Permit me to wax autobiographical for a moment:
I came late to Valentine's Day. Lacking any parental example of giving a damn about it, Valentine's Day was differentiated from Flag Day in my eyes mainly by a sneaking suspicion that there might someday be something in it for me. By this I meant chocolate, not romance.
The ensuing years differed in the details but not the basic sensibility: If there was chocolate or a party in it for me, fantastic. But while I was aware in theory that some people felt pressure to be coupled on Valentine's Day, it was like my awareness of the views in the recent Daily Kos Republican poll. Other people thought that. People I didn't know.
By this I don't just mean that I didn't really know people who were out roaming the bars looking to dig up a date, any date, for the big day -- I also didn't know people who were holding those "I hate Valentine's Day" parties or events to console singles. Neither the culture of wanting to participate nor the culture of wanting to flagrantly reject the holiday were common among my friends.
Flash to a year ago. The setting: an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, moderately priced but with at least some pretensions to...well, being a restaurant for non-tourist adults in Hell's Kitchen. At the end of a pleasant meal, Jesse Taylor's words were forcibly brought to mind:
When two people are having dinner, there is usually a straight line between them. By "usually", I mean "always", because basic geometry dictates that there’s a straight line between any two points. Some restaurants understand that this not being Mad Men, either one of the apparently functioning adults at the table is equally likely to have the ability to pay for basic necessities like food. Now, given two adults, either one of which could pay for a meal, what would make the most sense to do when handing a request for compensation for the food you just ate to said people?
If you said, "Put it as close to the man as possible, and then when returning the bank card with the name ‘Girly Von Girlerson, Professional Female’, again placing it as close to the man as possible," then you could have a job as a server waiting for you at any number of fine chain restaurants. Double bonus if the female diner actually hands you the payment, and you still return it to the male, like it was some sort of patronizing social experiment designed to make the woman feel like she could actually pay for things - next, she’s going to go home and wonder what it would be like if she could pay Social Security taxes, that ambitious little scamp.
The correct answer, by the way, is putting the goddamn check about halfway between the two people in a neutral spot.
I put my credit card down, the one saying "Laura Clawson," and it was returned to a spot two inches from the man across the table. The same spot in front of me was not left empty, however. No, there the waitress left the most appalling teddy bear. The cheapest bright red plushy coat, googly little eyes, and holding a heart with "I love you" stitched across it. It was not only presumptuous, it was totally out of step with the class and urban culture to which the restaurant aspired.
That's when it really hit me: People are serious about this gender-roles-in-relationships stuff.
Before I sound too naive, let me say that I understood that this was the case within established families, that women do a disproportionate amount of the household labor and decisions are more likely to be made around the man's career than the woman's. Yet somehow it had sort of escaped my attention that a significant number of people, and of course a great deal of pop culture, was not remotely kidding with all the stuff about, you know, people thinking it matters if they have a date on Valentine's Day and men paying and women being given gifts and all that other stuff.
In short, I understood gender politics and I kinda-sorta understood the culture of romance, but I hadn't gotten their intersection.
(Go ahead, take a moment to laugh at me.)
And I was able to miss this even despite my affection for romance novels, because the pressure and desperation of Valentine's Day culture is missing from that genre. Sure, they take for granted that being in love is the best way to be, and they go from there. But wanting to be in love and feeling like a failure because you're not is rarely if ever a plot point. It's not part of the romance-novel fantasy. It's much more common in romantic comedy movies and chick lit, not because they're politically better or worse than romance novels, but because they are oriented differently to "reality" and to conceptions of social success.
This year I've been using my new eyes for the pressures and customs of the day, trying to understand better what it's all about. So I decided to dive in head first: I went to see the almost universally panned Valentine's Day. This took work, mind you -- the first two showings I tried to get tickets for were sold out.
Here's the thing: It's not a good movie. Not by a long shot. But it's interesting on two levels -- as a cultural text about Valentine's Day and because the vituperation of many of the reviews would probably have been toned down several notches had it not been about said holiday. Boycotting Valentine's Day, or holding anti-Valentine's Day events, is at least a little trendy, as by extension is panning movies that place it at their center.
