Over at All About Books, Rike has posted a blog about inequality in romances and marriages. Comments, right off the bat, became very defensive about posters own marriages and what-not . . .
However, I do think that Rike has a point and as I was thinking about it, I realized that this is actually the main reason I hate the ingenue as a heroine. To me, the naive but beautiful ingenue encapsulates everything that is wrong with male/female relationships: that in order to be in relationship not only do women have to sacrifice themselves totally and without the man having to do anything either but aslo that in order to be in a relationship a woman has to start out on an unequal footing or else she cannot expect to incite desire in men. Anyone who knows me, knows that I have had a long standing disgust, nay antagonism towards relationships between younger women and older men. Invariably the man has money, perhaps not wealth but definitely is comfortably set. The woman is, if not strictly speaking beautiful, then at least very good at approximating it with the use of plastic surgery and yoga (see Bravo’s The Millionaire Matchmaker for references). She is also invariably neither as accomplished as the man nor as innately intelligent/smart. When I see this in real life it makes me want to light people on fire. The only reason I don’t is because I never seem have a convenient Molotov Cocktail on hand.
This is not love, people. This is prostituition in its most insidious form. It is an exchange, not of souls or even of bodies, not of minds or of hearts but of economic factors between the wealth of money and the wealth of beauty. I do not believe any of the men on Millionaire Matchmaker really want to find love. What they want is to buy love. This is why they are going to a matchmaker. And she’s not an old school yenta of the Fiddler on the Roof variety. Oh no, she is a pimp, bringing these men only the best products, the most appetizing of merchandise. Every woman on that show adheres to current standards of “beauty” with no deviations at all, not in dress, not in hair, not even in face. There is nothing remotely individual about these women. I suspect it must be something in the water in L.A. making them all into Stepford Ho’s. Not that I, personally, would want to have my body anywhere near these “millionaires” as most of them are so phenomenonly unattractive both in body and mind that one is literally gobsmacked with the idea that sexual desire could ever be possible. Can a vagina dry heave?
More to the point, none of these men are looking for love anymore than the women. What they are looking for is comfort but they do not have the honesty of true prostitution, a respectable trade in which money is exchanged for sexual services. The women want to be taken care of, protected, reverting back to chattel or cattle, as the case may be. Property bought and paid for by the wealth of old, smelly straight men who can’t date women their own age because women their own age have been rejecting them for the douchie-wankers they are for the last forty years. The men are not merely looking for sex. If they were I would not hate them so. No, I am suggesting that they are looking for a trophy. The coup de grace to their success: a hot, young wife with a pussy that snaps back into shape like a newly minted rubber band.
The desire that rages as an undercurrent in these relationships is not sexual desire or the desire to be loved, at least not to a predominante extent. Rather I think that the driving motivation is twofold: on the part of the women I think the desire is for status and for safety, probably because, according to popular psychology, their fathers didn’t love them or loved them too much. For the men, they are both trying to compensate for that time the head cheerleader didn’t go out with them back in 1945 and they also want, like everyone, to be desired by that which they find desireable. The fact that they have to pay for it in some way, even if it is only in gifts and treats, makes it an illusion. I use sarcasm but my serious point is this: it is the desire for the comfort and security of love without having to take the risk inherent in actual love that makes this sort of thing disingenuous.
Which brings me back to the Unequal Relationship discussion back over at All About Romance. Let me first begin by giving my own definition of love. Love is dangerous. To love is to risk. Not just the risk of your own happiness and joy, your own heart because your love might be rejected but the worse risk, the more dangerous risk of being loved back as wholly and completely. By loving someone, regardless of the fact of whether they are lover, child, friend, mother, or brother, means that you risk not only suffering the pain and the loss inevitable in your own life but that you will now suffer all the pain and the loss in your beloved’s life as well. If you love them, you will inevitably hurt when they hurt, feel anger at those who strike them, miss them when they are gone, ache when they lose someone they care about and worse, be powerless to prevent them from feeling that pain or sometimes even being able to ease it. It also means that you will have to sacrifice time, money, and desire. If they love you back, if the love is requited then this will be a two-way street. They will suffer for you, sacrifice for you as much as you sacrifice for them but it will not be easy.
