Before confronting the world, you must first face great pressure from your family.
Written by | Yang Wen
Original production of "Look at the World" magazine
My friend Xiaoqing told me that she was researching the process of applying for a sperm bank for IVF.
I was very surprised by this news. Xiaoqing and I have known each other for almost 15 years. Because of work, she and her boyfriend of more than 10 years have not lived in a city. In 2023, Xiaoqing will finally transfer jobs to end her long-distance relationship with her boyfriend. I thought they were about to get married, but she told me that with life full of uncertainties and a difficult gender environment, my fear of marriage is increasing. If it weren't for the fear of being old and helpless, she would hardly want to have children again.
"I used to think that if I had a child, I wanted him to be a boy, because I felt that girls come into this world and suffer." Now, she wants a daughter, "I slowly feel that men really mean a bit of a 'basic plate,' and they are similar in some ideas." Even if I can teach my child a lot of concepts of equality and progress, the environment around him, the friends he contactes, and other relatives instill in him may be very feudal and misogynistic. If in the future he becomes a man who cannot empathize with women's pain, I will be very, very disappointed. ”
I thought of her boyfriend, and I had the impression that the boy was docile and considerate, and when the two quarreled and fought in the cold war, the boy would sometimes come to me cautiously to inquire about the news: "The queen has not replied to me for several days." Have you contacted her? I'm a little worried. ”
I asked her, have you considered his feelings for you for more than ten years?
There was a hint of an open-minded smile in her voice: "No." I'm more about whether I can accept it personally. If I could figure it out myself, the other problems wouldn't be so much of a problem. ”
After listening to her words, I once again felt the contradictions and conflicts faced by the identity of "self-considered feminist" when encountering love and marriage.
If I use the usual rhetoric on the Internet to condemn, I have become an "accomplice" of the patriarchy after marrying early. Some time ago, gender studies scholar Liu Yiwa wrote his marriage and childbearing experience "What is the use of becoming a feminist?" " sparked a heated discussion, many of which can be summarized as her voluntary marriage and childbirth, which is to bow to the patriarchy and do not understand what feminism is.
In my life, I also faintly bear such a squeeze, after marriage, single friends call me a "married person", and will subconsciously label me as a "traditional" and "human wife"; At parties, they would tease me if I still had time to go out, and I would lose my voice when they discussed "today's fear of marriage and childbirth."
I felt at a loss in this gap, so I started talking to different people who were concerned about gender issues and recognized themselves as feminists ideologically. I tried to find a way out of this dilemma through different life experiences.
01
From love to marriage, realistic choices
Based on the same living environment and educational experience, I was "married early" among my peers, and I received my certificate on the eve of graduating from the third year of graduate school at the age of 25. When you meet new people, the question you often ask is, "How did you decide to get married?" ”
My imagination of married life was originally very simple, thinking that it was just a layer of harmless institutional shell added to love, and life continued as before. Even when he received the license, his boyfriend did not inform his parents of this decision. The old man brushed his son's circle of friends who posted a red book, only to know that he had changed his identity.
Looking back now, I feel like I was so simple, thinking that idealism and romanticism could fight all the problems of life. I occasionally think that if I had become more aware of gender consciousness as I do now, understood that marriage is a contract between two families, a social production unit, and so on, and knew that I would face the fact that patriarchy, gender division of labor, and other external forces will influence the lives of two people, I may not have jumped forward.
A still from "Kim Ji-young born in 82"
Some friends who have stable and intimate relationships but have not put marriage on the agenda told me that probably marriage requires a little "impulse", and sometimes understanding too much has become a kind of shackles.
Xiaoqing, who is studying the IVF process, has changed precisely because of this. Feminism, she argues, may be fundamentally at odds with marriage, and that "romantic relationships are actually an extension of marriage, not the other way around." What she meant was that it is now widely believed that love is a prerequisite for marriage, but marriage is also putting a shackle on women in the name of love. In the consciousness of fighting patriarchal marriage, personal feelings are no longer important, "For me, this is not a process of forbearance and cutting love, but as feminist consciousness awakens, emotional tendencies and views on things will gradually change, so that some different decisions will be made." ”
I didn't quite agree with her, but I realized once again that feminist identity and love and marriage were in conflict. So I went to other married feminists and asked them how they had made up their minds to get married.
