How to Build a Dating System That Isn’t Oppressive
By Jesse Singal - Oct 29th, 2008 at 12:02 pmYesterday at Feministing, Samhita did a post on ten things she “absolutely hate[s] about heteronormative dating”:
1. You are expected to dress nice and act a certain way “waiting” to get asked out.
2. You have to play by the rules which generally give men most of the power. (wait till he calls you, don’t be too forward, be mysterious-you don’t want to scare him off, etc)
3. If you show emotion too early on or too much of it, you are needy.
4. If you don’t show enough emotion, you are making the other party insecure forcing them to wield social privilege to silence your daring attempt at independence from self obliteration via coupling.
5. It fetishizes unequal power relations between women. He’ll get the tab, he’ll get the door as long as he gets the vagina, and that is considered “romance.”
6. It makes same sex couples feel “less than.”
7. It dictates your interaction in most social settings and social circles, whether you are single or coupled. It is either/or, there is no 3rd identity or in-between.
8. If you have sex too early you ruined it.
9. If you don’t have sex early on you are a prude.
10. It is expected to lead to marriage (and if you don’t have a ring on your finger you are “on the market.”)
This list bothered me a bit.
I had to sit and think awhile before I could figure out exactly why. It does, after all, point out a lot of the stupid stuff that comes with adherence to gender roles. But I think the problem is that Samhita approaches things from a bleakly fatalistic point of view (”You are expected to…”; “You have to…”), as though this one set of ideas about dating constitutes a monolithic, impregnable thing (Heteronormative Dating), as though the mere act of going out on a date with someone from a different gender means you are prostrating yourself supine before The Rules Of The Game. In reality, dating, like any other human construct, is made of the shifting sands that define culture and will look completely different a century from now.
In fact, we’re already making progress on this particular front. Now, saying we still have miles to go before men and women are treated equally when it comes to relationships and sex would be a vast understatement (to wit: the slut/stud disjunct, first called out as ridiculous a long time ago but still going strong), but that shouldn’t take away from the fact that most of this list consists of beliefs and practices that are well on their way to extinction.
For example:
2. You have to play by the rules which generally give men most of the power. (wait till he calls you, don’t be too forward, be mysterious-you don’t want to scare him off, etc)
I’m sure people have had different experiences here, but, taking as a sample group me and my friends (yes, I know the plural of “anecdote” isn’t “evidence,” but they don’t do peer-reviewed studies on this sort of thing just yet), this simply doesn’t apply anymore. Guys are just as scared of calling too soon or too frequently, or of seeming too desperate. Girls no longer have a monopoly on this extremely aggravating brand of neuroticism. Progress!
And:
5. It fetishizes unequal power relations between women. He’ll get the tab, he’ll get the door as long as he gets the vagina, and that is considered “romance.”
Dating itself can’t fetishize this (dating doesn’t exist without the people who date). So who does? There are plenty of heterosexual daters–like me, for example–who would find this arrangement just as repugnant as Samhita. We’re all susceptible to the ubiquitous drumbeat of culture, particularly when it comes to matters of sex, and I’d imagine I’m not the only one who has held a door or picked up a tab.
But that’s a far cry from this quid-pro-quo, which has been extinguished from all but the most sleazy of circles. If a man thinks he should “get the vagina” because he held a door or paid a tab, it means he’s an asshole, and it says more about him and the immediate culture in which he matured than it does about dating as an institution. Similarly, if a woman is fine with this arrangement and considers it “romance,” she should… well, she should read a hell of a lot more Feministing, for one thing.
Also:
8. If you have sex too early you ruined it.
9. If you don’t have sex early on you are a prude.
10. It is expected to lead to marriage (and if you don’t have a ring on your finger you are “on the market.”)
These last three points ignore the fact that there exists a staggering range of people out there, all with different attitudes, beliefs, and values. There are folks who have no problem with having sex on a first date, who wouldn’t look down on their partner for complying. There are folks who prefer to wait a bit. There are completely asexual folks who date for companionship. There are folks who date but have no interest in getting married. There are folks who don’t date at all.
Etcetera, etcetera. We needn’t approach an inherently troubled, complex concept like dating as though we are at its mercy. I understand how it can feel this way, how the social and cultural pressures that are constantly trying to beat us into place can lead us to perceive that we’ve been robbed of our agency (though, as a male, I certainly couldn’t fully understand how this impacts women, who definitely have a heavier burden here). But if anything’s proof that we have a say in all of this, that we can shape the messy world of male-female relations and expectations, it’s American dating, a practice that has bloomed out in a million different directions in just a few decades and which is already far removed from its strictured origins.
The “staggering range” of potential mates out there applies to all the other points as well. Of course there’s a subset of men who expect women to passively and demurely wait to be asked out, and consider them “too forward” if they do the asking, but if you don’t want to date a man with that attitude, then you don’t have to obey those rules.
Every individual needs to decide what their values are, and only date others who are compatible with those values. If you are a feminist, and you date a chauvinist, are you going to have a good time? Forget generalized lists. Sure, you might get fewer dates that way, but they’ll be much more worthwhile ones.
October 29th, 2008 at 1:32 pmAgree, Jesse. Agree, wahoofive.
This list overlooks the fact that every person has their own individual stance as to how they want to be treated and their expectations. Unless you’re still in Jr. High and figuring it out for yourself (sadly, some people never do), you have enough self-confidence and wherewithall to uphold your own expectations in a dating scenario, and likewise only date people who are mature enough to respect those expectations (if they don’t already have them, themselves).
October 29th, 2008 at 3:51 pmI think part of her point is that it’s not a monolithic system, but a paradigm that inevitably finds a way to make a judgment against the woman. Especially considering the contradictory 8 and 9 - heads the man wins, tails the woman loses.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:50 amWhat I love about heteronormative dating rules:
If you break them, and your date freaks out, you know right away you don’t want to date them anymore.
October 30th, 2008 at 10:53 amtrue that, MikeT. One can date heterosexually without dating heteronormatively.
October 30th, 2008 at 11:07 amOn the one hand, I find this discussion ridiculous on many levels, beginning with the implicit assumption that behavioral “norms” are a. bad and b. evitable.
On the other hand, I think that dating in the US is prohibitively performance-obsessed, and that “good” performance in the initial few dates has very little predictive value for establishing a happy longer-term relationship. There’s a lot of Seinfeld-esque hating the way she eats her peas going on — the cultivation of ludicrously finicky and arbitrary aesthetic standards for social and physical qualities that does nothing but make the people who hold the standards miserable. For me, finding someone I’m happy with did in fact involve dropping, or at least loosening, the aesthetic approach to the dating process itself (as opposed to my approach towards the person I was interested in).
October 30th, 2008 at 9:26 pmBut on the ridiculousness front, look again at this:
“3. If you show emotion too early on or too much of it, you are needy.”
What is “heteronormative” about that? Gay daters face exactly the same issue. They may be a little less hung up on the 8 and 9 issues, and it’s legit to say that the reason for some anxiety on the timing of the sex in hetero dating is lingering power issues around male/female gender stereotypes. But as for 10…well, the fact that this is becoming increasingly true for gay dating as well as straight dating is what I call “progress”.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:33 pm