Reporter | Xu Luqing
Edit | Yellow Moon
1
A post on Douban that "kissed a stranger I met in the movie theater" spread widely last month, telling the story of the landlord who met the boy in the back seat at the movie theater, the two walked home after watching the movie, and chose not to leave WeChat to say goodbye to each other after kissing. The retweeted post came from the Douban group "I met a rush today", crush refers to "a short and enthusiastic heartbeat", where female-dominated team members record their own experience of rush moments - only three seconds in reality, but the aftermath of emotions can continue.
In stark contrast to the "crush group" indulging in the heartbeat moment and romantic fantasy, is the "Douban Persuasion Sub-Group" with comparable heat, and the members are mostly women, and the mainstream attitude here is: feelings are "virtual", and it is "real" to engage in money and career. Similar statements such as "Without feelings, can we stand in an invincible position in the relationship between men and women" were praised a lot, and people who had expectations for romantic love and were not decisive enough about breaking up were criticized as stupid "love brains", and "scolding and waking up love brains" was the eternal theme of the group.
The "Crush Group" and the "Douban Persuasion Sub-Group" grew rapidly around the same period and received a lot of attention, with many users being members of both groups at the same time and "repeatedly jumping between the top and bottom heads." These two groups with completely different attitudes to love provide a gap that allows us to glimpse the complex feelings of women facing romantic love at the moment: on the one hand, the upper moment of cruss, happy to snort "instant sugar"; on the other hand, they regard feelings as male traps and lament the self-indulgent degeneration of the "love brain". At the same time, we also see that when women unite to form a new emotional narrative, internal divisions and conflicts also arise: the "love brain" is accused of self-indulgence, and indulging in feelings is regarded as weak and incompetent. If romantic love is a sugar-coated poison of patriarchy, what kind of "new" picture can a woman see when she tears up romance novels, breaks free of the shackles of existing love discourse, and moves toward the opposite side of understanding? Is being an independent and autonomous economic rational person an ideal antidote?
(Image source: Douban) 01 Sugar on the top and persuasion on the head: facing the cruel reality of the same way
There are many moments of Crush, whether it is a look at a nucleic acid test, a song on the boy's mobile phone on the subway, or a wrong hand unintentionally held when the crowd is crowded. The group members were disturbed by the one tone of voice that the crush object typed during the chat, the imagination was disturbed, and the empathy was similar when reading the rush experience of others.
The high popularity of the "Crush group" seems to reflect women's desire and expectation for romantic love, but the interest often stays only in the romance of the heartbeat, and many people feel that the subsequent pulling love story destroys the sense of beauty, and there is a high "down" risk. Most of the most clicked in the group are also stories that the parties miss each other and no longer have any follow-up development, and there are also many voices of "no regret" in addition to regret, because "getting close will always be disappointed".
The story of "kissing strangers in the cinema" is in line with the model of encounter-separation, and the landlord finally rejected the boy's request for WeChat, "because I think if it continues, everyone knows that there are only a few results." There would be no better experience than tonight, and it would be nice to stop there. Many people expressed their appreciation and admiration for the landlord's choice, such as "I think you are so inspirational and sober without WeChat, and your meeting is already the climax of this rush." On further analysis, why is the refusal to make further contact considered "inspirational"? Perhaps this shows that the landlord is not momentarily carried away by the heartbeat and falls into the trap of love - after all, according to the mainstream view of the group, after the climax of the rush story, love, marriage and "three children" are not difficult to imagine all the way downhill, a chicken feather.
The crush group's popular "bad ending," which refers to the regretful separation of the ending, as opposed to the happy ending (Image: Douban)
In the post of "Douban Persuasion Group", the specific reality of this kind of chicken feathers in one place is vividly reflected. In the surging news "Douban persuasion sub-group: contemporary youth's "marriage calm station"" article statistics of the reasons for the group to break up, "body humiliation", "virgin complex", "prostitution and domestic violence", etc. are not uncommon, and there are many women after marriage to the in-laws to promote, widowhood parenting and workplace dilemmas and so on. Social news related to gender issues will also appear in the posts of the persuasion sub-group, whether it is the Huo Zun and Wu Yifan incident, or the issue of crowning the surname and women's trafficking, there will be female members in the group who said that in these discussions, the attitude of the boyfriend and himself is too different, and he is worried that he may become the next "victim". Echoing the current situation of the "persuasion group", there has been such a suggestion in the "crush group", and the members of the group who are too high can browse the tiger poker dominated by straight male users, and will find that many male users' attention to women is almost only focused on appearance, body and other strong physical characteristics, and has the effect of "immediately lowering the head".