Friend Oguri said the most immediate pressure came from her parents, and she and her boyfriend were middle school classmates who both worked in Beijing after graduation. Oguri and her boyfriend didn't want to get married, and they planned to practice another way of life, but her mother strongly discouraged the two of them living together unmarried — what the parents didn't know was that the two had been living together for three or four years. The stalemate was fruitless, and in the end, I had to obey my parents' wishes and receive the certificate.
Friend Xiaofan is also a similar reason, she and her boyfriend fell in love while studying in the United States, and due to the impact of the epidemic, they both returned to Beijing University to continue their studies. Because they are locals, they live separately back to their parents' house. This makes Xiao Fan, who has become accustomed to independent life, unbearable, and his parents' interference in life is everywhere, "You have to obey their living habits, when you want to drink coffee and want to eat sandwiches, they must let you drink porridge and eat buns, saying that coffee is harmful to health, you need to drink less." ”
Dating with her boyfriend is also subject to certain restrictions, and even supervision, "If you want to go out and do something together, you have to report it to your parents, which is very awkward." Xiao Fan said that he wanted to move out, but his parents usually did not understand this state of mind, and he felt that renting a house was an unnecessary expense. The only necessary reason she could use was to get married, and in order to "normalize her whole body and mind," she got married, and the two lived in a house where only each other was.
This may be the first dilemma that many feminists face: facing enormous pressure from their families before taking on the world.
02
History of the demise of romance?
I experienced the difference between marriage and love, precisely after entering marriage. I was born in the capital city of the northern province, the only child in my family, and I always thought that my parents were more liberal in my education, they allowed me to choose the major I wanted to study at will, supported me to run alone to the corner of the world where birds do not, and tolerated me to quit my decent job in the system.
Only in the matter of marriage, there is no compromise in teaching me how to be a "good daughter-in-law of someone else's family". After getting married, my parents would be unbiased in other things and ask me to do behaviors that seemed very "sensible" with my parents, such as carrying the most elaborate and valuable gifts when visiting the man's house; My boyfriend and I are fellow villagers, and when we come home from Beijing for the New Year's holidays, we must first go to my in-laws' house for dinner and spend the night, rather than going back to our own house first. I knew that this was a tradition of the Chinese family, but I couldn't help but feel uncomfortable and "excluded" from the original family.
Oguri also felt this way, when her mother saw that her room was messy, she would always count "how can you marry someone like this, and can you still clean up the house for others". Then Oguri would quarrel with her mother. Due to work and the epidemic, Oguri's wedding has been postponed repeatedly, and she and her husband no longer want to have a wedding, but her parents are very stubborn, and her father even cried after a drink, "He may have thought that other people's daughters have such a ceremony and I didn't, and I was wronged for me, but I was very embarrassed at the time." ”
The social value attached to marriage squeezes love from the outside, but what I am confused about is that marrying someone I like is not natural and logical? I threw this question to my married friends, but the more I asked it, I began to wonder if the "natural" and "logical" in this expression was a misunderstanding of habitual thinking.
Stills from the movie "Little Women"
This inertia may be due to the lack of imagination in the domestic social and cultural environment, and we cannot find a love path that does not lead to marriage.
In addition to the patriarchy, this may also have something to do with the baptism of pop culture that our generation has experienced. A colleague introduced me to the American scholar Janice M. A. Radway's "Reading Romance Novels: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature", a survey of housewives who loved romance novels in middle-class white American families from the 1960s to the 1980s, found that the types of men they liked were very similar to the romance works of "overbearing presidents" and "affectionate favorites" that I was exposed to as a "post-90s" generation.
We can often read the ending "The prince and princess lived happily together", but few people tell about life after that. In the imagination of popular romantic works, marriage is the highest temple for the fruitful cultivation of love. The book explains that women in such works can have their own ideas and subjectivity, but they must also obey the institutional arrangements of the patriarchal family in order to ensure ultimate happiness.
