorite writers tag team a tenacious topic. This week we broke open some Ben and Jerry’s and popped in a Collin Firth movie, then decided it was a bad flavor and casting mistakes were made. That brings us to today’s topic: Feminist Dating. The ever hillarious KillerTofu and Katie.O are bitchin’ about the ups and downs of dating as a feminist in a pretty anti-feminist world as sexual minorities! Yes, it’s a Double-Whammy today at the Bitchin’ Table.

This is our future, if we don’t find someone decent now…

Virginia Woolf Saves the Day

 I am not feeling like much of a feminist today. How could I, after spending two days in bed mourning the loss of my ex-boyfriend? We did the thing, I am sure you have experienced it or heard, where you get back together for a relationship death rattle after time apart. Aside from being the worst idea ever, it also ended with the worst consequence I could imagine – I hurt my best friend who had helped emancipate me, physically helping me move my mass amounts of belongings from my boyfriend’s house while mentally providing me with the peace of mind that I had someone in my life who I could trust.

Someone asked me recently why I keep referencing the fact that I am 23, and I guess it is because I feel like I am truly an adult now. Sure, I still make mistakes, but nothing compared to when I was 17 or even 21. I’m older than a lot of my classmates, which often gives me the opportunity to give advice. After all, I do know where to find the cheap beer downtown (Finns, $2 PBR drafts) and where to find the financial aid office (3rd floor, Warren) or the writing lab (2^nd floor, Wilson). But inside me, there is still a tiny little freshman who loves to have a boyfriend. After all I’ve seen and done and learned, I still haven’t squashed her.

 There has been one highpoint in my two days spent in bed, a book, given to me by my friend Sam. “You need to learn to be good to yourself,” she said when she handed me A Life of One’s Own by Ilana Simons. I scoffed at Sam and threw it on the backseat of my car, which is where it remained until yesterday morning. It is kind of like a self-help book, “a guide to living better,” but it is written through the lens of psychological thinking and the works of Virginia Woolf. It’s about finding your place in the world, finding confidence, and challenging yourself to be better. I thought I might really need to hear what it had to say, and I was right.

 Simons says, “Persistence can mean success. The difference between a breakthrough and an uneventful life might just be the difference between a lower and higher threshold for actual – painful, self-exposing – work.”

I had high hopes for an intellectual blog this week, but after several false starts I decided to embrace what Simons was saying. I am learning incredibly hard lessons right now, but I am bet there are those of you reading who are or have gone through similar experiences. Saying that I love to have a boyfriend is self-exposing to me, because I like to present myself as independent and strong. I don’t need no man! But last week when I found myself truly without one, I panicked. I couldn’t stop myself from calling, texting, and eventually hanging out with my ex, even though I knew it was wrong and that he was way wrong for me. ‘He might not be Mr. Right,’ I thought, ‘but he is Mr. Right-Now.’

“We only find calm in intimacy when we know that people don’t boil down to something fixed and specific…Happiness only comes when we accept that we make limited, flashing connections with other people.”

Could I really be another woman tricked by dominant culture into thinking that a man = happiness, validation, love, and self-worth? Sam’s right. I do need to learn to take care of myself, instead of just trying to take care of my relationship. It’s just so damn rewarding to make another person happy, that it is hard to step back and try to make myself happy. In fact, I am not even sure I know what that would look like if there wasn’t a man in the picture. How’s that for self-exposing?

 ‘Your friends will change in different environments and you’ll never know all their moods or sides. The ache for full revelation is a source of frustration, and annoying to both sides. Our personalities want the room to shift. In the end, getting comfortable with that dance is also finding peace in independence.’

This quote made me reflect more on myself than a friend or partner. I accepted (and expected) certain changes from my boyfriend, but I wasn’t taking into account how much I would change, and as that happened, I started to want different things. I never knew I was going to enter Women’s Studies when I started at JMU. I had never heard of Harvey Milk High School or dreamed of moving to New York City to teach there. I had never even read Milton. I used to like the saying “You are at 8 who you are at 80,” but I am beginning to see why this is not true. People are always changing, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. It is a natural part of growing and learning and becoming better.

‘But becoming better for what? For who? What’s the point if I am all alone?’ At this point, reading wasn’t going well. I wanted to scream at Simons and slap Woolf for being so enlightened. I threw the book across the floor. I threw myself on the bed. I wallowed in self-pity and took a depression nap.

‘Being independent means dealing with competing ideas, making contact with these people who matter to you, but then stomaching the ambivalence in carving out your own choice – which is likely to be an opinion that no other head in the world hears or completely agrees with…After all, no one will have to sit through the wreckage like you will.’

This is going to be the hardest part about being single – making my own choices. I used to tell my ex that I wished I had a pocket version of him to carry around and check in with throughout the day (not unlike the iphone applications I bashed a few weeks ago). His calm and rational personality was a good counterbalance to my more emotional and spur of the moment approach to life. I always want someone to double check my decisions, to make sure I am doing the right thing, and then to tell me I am right. Little by little, I am starting to make my own choices. It’s something I have to master if I want to follow any of Simons and Woolf’s advice.

Last week I wrote about “loving with intent,” and I guess that’s really at the core of what I have to say today as well. But this time, I am talking about loving myself. It sounds cliche to say that you cannot truly love or be loved until you love yourself, but it’s still true. I might not feel like a feminist today, finally accepting my reliance on a boy, but Virginia Woolf is pulling me back from the precipice and reminding me to be true to myself, and that is a good lesson for everyone to learn.

Step one, apologize to my friend. After all, Woolf had to apologize to her friend Ethel several times after bouts of moodiness. It takes balls. Step two, figure out what makes me happy. And do it.

‘It is only when we actually speak and act that we come to see what’s real, not just imagined about us.’