Valentine's Day belongs to the recently-popular genre in which seemingly-unconnected stories turn out to all be connected. Playing By Heart was better, and about love and relationships, and mostly overlooked; Crash was somewhat worse, but it pretended to have things to say about race (it didn't) and won Best Picture.
Vague spoilers, though if they spoil anything you wouldn't have guessed about 15 minutes in, you probably need to watch more movies: Valentine's Day has most of the tropes: The kindly older couple, the desperate single woman, the player determined to avoid romance on this day, the too-nice guy who you know will somehow be hurt by the hardened professional woman he thinks is the one, the philandering husband, the horny teenagers, the unforeseen gay plot, the new couple who have to overcome discoveries about each other and decide whether to move forward, the friends who have to discover they're right for each other, the cute kid. End vague spoilers.
This is a movie so crowded and busy that, without quite having any Indian-American characters, it manages to have an Indian wedding scene and a bit about arranged marriage. So that was...creative in its need to get in an ethnic stereotype, however glancingly.
With so many plots, Valentine's Day actually skips one of the big ones of romantic comedy. There's an unhappy single professional woman, but the movie doesn't have time to go all in on that trope.
But in a romantic comedy, can’t we EVER have a female character who just happens to be single? Not because she chose work, which implies that we’re too weak to balance both; not because she’s a total spaz freaktrain, which makes you totally not root for her anyway; not even because she chooses to be, because rom-com science dictates that that perfect man will come along and make her see the light anyway. Just single. Just happens to not be seeing anyone at the moment, just like all of us have been. And not desperately so.
To be fair, Valentine's Day probably would have gone there if it had had time. It would have had quite a ways to go, though, to equal the standard set out by last year's V-Day ensemble piece, He's Just Not That Into You. In that one, Ginnifer Goodwin exemplifies the "total spaz freaktrain," obsessing frantically over guys she's been out with once and borderline stalking. But she's hardly alone as a pathetic female character; in this movie, the women run the gamut of pathetic. Whatever you do, don't watch this movie. It's designed to make women feel insecure and to make men feel that all women are insecure, desperate, and maybe a little crazy.
Ah, but if the pressure to become coupled is a giant hurdle the culture of Valentine's Day throws at us, it's not the only one. Because just becoming coupled doesn't actually cause us to spend money, and that is the point, right? Just as an illness that lacks an expensive drug to treat it is less likely to be diagnosed, since pharmaceutical companies aren't out there reminding doctors to look for it, no holiday gains much traction in the popular imagination without companies creating consumerist rituals around it.
This is where we come back to the restaurant that puts the check in front of the man. Men are supposed to spend money on Valentine's Day. Women are supposed to spend emotional energy.
Thus the ads. I think we all know that the "He went to Jared" ads are the absolute worst. It's hard to get much worse than a campaign suggesting that the most important thing about making the decision to spend your life with someone is where he went shopping. That's really the takeaway message to give to your friends, right?
The whole jewelry thing, and the flowers thing, conveys the message that men have to give stuff to women, but they don't have to put any thought into it. As a man, the culture tells you, you're responsible for remembering the date and spending enough money in an ostentatious enough way. Men are consistently portrayed as the economic actors in relationships, and their gift-giving oriented to things other people can see and recognize.
Women, meanwhile, are supposed to use their gift-giving to create internal meaning.
If you've just started dating, keep your gift casual. At this point, anything expensive or too personal will send a scary I-like-you-a-little-too-much message.
Since we know women are desperate, they must make extra sure, to the point of defensiveness, not to look like it.
If you've been dating 3-6 months...
This is a tricky in-between phase: You're an official couple, but are still getting to know each other. Impress him by finding something creative that's totally him.
Got that? He has to decide how much is a 3-6 month amount to spend on flowers. You have to impress him with your creativity and knowledge of his ways.
How about 1-2 years?
You've crossed over into the long-term commitment zone, so this is a great time to commemorate your relationship or show off how well you know him.
It's nothing new; the culture of Valentine's Day is just a wildly commercialized, in-your-face condensation of the most dumbed-down, regressive mainstream of gender roles and their application in romantic relationships. When you think about it, it's not worth saying "I'm boycotting Valentine's Day." You have to boycott the roles it's built around every day or the exact same ways of promoting them will be on our televisions and in movie theaters sometime, even if it's not today. Boycotting the holiday gives it too much credit. Boycott the values system.