With the rise of feminist issues in China, the cultural content we receive is quietly changing and interacting with real life. Women's film and television dramas that have been well received in recent years, whether it is "Twenty Not Confused" and "Love is Delicious" in modern cities, or costumes "Menghualu" and "Qingqing Daily", are showing the independent thinking of women who "Girls help girls" and "looking for a husband is to invest in yourself".
Xiaoqing is a veteran reader of Jinjiang Literature City, and he can feel the changes in readers' tastes over the years, and then look at the previous popular novels to have an "ancient taste". "When we were children, we were all love triangles, 'scumbags' and '', sadistic bodies, and later became 1V1 sweet pet texts, and recently began to popular wife-chasing crematoriums (at the beginning, the male protagonist ignored the heroine's love, ruthless, and later fell in love with the heroine in order to please and worked hard), the big heroine is cool, no longer abusing women in large paragraphs, such as the heroine's rebirth and revenge text is enough for one or two chapters, and the rest is all in the 'wife chasing crematorium'." What's more, Xiaoqing has recently been reading infrastructure articles and farming texts without CP, "The fewer emotional dramas, the better, and most readers don't want to watch emotional dramas." Even some web articles know that this article is coming to an end as soon as they see the male protagonist come out. ”
03
Opposing identities and emotions
When the sanctity of love is removed and the pressure for women to succeed in their careers rises, for well-educated women in first-tier cities, late marriage and childbearing and infertility are no longer an "abnormal" choice. People like me who "married young" have become a "special" presence among the friends around me.
I can feel "differentiated" from the dealings between my friends and me, such as the ridicule of calling me a "married person", the future outlook for my "good wife and mother", the hesitation of whether you can ask me out on weekends, and the tacit assumption that I may have household chores that I can't get rid of. Once, when I met a friend I hadn't seen for months, she laughed and said that I was now dressed more and more "wife", but in fact I had just bought more mature clothes for my work after entering the workplace.
March 7, 2021, Paris, France, to celebrate International Women's Day, calling on the world to stop gender discrimination and harm against women, street posters were displayed. (@VisualChina Photo)
Oguri empathizes with this, she works in the media, there are many young people in this industry, the work is busy, the thinking is more avant-garde, and the single rate is relatively high. Several of her well-connected female colleagues are single, and they eat together every day at work. But when there are events on weekends, colleagues don't ask her by default. Over time, Oguri was reluctant to tell her about her marriage, "If you say it, others will have a very natural impression of you and think that you should be a very traditional person." ”
I also feel more and more that after some outrageous gender news, such as domestic violence, rape, prostitution, single female friends sometimes extend to more radical gender speech, such as "today's fear of marriage and childbirth" and "men are not okay", but at this time, it is often difficult for me to put forward a moderate and dialectical view, because on the Internet, the more radical feminist view will believe that married women are patriarchal "accomplices", under this perception, I am no longer qualified to express my views.
This rise in gender binary sentiment has also penetrated into reality from social media. I once interviewed an 18-year-old high school student who immediately became disgusted when she noticed someone in her class falling in love: "I'm so afraid of men, I don't think they're okay." Just earlier, she mentioned participating in extracurricular activities with several boys. I was curious and asked what she thought of these male students, and she hesitated and said, "A few of them have to get in touch, it's okay to actually get along," but quickly added, "Overall, I still hate boys." ”
I discussed these phenomena with my male friend Xiao Ai, who usually focuses on gender issues and advocates for women, and he is very cautious, saying that he will avoid the term "male feminist". "'Feminist man' has often become a pejorative term now." He had seen some of the rhetoric circulating among men, such as that he could soak girls by simply following them. He also sent me a screenshot of the first associated word for "feminist man" in a Google search: "A man is so desperate to touch a woman's genitals that he shows hatred for himself and his gender." ”
"So, I'm not going to advertise myself as a feminist. At most, I can express my opinion through concrete examples. After listening to Xiao Ai's words, I realized how gender opposition blinded us and ignored the more essential problems. Liu Yiwa wrote "What is the use of becoming a feminist?" also mentioned that her husband quit his job to become a full-time father, but could not resist his parents' complaints that "men can't earn money to support the family" and the strange eyes of other women walking children in the community.