The disdain of romantic love by the "persuasion group" and the extreme fascination of the "crush group" for a moment seem to be opposite, but they unanimously emphasize the brevity of love, which may be the same way to face the cruel reality of the lack of institutional protection and the lack of gender equality. When women begin to think that entering an intimate relationship is not necessarily happy, more likely to be hurt and risky, they are more willing to sniff "instant sugar" and use second-hand heartbeat to meet emotional needs while flipping through the experience of the "persuasion group" to prevent themselves from falling into the emotional trap.
02 Women's Alliances and Internal Separation: Deconstructing Male Speech and Fighting the "Love Brain"
The two emotional groups are not just simple emotional experience exchange meetings, in which they also form a women's alliance to support each other. Comment sections often include encouragement for women who are suppressed in intimate relationships, who are caught up in excessive self-doubt, and who are overly entangled in their crush. There is a fixed "divided" column in the persuasion group, which is dedicated to publishing the actions of the predecessor, neither to hurt Chen's misfortune in the tone of a poor victim, nor to seek help, but to tell a story "let the sisters have fun", and use their own experience to warn others. Such a narrative breaks the stereotype that the injured person is always deeply sad, and also makes the other members realize that the person who is hurt does not need to hide and blame himself, and the person who should be ashamed of doing the wrong thing should be ashamed.
The persuasion group will also subvert the male suppression discourse with a very feminine subjectivity through collective carnival questioning, satire and ridicule, and empower itself. For example, there was a post that recorded that the boyfriend only sent 0.25 yuan in red envelopes on Valentine's Day, and when the girlfriend questioned whether the reciprocal gifts should be of equal value, the boyfriend replied, "I always thought you were not that kind of material person." "I always thought you weren't that kind of material person" was repeatedly quoted in the comments section, someone paired with "hahahahahahahaha
The boy's Valentine's Day gift is a photo of a flower bed, and the group is advised to think that it is not thoughtful enough to send it to the door, so it made its own emoji (image source: Douban)
However, the women's league is not a peaceful one, and its internal side also shows a fragmented and contradictory side. Although the two groups have many overlapping users, the "persuasion group" will occasionally make a contemptuous statement against the "crush group", calling it a "love brain", and the members of the group are trapped in love fantasies. "Love brain" is considered by the "persuasion group" as the first major terminal disease, and women who are eager for romantic relationships or invest in feelings are seen as trapped in the trap set by the patriarchy, weak and stupid. The group's hottest essence post summarized the historical "those replies that I regret seeing", most of which were collected because of the feelings of the group to seek advice, but because of "reluctance", "feelings too deep", "soft heart" and other reasons did not listen to the example of breaking up, the comment area was full of insults, attacking them as spineless "wives" and "sloths" and so on.
Attacking the "love brain" with the posture of an independent woman has created a new "victim guilt theory", many remarks point out that the women who have been hurt are begging for self-inflicted suffering, and some members have summarized the psychology of girls who are unfortunate in their feelings but are unwilling to break up, and evaluate their "low value and greed for the value of others, lazy and stupid". Offensive comments such as "deserve it" and "lock up three children" appear from time to time, and the giving and love in a relationship become evidence of women's weakness and stupidity. In addition, the "love brain" is opposed to reason, believing that women are more likely to be overwhelmed by love and cannot control their own reason, while men are always very sober and focused on their careers, such essentialist judgments also create misogynistic words similar to "crazy women". These individual-specific attacks obscure the more critical question – what makes love, a basic human emotional need, so high risky for women? What deprives women of their right to love and stigmatizes their legitimate desire for love?