The problem with real love like this is that as idealistic and transcendent as it sounds, it is not a very comfortable existence because you are constantly living on the precipice of tragedy. As my father says about having children, it’s like giving hostages to fate. But I think the same can be said whenever you truly love someone. What if the baby stops breathing? What if someone gets sick? Loses their vision? What if the house goes into foreclosure or jobs get lost? What if they die? What if they leave? What then? Because of course, the more you feel joy the more you feel pain when the joy leaves. The higher up you go, the further you have to fall.
Having a relationship in which extreme inequalities of money, power, place, and privilege exist, in which there are such power discrepencies between one partner and the other, causes many problems, it is true. However, I think the reason people choose these relationships is because they simultaneously want to be loved and to love while still being in total control of their destiny, while still having a power over the relationship that does not exist when you really give in to love. The distance created by the inequal relationships acts as a buffer against the deep cuts that true love can cause. It’s like armor, a shield against pain or disappointment. The fact that this doesn’t work doesn’t stop people from trying. It is very hard to give up control but the chaotic nature of love wants you to lose control, to give up your power. It wants to divest you and dillute you into just your existence. Look what Cupid did to Psyche. Love takes away everything you are as much as it gives it back. That people do not want to risk this, I understand. I understand that people want to be comfortable, that pleasant is often a better option than pleasure. I understand why one people don’t want to risk anything. But I have nothing but contempt for those who pretend at love, who barter for it like a cheap Egyptian street souvenir, who used the simulation of it to garner power or money or status. That I find disgusting.
As for the unequal relationships specified by Rike, I may not have the utter contempt I do for the status hungry sort that I think invariably pollutes the May/December relationships between young women and old men, but I do think it is an absurd proposition because even though love may be about sacrifice is also about making the unequal, equal. True love cannot really exist between people when they are too different. Opposites only attract to an extent, like the yin and yang symbol they have to both curl into each other and incapsulate something that is like the other in themselves. Total sacrifice is only useful when it is being commited by a deity. Otherwise it just makes everyone miserable. You end up with two bitter people: one because they do everything and the other because they do nothing (see Jon & Kate Plus 8). I leave you with this scene from Moonstruck a movie about true love and family and being Italian.
7 Comments
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
I understand exactly where you’re coming from, I think. However, I don’t necessarily agree with you about the older man/younger woman thing. Let me hasten to say I’m not myself in that position, but I’m of the opinion that age really is just a number, whichever half of the partnership is older or younger.
I do accept that the reasoning behind your argument is entirely valid except for one thing – I think that sort of relationship is often much more honest than many more conventional ones. If each of them knows where they stand and what they expect of each other from the start then I have no argument with it whatsoever. It’s their business, not mine.
There are almost as many variations and subtle differences between relationships as there are couples engaged in them. Nevertheless, on my blog I have written about my admiration for confident, able, truly liberated women and I think the real test of whether a woman is “her own person” whether in a relationship or not, is that she doesn’t give a damn about what any man thinks of her as a woman. Sure she”ll mind what her lover thinks and hopefully want him to find her sexy, just as he’ll mind what she thinks of him and feel the same way, but outside of personal friends and lovers – who cares!
To me, able, fit (more or less regardless of size), interesting and self assured are all “sexy” qualities and what makes a woman attractive. Love and friendship may be something else entirely, but most relationships have sexual attraction at their heart – at the beginning at least. What happens after that is up to them.
