(isabel) i mean i actually would pick a career i loved over a capital-R Relationship that lasted forever
like, no question, oh my god NO QUESTION AT ALL, the easiest choice ever. meaning: i want, badly, to find/work my way to a career i love and care for, and i… don’t actually want a Relationship? i’m not against them, or against my having one. it’s just not something i really care about. i keep…
It’s not so much that people are shot down in feminist circles for wanting a Relationship over a Career — that definitely happens, but I agree that isn’t the same thing as the reverse situation in wider society, not nearly — but that people are also shot down in feminist circles for not valuing Career over all. Just as Relationship should not be everyone’s ultimate goal (and points taken off you if it’s not yours), Career should not be turned into everyone’s ultimate goal, the only truly satisfying thing.
It’s not, here, the lack of relationship-focus that’s the issue — that’s fine! — it’s the conflation of what you do/what you care about in life, with work-for-pay. Work-for-pay is something that a great many people cannot do and many others just don’t want to do; it’s also something that a great many people have already been doing for centuries and don’t find particularly liberating, etc.
Work-for-pay is just one thing among many things that can be important in a person’s life. The problem with *F*eminism is that it assumes that because we know Relationship should not be everyone’s ultimate goal, there must be some other thing that must be everyone’s ultimate goal, and they turn to work-for-pay (a.k.a. the ever-elusive Career) because of the particular concerns of the narrow group of women in power in the movement. Really, though, we shouldn’t be replacing Relationships on that pedestal — we should be tearing down the pedestal altogether.
All that said — I liked this post, especially this part:
besides, i have so many people already that i love (and am already so bad at keeping up with them!). i don’t like that people associate intimacy only with romantic relationships.
because hey, building community and intimacy and all those other things don’t have to be directly tied up with a life-long monogamous heterosexual Relationship. All of the positives that society claims in Relationships can be found in many other places. (But they don’t want you to know that — then you’d stop gunning for that Relationship for yourself!)
yeah! i totally agree with this and this is a super-important point that i’m reblogging in full because you say it better than i could, i think - that was what i was trying & evidently failing, my bad, to get across with the meandering bit about like “insert some other career-equivalent thing here.” like, equivalent is not really the right word, which maybe is why this was confusing? orrrr maybe i am just unclear and fuzzy! ALSO POSSIBLE. so to try for clarity: i also do not like the idea that work-for-pay is the only valuable kind of “work”! NOT AT ALL, is how much i like that idea. SUPER MUCH, is how fucked up i think it is! VERY MUCH, is how sorry i am that i gave the impression i was down with it!
but - yeah, so i think you made me realize that there are two separate-but-linked mechanisms at work that i was being bothered by in that post (and… am, in general).
first is what you elucidate - the idea that there should be a One True Pairing Priority at all, and any others are inferior somehow and reflect poorly on you as a person and you will someday realize how empty your life is because you failed to achieve your OTP (dorky fandom humor in the morning, WHO DOESN’T LOVE IT). this is… messed up, and messes up, i sort of suspect, a lot of people in a lot of ways - not to judge but to… project, i guess, like this for sure happened to me (in kind of the opposite way than the relationship way - you don’t go to harvard for the dating prospects - but still) and i have to assume i am not that special that i am the only one this has happened to. and also really is just like so fundamentally wrong, man.
like, i just don’t like hierarchies, i really don’t. i feel like a lot of things i think or feel come down to this on some level. i don’t like judging people for anything that doesn’t hurt anyone (am i guilty of it, HELL YEAH, but i am trying to back off, mostly), and that’s what hierarchies of desire do, is judge people for wanting a different thing than you. i hate that we’re instructed on what to want - and that “trying to mostly be a decent person as best as we can and not hurt people” is not all that prominent frankly among the lessons we learn - it just bums me out/pisses me off like whoa, whether it’s about what gets you off or who you fall in love with or what your goals are or whatever. i think we should be given blank slates and the space to spend time - spend a lot of time, and not need to figure it out by the time we’re 20 - learning and deciding our desires for ourselves.
and then the second thing is, i guess, a very common micro version of that, which - i am bad, i will tell you, at letting things friends say to me that piss me off go. so this one has been under my skin for a long time because of that one time that one friend did a douchey thing relating to it, also is the plot of, geez, approximately a bazillion movies. i don’t think it’s more important than any other incarnation, just on my mind today for whatever reason.
