Pack Your Fudge Next ‘V-Day’

I have so many fond memories of the flurry of preparation at my suburban middle school leading up to our holiday of love, Valentine’s Day. Girls in Old Navy heart T-shirts furiously finishing valentine notes to all their “boyfriends.” Boys dressed in their Abercrombie best would intricately follow the middle-school masculine code and eagerly fulfill our culture’s masculine necessity of providing a woman with a V-Day gift. After months of bombardment with advertisements, the boys would decide on which overpriced bouquet of roses and box of chocolates to waste their allowance. And if for some reason you didn’t have a valentine, didn’t want a valentine, or were just too queer to perform the prescribed ritual of heterosexual pubescent romance, you were just a huge loser.

Today, at Columbia, the situation seems oddly familiar, if not slightly more “sophisticated.” Opening up my Facebook inbox over the past week, I found myself staring at various Valentine’s Day invitations featuring everything from Mickey and Minnie Mouse embracing in a romantic pink heart to an erotic scene from the movie Chocolat. Invitations beckoned me to date auctions (presumably heterosexual), cupcake making, and movie screenings of straight romantic films. So I ask myself: what about the Columbians who don’t have a valentine, don’t want a valentine, or are just too queer to role-play the sanctioned romance paradigms of the chivalrous man and the doting, appreciative woman?

It’s easy to pass off Valentine’s Day as innocent. One could rationalize that while it’s over-commercialized and cliché, it’s still, much like Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, harmless. Though it inundates us with images of love and romance, isn’t that what we all want in the long run anyway? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Valentine’s Day symbolically institutionalizes traditional gender and sexual paradigms which often serve few of us and hurt many more of us. V-Day specifically requires men to commercialize (often sexually) expressions of appreciation for a given lover through gendered gifts geared toward women. I’m thinking along the lines of diamonds, roses, lingerie, etc. In last week’s Spectator Monday feature on feminism, Professor Christia Mercer strongly detailed many of the ways in which traditional gender and sexual norms limit and oppress all of us- queer, non-queer, men, women, etc. It seems worthwhile to consider the message of Valentine’s Day and its implications for each of us.

Perhaps the most obviously problematic ideal symbolized in the celebration of Valentine’s Day is the obsessive idealization of “coupledom.” That is, the socially sanctioned model of two people (almost always a man and a woman) joining together in a flurry of love and romance. Any single person knows, especially an older one, how alienating and detrimental the emphasis on coupledom can be. Like the idealization of marriage as a superior model of social interaction, coupledom bestows upon its recipients certain social benefits—communal respect, communal adoration (the “they are oh-so-cute-together” factor), social acceptance, and often the social sanctioning of sexual relations- which “singledom” or non-traditional partnerships cannot do. You may be cool with queers kissing, but browsing through a few Hallmark cards or looking at the window displays along Broadway should provide ample anecdotal evidence of the superior and celebrated status which coupledom is granted in our culture at others’ expense.

But V-Day isn’t just an issue of belittling the non-partnered among us. Its alienating nature makes it a perfect prism for reconsidering our societal obsession with finding a single, all-fulfilling partner. This way of thinking about ideal models of social and sexual interaction reduce other relations which go a long way in fulfilling our emotional and physical needs. Michael Warner, a Rutgers professor and queer activist, makes an incredibly convincing case for a queer reinterpretation of love, romance, and relationship ideals—for straights, gays, the whole bunch—in his book The Trouble With Normal. In the book he outlines how queer radicals help extend the constricted definitions of heterosexist coupledom and romance in order to see the value and relevance in other friendships, sex buddies, tricks, casual encounters, one night stands, and so many of the other physical and emotional encounters humans can benefit from. Straight people, this is about you! All of us—gay, straight, trans, whether we’re into casual encounters or in a monogamous partnership—experience being shamed into acting out a perceived masculine or feminine ideal which I imagine doesn’t always make us feel warm and fuzzy inside. If you are reading this and have never felt your masculinity or femininity unfairly challenged—maybe by being called a queer for not being good at sports or a mannish woman for being strong willed—then I’d imagine you are in an extreme minority. Ever been shamed into feeling slutty for your Saturday night adventures? Warner’s case is all encompassing, it’s as relevant to the transgender queer in your LitHum class as much as it is to the rugged straight football player in Frontiers. Though he never mentions V-Day specifically, Warner’s point is to expose Valentine’s Day as the idealization and institutionalization of norms which none of us are really fully capable of performing. More importantly, changing our sanctioned gender and sexual paradigms exposes us to experiences and performances which are creative, fresh, exciting, and fun, if not incredibly sexy.

Middle school is, thank god, gone a long time now. Yet the same constricting and often oppressive gender, sexual, and romantic norms which make newly pubescent 12-year-olds robotically send romantic notes and buy stupid red-coated gifts still informs our gender and sexual paradigms at Columbia. It’s not just singles and gays being left out of the “fun”—its anyone who doesn’t fit into the narrow mold of what a proper man or woman should be. We would do ourselves and our national holiday of love a great, loving service by seeing through its limitations and reinventing it. No need to give it up, just make it more fun! I love V-Day for god’s sake. Make Michael Warner proud and use next Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to queer your life up just a little. Use it as an opportunity to forgive yourself for that random casual encounter and learn to embrace those magic moments. Most importantly, don’t buy fudge for your lover next V-day, just pack some instead. In the long run, I’m sure they’ll learn to appreciate it. Happy V-Day!

Ira Stup is a student in the School of General Studies majoring in American studies. The Problem With Normal runs alternate Fridays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com