Rachel’s Musings

As the rainy season starts in earnest, the thought that the fight for equality pushes us singles out into the rain becomes even more real. Many of us supporters of going beyond conjugality have had trouble with the single issue fight for the right to marry for people in the LGBT community. On the one hand, exclusion from marriage is clearly discriminatory. On the other hand, this fight implies a normalization, which is scary, and prevents us from questioning marriage itself and thus enshrines it even more into our culture. I have fought against Prop 8 because I felt it violates the separation of church and state (interestingly enough, as I was calling people to confirm their participation on election day, many backed out, including one person who was getting married while she could). But there has always been some unease because I felt that I was fighting to have the red dividing line between the married and unmarried moved, rather than removed. Ultimately, I felt, I was pushing myself out into the rain.

With this as background, it is even more disturbing to read about the pro-marriage rhetoric from the Prop 8 trial (the link brings you to a create commentary by Nancy Polikoff). Mind you, it is not coming from the religious wrong, from where I usually expect it. Rather supporters of same-sex marriage are spouting the same old myths about marriage. It is no longer a fight against discrimination. It is a fight for the perpetuation of the glorification of marriage. These leaves out all of us who are not married because we choose not to, which would include a large number of people in the LGBT community could they make that choice. Ultimately, this feels like a white upper-middle class fight. It is not about getting fairness, it is about access to privilege. If it were about fairness, the fight would move us beyond conjugality, which would value all forms of families, no matter what constellation they take. Ultimately, this would value all people, as individuals, respecting and supporting our choices.

I’ve been spending way too much time since the beginning of December reading, rereading, and rerereading Kant’s Prolegomena, a work that attempts to summarize his Critique of Reason, Kant’s important contribution to philosophy in general and metaphysics in particular. It is impossible to understand his writing without total immersion, which means reading the same thing over and over again. I am beginning to understand what he is saying but that’s not what this post will be about. This post will be about a fact from Kant’s life: Kant died a virgin. This fact seems to conjure up all the prejudices we like to impose on single people, all of them boiling down to: There is something wrong with us. There are certainly things wrong in Kant’s philosophy (or lets put it less harshly, there are some things that we certainly need to question). But dying a virgin isn’t one of them. Kant imposes his puritanical view of sex onto us by claiming that marriage is necessary because only then can we have morally right sex (see an excellent article by Elizabeth Brake who refutes this position using Kant’s own ethical position). But this has nothing to do with his choice of remaining a virgin. Sure, maybe he was disgusted by sex. Maybe he thought it was morally wrong (interestingly, his view on the morality of sex might have been similar to some feminists, as Brake points out). But maybe he just chose to remain single because his life’s work was not to produce umpteen children. He would rather spend his time developing his own philosophy than mating and recreating as society demanded from him.

It is interesting – and rather sad – how the focus on Kant’s virginity and the associated pathologizing of his decision reflects our couplemanical stance. Unless you are coupled – or at least have had sex – there must be something wrong with you. It is time to question this conclusion! There are many reasons that a person might not be couple, or might not have sex, that are entirely valid and far from pathological. These reason include simply choosing to do so or is just simply not sexually attracted to anybody. Choice and biology can underlie not being on the beaten path. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

That’s what the sign read posted to a bulletin board at SF State. Intrigued, I stepped closer. After all, maybe someone was going to bust some internalized singlism that was causing people some emotional heartaches… Fat chance. The ad was from an MFA (marriage and family agreement?) who was going to help people find their One and Only. So, if you’re unhappily single, the only solution is to become unsingle? And that will automatically make you happy? How about deconstructing the social assumptions that underlie these assumptions because they are what makes many singles unhappy: You are nothing without a mate. You cannot possibly be happy without a mate. Or how about teaching people to be happy whether they are single or not? Developing self-acceptance no matter what our relationship status seems to be a much sounder long-term approach than desperately trying to find a match.

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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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!

A new reality show is out! Fortunately, there is hope for all of us single women. Phew! Because as Sarah Haskin tells us “It is a truth universally acknowledged that the worst thing a woman can be is single. Worse than leprosy you ask? Yes. Because lepers live in a colony. Single women live alone.” Hold on! Wait for the last sentence (yeah, I was ready to kill her, too): “So, follow those [dating] rules, and you’ll see that first date turn into a second divorce in no time!” While she’s poking fun at the show, the show is real! And I would bet that it’s premise is exactly what Haskin suggests: Being single is so horrible that we need to do whatever we can to “land a man.” Plus, being with a man – any man – is better than being single.

The women in this boot camp are desperate and single, but can’t figure out why. The cast is composed of classic archetypes of the single woman: the ‘too much too soon’ romantic, the ‘gold digger’, the ‘fixing the wrong guys’ victim, the late 30’s ‘Lone Ranger’. To call the women out on their issues, Steven labels each woman with a moniker that correlates to her main problem. From “Miss Picky,” the woman who is too caught up in a list of impossible expectations, to “Miss Wedding-Obsessed,” the girl that tells guys on their first date she’s looking to be married within a year.

Of course! It’s the women’s fault that they’re single – if only they were to follow Steven Ward’s rules, they’d be happily married by now. Maybe he needs to read Dr. Karen Gail Lewis’ book and get a clue that women have a right not to settle. And we can be perfectly happy without a man, thank you very much.

The methods employed by Steven, with his “brutally honest approach to matchmaking,” are reminiscent of dog training: ” the ladies [get] zapped by an ankle bracelet when they bring up inappropriate topics on a date; or [they learn] how to pose in lingerie in an episode on sex.” Glancing through an interview with Ward, he is suggesting that dating is a game and being honest will prevent you from being in a relationship. He is perpetuating this game by training women to play into it (what happens after they land a guy, he doesn’t say – I guess the game has to continue indefinitely). Unlike Lewis who tells women that it’s okay to be single rather than playing to a man’s notion of what a woman should be like. Rather than degrading ourselves, we should demand that men grow up and be honest. Let’s add another “classic archetype of the single woman:” The happy spinster who proudly doesn’t settle!