She realized: "Women are not a gender, but a situation. ”
04
"There was no heresy trial, and there was no removal"
Nowadays, news of mutual accusations among women is becoming more and more common, from Papi sauce giving children "crown husband's surname" a few years ago, to Nan Yi, a graduate student of the Academy of Social Sciences, who took a break from school to marry her hometown boyfriend a few months ago and was raped online. The voice that criticizes them is nothing more than that they have not thoroughly implemented the practice of "independent women" and have not set an example for more women.
Criticizing the "love brain" and despising motherhood, some feminists are spreading the "anti-marriage and anti-childbearing" voice, putting married and childbearing women at the lower end of the contempt chain. After experiencing first-hand the difficulty of motherhood, Huang Weizi, an assistant professor at Macau University of Science and Technology, deeply realized that the role of mothers cannot be highly evaluated in the so-called feminist "political correctness" or in the mainstream evaluation system of patriarchal society.
In "Imagining a Feminist Motherhood", she mentioned the story of Yang Bing, a scholar of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who died in childbirth, and public opinion believed that her "promising scientific research talents died in giving birth." Huang Weizi commented, "Women's childcare and housework within the family is devalued as unproductive labor, and public values take precedence over family values. Many feminists have embraced this value set-up, and the solution is to compete with men for roles, achievements, and rewards in the public world. Physical characteristics that prevent women from engaging in public production or that keep them in family life, such as the womb and the ability to procreate, are considered nuisances. ”
That is to say, when a woman chooses to have children or family, all her efforts and efforts will be considered worthless by some people.
What Huang Weizi wants to remind people is that the touting of independence and soberness and "career heroine" is also a very single value. "The aspiration to become economically independent and move to a higher social class is a path capitalism has set for men to success." She believes that it is certainly okay for individuals to choose to work hard for their careers, but it cannot be assumed that women can obtain equal opportunities with men and move towards women's liberation by relying only on their personal struggle. Taking gender discrimination in job search as an example, even if individual women are good enough to win, "this path alone will not bring better prospects for gender equality for women." ”
Stills from the movie "Hidden Figures"
Therefore, Huang Weizi called for vigilance against the internal division of the female community, "Different female groups should no longer fight each other." By dividing women into categories by masculine standards, a patriarchal society is dividing you. ”
Indeed, when I asked several married friends if they would like to call themselves "feminists," they all hesitated that they were not "thorough" and "perfect" enough to be trapped in the gap between women's consciousness and marriage.
"Do I often reflect on myself or am I not a qualified feminist? Most of the feminists I admire have chosen not to marry or even refuse housework, and I can't find a role model to follow. Liu Yiwa also wrote, "In gender studies, no one taught you how to practice a feminist love and marriage in reality, criticized the patriarchal society and analyzed the marriage system, and failed to teach me how to live my life well in marriage and family." ”
Returning to the question I originally wanted to pursue, what is the way out of the dilemma of feminist consciousness in reality? I still don't have an answer. However, I found that after discussing with many friends and scholars, my entanglement as an "intermediary" was actually eased. Because I found that there were many silent women who had similar feelings and confusion to me.
Huang Weizi also mentioned that after his article discussing motherhood was published, it was seen by several doctoral students who had become mothers, and they took the initiative to discuss with her, and their eyes burst into tears as they spoke. They said that their experience had never been expressed, and that they had seen their experience written in my articles. There are also things that they once vaguely felt, and now I present them in a clearer way. ”
Huang Weizi believes that the value of writing about individual experiences is not for other women to do, but for other women to share, who may not have found the opportunity to express it. "Maybe some people can find empathy in this, find another possibility, to break the 'universalization'." We need to broaden the understanding that feminism should have a broad spectrum and a common foundation, but on many specific issues, it is good to have differences. ”
Japanese scholar Chizuko Ueno believes that feminists are not intelligent machines, "just cram the question in, it will spit out the answer." She argues that feminism is a self-declared concept, "There is no real or false, there are just all kinds of feminists." Not a title certified by a third party, there is no heresy trial, and there is no removal. ”
In her opinion, "practicing feminism will be very happy", and Changyue refers to liberating yourself, speaking freely, and doing what you want to do.