Yesterday I broke my blogging fast to write a response to Suzanne Venker. Venker is the author of the book How to Choose a Husband and Make Peace with Marriage as well as three inflammatory Fox News opinion articles (1, 2, 3), getting her a lot of attention in the Twittersphere and my own personal circles. I've had some time to think since my last post, and I have decided that it is important to articulate my problems with Venker's claim that happiness requires the admission that "men and women aren't 'equal'". Why? Because Venker's perspective is a frighteningly popular one, a 'guilty pleasure' admission to which people will and do latch as an excuse to perpetuate what may seem on the outside to be an attractive traditional pathway. In reality, these articles reveal a limited understanding of a complex world, tempered by unacknowledged and poisonous privilege.
These articles are dripping with privilege, perhaps evidenced by the Freudian slip that was a picture of a same-sex couple used to depict lasting love and peaceful marriage in Venker's most recent piece. This wouldn't be a problem, if Venker wasn't writing about marriage as strictly under the domain of heterosexual couples. Since discovering the mishap, the picture has been replaced by a generic pair of stick-figure people supposedly depicting a man and a woman, public-bathroom-style. What does that tell an audience? Could they just not find a reliably heteronormative photo of a happily married "straight" couple? Wasn't the original enough to demonstrate that just because a person wears pants doesn't mean they're a man?
Sorry, Venker. The gender-fuck already happened, and no picture on the web is going to erase that stain from the internet's memory.
The ironic thing about it is that Venker's article attempts to dismiss her critics because she doesn't believe gender is a construct. "[T]he truth must be heard..." she writes. "Unless, of course, you’re beholden to feminism. In that case... [y]ou’ll believe what feminists taught you to believe: that gender is a social construct."
Her supporting evidence is a joke. "Those of us with children know better. We know little girls love their dolls and boys just want to kick that ball. This doesn’t mean men can’t take care of babies or women can’t play sports. It just means each gender has its own energy that flows in a specific direction. For God’s sake, let it flow."
Seriously? It's not like there is a whole history of dolls and balls being forced into the faces of 'little girls and boys' by advertising and moms like Venker or anything. Obviously the submission of impressionable minds to traditional gender norms enforced by figures of authority perfectly demonstrates that gender is not a social construct.
Vernker's piece is composed of heteronormative, cis-genered privilege, but it is also the cry of an upper-middle-class white woman who does not seem to comprehend the idea of life for life's sake sans traditional marriage and babies.
Her simplistic perspective of history ignores feminine oppression, pretending feminism exists solely for the purpose of proving that gender is a construct to fuck up marriage and get ladies jobs (as if deconstructing marriage and giving ladies jobs is the worst thing that could possibly happen to anyone ever). It's so much more than that. It's the rejection of the objectification of women. It's the protection of the feminine voice. It's the refusal to accept that there is one path for which I was designed and that all others are unnatural. This separate-but-equal attitude Venker adopts (the same perspective historically adopted pre-civil-rights and used in the present day by many in the same-sex-marriage debate) just isn't reasonable. Separate but equal is an illusion, and it's not something I'm willing to entertain.
From one woman to another, I have a different perspective to offer Venker:
Yeah, Suzanne, I really like the idea of getting married and adopting children and having a family, but never in a million years would I sacrifice the rights that generations of feminists (yes, feminists, not just women) have fought for me to have just so I could acquire what you perceive as peaceful and socially acceptable marriage.
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