That age is just a number is where you and I disagree. It is not just a number, it is also the number of years a person has lived, the experiences they have accumulated, where they are at in their life and what they want in their life. Not all relationships that have an age gap are like the ones I have talked about. However, I am deeply suspicious of relationships in which the man is a lot older and has money and the women is younger and doesn’t. To me it invokes all of the old gender stereotypes about women needing to be submissive and beautiful and thoughtless. Moreover, with age and wealth comes a certain amount of power that the young and the poor do not have.
As for the honesty, my point was that these relationship aren’t honest. And the motivations, the desires, the driving forces behind them are not only not honest, they haven’t even been examined. They are not like Charlotte in “Pride and Prejudice” who marries Mr. Collins because she knows it is the only offer she will get and practically speaking, she is better off married. It isn’t that self-aware, generally speaking. The claim is always that they are in love, but if that’s the case why is she always beautiful and he always rich? If it were just a matter of age not being a number then the women being plain and the man being poor would happen just as often. Or you would see more older women with younger men. But you don’t.
Everyone is very sincere, I’m sure. I am just suspicious of that sincerity when money, beauty and power are involved.
Sorry. Please forgive the expression, but that’s bullshit! In my sixties I’m one hell of a lot younger than many a thirty year old (and I can beat a lot of them at sports like squash!). Conversely, I know all too many boring, aged people who pretty much seem to have been born that way – and yet they are physically quite young. The body ages, yes. We can keep that at bay to some extent, but in the end it’s a fact. IN ONE’S HEAD, however, the situation is entirely different and if you THINK old then you ARE old.
As to the relationships you talk about, if the women don’t like it then they can leave and, if they can’t, then blame the education system that didn’t teach them how to be an individual and manage their own affairs and thus failed them miserably. Please, though, don’t blame the guy out of hand unless you KNOW for sure that he’s used devious (even criminal) means to trap the woman into that situation. I’m sure that such things do happen, but I’m equally sure that some men are subject to entrapment by devious women.
Don’t judge situations you know nothing much about – it’s none of our business – yours, mine, or anyone else’s except the people directly involved.
Oh and the question about beautiful and rich – simple men like beautiful womne and many women like money. If each has what the other wants, what’s wrong with that – or are you stuck with the idea that love has to be in the equation somewhere – because it doesn’t – not for some people at least. they may be lacking something emotionally, or even missing something that the rest of us feel makes life worthwhile, but, like I said – don’t judge others by YOUR values, unless you absolutely know for sure there is something that THEY regard as bad going on. If they are happy with the situation, the rest of us should get the hell out of their lives and leave them to it.
Well, AF, of course I judge people with my values! What else am I supposed to judge them with but my own judgment which is formed by my values? And does it really matter all that much how badly I judge them, what I think of them? Is this hypthetical couple so unsure of their choices that the judgment of a random, unknown woman blogging into the ether is going to taint every one of their future interactions? So what if I judge them badly! Surely, the majority of us have been judged and found wanting at some point and just carried on living our lives, ill-advised or not as those lives may be. Have I suggested legislation that would outlaw such a relationship? Did I put forth the idea that we should go door to door preaching the opposite relationship? Did I say that there should be a company policy against them? That restaurants shouldn’t serve them? No, I just said I don’t like it, I highly doubt its love and it makes me suspicious. If that upsets you, what can I do but paraphrase Woody Allen: If my blog has made one more person miserable, I’ll feel I’ve done my job.
Of course it doesn’t matter to themI But it does something to dimish you, or make you less happy than you might otherwise have been. Personally, I don’t care either! I was simply pointing out that each of us have values that are the result of our individual experience and those values may be totally inappropriate to others in different situations – i.e. I was debating the matter with you. If you don’t want that, then fine! I’ll shut up… No problem!
By the way, I don’t know if it’s intentional (it may be, who am I to judge), but on my system (MSIE 8 – Vista) your blog name doesn’t show up and I thought it was rather a good name so it seems a shame.
Have a nice day
[...] had what turned out to be a rather heated, if brief, debate with another blogger over this article here regarding the contention that there is frequently something wrong with a relationship between an [...]