Image source: Visual China 03 Epilogue: Is an independent economic rational person the way out for women?
It is true that from the romance novels of the nineteenth century to the large number of movies and idol dramas produced by the cultural industry today, the romantic love narrative has not made much progress in the past few hundred years, and generations of women are wrapped in the love discourse influenced by the patriarchy, easily taking romantic love too seriously, paying too much on the lover, hindering the development of their own potential, and the so-called "love brain" first attacked the tendency of excessive dedication and sacrifice in the relationship. In today's "persuasion group", the "love brain detoxification" suggestions that often appear include: self-feeling as the center, "do things only consider themselves, do not care about each other's feelings, do what you want to do"; instrumentalize each other, "use men as tools, rather than fall in love with him"; do not invest in feelings, "Men actually do not need women's love, but need women to understand, support, good-looking, can sleep on the line, women can also refer to this angle, pay attention to men's practicality rather than love"... To a certain extent, this kind of mentality is both a tit-for-tat in a misogynistic environment and a self-protection of women in structural injustice.
However, when the criticism of over-giving slides into a crusade for all desire for love, the new "political correctness" becomes "Mod feelings", "love yourself" and "will make money", people who indulge in love are considered shameful, and the philosopher Han Bingzhe's description of love desire - "I no longer maintain my position, but lose myself in the other, for others" - is even more worthy of killing. In the episode "Scientifically Dissolving the Love Brain" in the podcast "Seahorse Planet", the guests used many economic theories to detoxify the "love brain", including modular management, game theory, and diminishing marginal benefits. "Modular management" refers to the needs of their own needs into different small needs, and by finding the most suitable objects for the needs to match, to achieve the highest efficiency. This set of management methods is rational, efficient, and perfectly fits the logic of maximizing benefits, but it seems to have produced a new discipline: independent women should be rational enough, not dependent on others, have a strong ability to "make money and engage in business", and be an excellent economic rational person. When we extend the logic of capital to the relationship between people, regard everyone as a tool and resource, and consider interests as a guide for all actions, do women fall into the logic of capital that belongs to the same patriarchal thinking after tearing up romance novels?
"Gender Troubles"
Judith Butler by Song Sufeng, translated
Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore 2009-01
The feminist scholar Judith Butler once pointed out that the free appearance given by the logic of capital is patriarchal and man-craft, and even the economic rational man is the image of the economic man, which limits our imagination of a new face of freedom and equality. In the 1980s, when neoliberalism flourished in the United States, when independence became a new moral trend, there was also a phenomenon of "love brain" being pathologicalized. American addiction expert Maya Sarawitz's Why Are We Addicted? is a psychological book in which she describes that at that time people thought of loving too much as a psychological defect:
"All feelings are nothing more than addictions, and most love is self-centered delusions. Loving too much is accused of being pathological, and relying on others becomes the original sin. Man should end all love with the characteristics of obsession, and strangle the common dependence in the cradle. ”
Americans at that time described love as "the most serious of all diseases", making a person extremely sensitive and restless, so that it disturbed normal work life. In interesting contrast to this statement, there is a post by the current "crush group", the poster is grateful to the crush for bringing himself a full month of throbbing, although this has no benefit return, let alone meet the need for modularity, but "crush reminds us that our feelings can be so clear, sincere and strong, our life is not a barren and decaying wasteland, but a series of mountains with dense forests and majestic waterfalls." We imagine a feminist freedom and equality, which may not be based on the existing hegemonic structure, in the market logic to achieve the independence of rational people, but in a society that can support fragility and softness, people are not afraid to rely on their lovers, not afraid to embrace abundant emotions and passions, and are regarded by the performance society as useless fragility, sensitivity and turmoil can be accommodated, at that time, women may really take romantic love from men's hands and create our own words.
bibliography:
Why Are We Addicted? Republic of Hainan Publishing House Maia Szalavitz's book Ding Will 2021
What are we talking about when we talk about the "love brain"? Other girls https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/AqukvuFBPTuYVDpHETLfDg
Precarious Life： The Power of Mourning and Violence. Judith Butler. Verso