Rachel’s Musings

During a recent discussion amongst footloose femails, we bounced around some idea for self-descriptive labels that don’t come with truck-loads of baggage. Single or spinster came up, of course. One woman had the idea to look at thesauruses, which revealed a boatload of singlism.

According to Reverso, these are synonyms for unmarried:

bachelor, celibate, maiden, on the shelf, single, unattached, unwed, unwedded, virgin

Celibate? Virgin? Unattached? Unless I’ve replicated virgin birth, I am obviously no longer a virgin because I have a child. Why does a single person have to be celibate? And what’s up with being on the shelf? As if being unmarried means that you cannot possibly live your life; you are waiting to be picked. Only then can you get off the shelf to finally enjoy life. What matrimanical bs!

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Despite my stance on marriage, I am appalled that the CA Supreme Court upheld Prop 8, which is a clear violation of the separation of religion and state (name one secular argument against same-sex marriage – I have not heard any!). Therefore, I want to share the press release from Atheists United:

LOS ANGELES-Atheists United notes with regret California Supreme Court’s “compromise” decision upholding Proposition 8 and thus requiring the state to use a religious definition of marriage, which has no place in civil law.

“Although we are happy for the couples whose marriages are allowed to stand, we do not believe that forcing government to use outdated religious concepts in its civil law is a matter of compromise,” said Communications Director Brian Parra.

In light of the recent and rapid change of public opinion, the group anticipates a new initiative to permit same-sex marriage, and promises it will continue to support the rights of all Californians and the responsibility of the state to be truly religion neutral.

Noting that some religious people were frightened into voting for Proposition 8 by a warning that churches would have to perform weddings for same-sex couples, the group’s president Bobbie Kirkhart said, “We believe in freedom of conscience, and I pledge that if that were ever to happen, atheists would defend the rights of the church.” She noted that if the church were required to follow state law in such matters, Catholic priests would long ago have been forced to marry divorced couples.

Watching “Enron: The Smartest Guy in The Room” now – in the midst of the financial crisis – is eerie. The Too Big To Fail banks are all over that one as well. Citibank, JP Morgan, Chase, Credit Swisse, the who’s who of banking loaned money to Enron without questioning, gleefully swallowing the crap they were told as long as they were making money themselves. It almost looks like Enron was just practice. The bigger house of cards was still to be built; only this time it brought down the world economy when the house of cards collapsed. But why are we allowing this to happen? Sure, Ken Lay’s and Jeff Skilling’s names are tainted but that tarnish seems to come with a bit of admiration. They made themselves. They rose to the top on their own power. And they made loads of money.

Alex Gibney, the filmmaker summarizes the underlying lesson well in his commentary in the extras of the DVD: “I think the story of Enron exposes the major flaw in capitalism, which is the crude belief that raw self-interest left untethered will always result in the best possible social good. It’s not so.” Instead it results in the enrichment of the few and the raping of the rest of us. Why are we letting this happen? Are we so determined to become the few that we overlook reality? Are we so blinded by the money we’ll never make but think we could that we can’t see that there has to be a better way? A way that allows everybody a decent way of living rather than the obscene splendor of the few? The documentary contains a clip of Ken Lay talking to reporters bemoaning the fact that his net worth shrank from $100 million to a mere $20 million after the Enron collapse (this is at least in the bonus material of the DVD). And that’s after setting aside funds for anticipated legal defense cost and settlement. $20 million is far more than most people make in a lifetime. Nobody called Lay on that. How can he get away with feeling sorry for himself?

Somehow this all reminds me of a Yiddish joke that I listened to often as a teenager. A man comes to a rabbi complaining that his friend doesn’t talk to him anymore ever since he’s made a bit more money. The rabbi asks the man to look out the window. “What do you see?” he inquires. The man describes the scene he sees: People hurrying along on their business; kids playing; a couple of friends playing cards; an old woman watching over a baby. The rabbi asks the man to turn to look into the mirror. “What do you see?” he asks. The man laughs and says “I see myself.” “You see,” explains the rabbi, “when you put a little bit of silver underneath, all you can see is yourself.”

Have we gotten so caught up in the earn-and-spend cycle that we don’t see the masses of homeless? Or feel the moral outrage of even having homeless people in a country as rich as the US? Then there are the people – including children – without health insurance and on and on. And yet, the top keeps on enriching themselves and we, the masses, wonder when the next sale is. How have we become so numb to moral dilemmas? How did we become too complacent to be outraged long enough to actually change something?

From the latest issue of Too Much:

Love knows no budget, at least not in high-end British wedding planning circles. Now that love knows no privacy. A veteran London wedding planner, Imogen Edwards-Jones, has just penned what her publisher is calling “an insider’s account of how the super-rich tie the knot.” Wedding planners like Edwards-Jones typically handle weddings that run at least $250,000. Their fee: 20 percent of the total cost. How high can that cost go? One recent bash cost $7.6 million. The bride spent $130,000 alone “on trips to New York for dress fittings.” At another gala, a Russian oligarch shelled out $91,000 for a floral bridal arch. The most over-the-top wedding accessory of all? At one wedding, an Edwards-Jones client spent $30,500 for a cake no one ended up eating . . .

Obscene.

Why are we doing this to ourselves? We go like cattle to work every morning not questioning the absurdity of our whole lifestyle – how it is destroying our very ability to exist on this planet. As women, we joyfully participate in a patriarchal ritual designed to pass us from our father to another man ensuring that we never become independent. And even the little things: Why do we let men open doors for us, tuck us into our seat? Sure, it’s nice on some level but it’s also disempowering. The message is clear: We are too weak or delicate to open doors (literally and figuratively) or seat ourselves. Why do we participate in our own disempowerment?

Clearly, fear is at play. There are strong archetypes that entice us to stay on the wide path – for else we’d be beaten, poor, and unloved. As women, we’re told again and again that we need to fear the stranger as rapist and are better off in the safety of a marriage (never mind that a woman is more likely to be abused by her husband than a stranger). If we’d make our own path, we’d surely end up in the poor house and that would be horrible because money is what makes us happy!

Maybe it’s time to rethink all that… To me, though, the most important question is the why: What is keeping us from being upset over living such unsustainable and largely meaningless lives. Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe everybody is perfectly happy and I am just a disgruntled spinster… Somehow I doubt that…

(Here are some similar thoughts from Barbara Ehrenreich who is musing over the unemployeds lack of complaining… Another trance at play: We’re lead to believe that looking for a job is a full-time job therefore we don’t have time to demand, for example, that those who created the current recession be held accountable.)

It is fairly easy to claim that we’re fighting singlism and matrimania. Yet, what does that exactly mean? And what would a world without it look like? These questions come up when we start digging into this a bit deeper. Would we really want a society where no relationship has any protection unless the parties involved got a legal contract? I’d like to start a conversation about what we’d like society to look like. Let’s start with some definitions. (There are some good documents that do this from a legal perspective: Nancy Polikoff’s book and the Canadian Law Commission’s work “Beyond Conjugality”).

The very first definition we need is for relationship – a word that has undergone a dramatic meaning change: From describing people who relate to each other to The Couple. One of the definitions presented by a dictionary at Princeton defines relationship as:

A relation between people; a state of connectedness between people (especially an emotional connection)

Let’s keep this definition in mind as we dig deeper into the discrimination faced by singles and other unmarried folks.

Types of Discrimination

Here are types of discrimination adults can face depending on the type of relationship they are involved.
Marital Status Discrimination (MSD): Treating married people differently than people who are not currently married.

Conjugal Status Discrimination (CSD): Treating people who are in a conjugal relationship differently than people who are not in conjugal relationships.

Relationship Status Discrimination (RSD): Treating people in any kind of relationship differently than people who are not in a relationship.

These status discrimination are strongly interrelated: MSD is a subset of CSD is a subset of RSD. Single people might face RSD if they have no relationship ties with other people; they definitely face CSD even if they are in relation with their siblings (for example); all unmarried couples do not face RSD nor CSD but they do face MSD; married couples don’t face any of these discrimination.

I suggest that

• We fight Relationship Status Discrimination by preventing that any relationships carry special benefits.
• We support offering automatic legal protection to relationships when they dissolve whether through break-up or death.

I think this is a middle ground between fighting CSD and RSD by recognizing that relationships meet special needs and deserve protection by society. But these relationships are not limited to conjugal relationships nor are they limited to two people, really. I also think that there are hardly any people who are not in any kind of relationship, so RSD likely does not effect many people, as long as we stick to the broad definition of relationship!