And the Feminists Whooped
A Male Ally Reflects on Public Displays of Liberation
Recently, I attended a musical adaptation of 9 to 5 put on by an amateur theatre group in the small city where I live. 9 to 5 is, of course, the Dolly Parton vehicle in which three intrepid working women usurp their company’s boss, an “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.” The musical, like the movie, makes for a scathing and timeless critique of male privilege and patriarchy. The crowd certainly got into the spirit. Naturally, the script was full of zingers against the sexist boss and his male privilege, and these were met with wild and raucous whoops of approval from the ladies in the audience. One such example came when one of the female leads strode out for her happily-ever-after denouement and it was revealed by the narrator (a pre-recorded Dolly Parton) that she had (1) permanently left behind her ex-husband, Dick, (2) chosen not to remarry, and (3) authored a book entitled Life without Dick. This occasioned some of the loudest whoops from the women in the audience.
When the curtain closed, those whoops continued to echo in my mind’s ear. I found myself reflecting as to just what exactly those enthusiastic whoops might mean with regard to relationships, marriage, and societal norms, and I’ve come up with a number of hypotheses.
On the one hand, the feminist in me hears in these whoops a clarion call to progressive, powerful, independent womanhood, a goal that I wholeheartedly endorse. Those whoops would seem to affirm that a woman does not by any means need a man to live her best possible life. Correspondingly, these whoops would seem to assert that marriage is not required of any woman nor, for that matter, any man. In that sense, these whoops speak to a future more liberated for anyone of any gender. Indeed, those whoops would seem to put forward a much-needed criticism of the institution of marriage. I applaud that sentiment. While some people undoubtedly have happy and healthy marriages and are better off for it, I think as many or more people suffer on account of the institution. To consider marriage as necessary for anyone who wants to live a fully adult life is an archaic view and doubtlessly limits the potential of a significant number of people.
But on the other hand, the cynic in me knows that 99% (or maybe even 100%) of those whooping women will be married in five years. Many of them may already be married right now. This is a safe assumption, as we are located in a small city in a largely rural region; moreover, the audience was not composed of artsy types who might actually make attempts at a non-conjugal life. Now, I point this out not to call all women or all feminists hypocrites. That is not my aim at all. Rather, my point is that marriage has such a profound weight in virtually all cultures that most of us, if we want to be taken seriously (or at least avoid being swallowed up by inadequacy), will end up married, or at least in a long-term conjugal relationship. To be without a romantic affiliate, after all, can occasion personal and interpersonal vexation (perhaps even more so the latter). The married masses may look at you askance if you’re terminally single. Hence, we are perpetually pulled toward marriage, even if we find it distasteful or archaic at some point earlier on in our adult lives. Marriage is a juggernaut at full momentum, and though many of us will run from it, most of us will still get swept under. Perhaps some of the whooping women will resist, but they can’t be blamed if they ultimately don’t. People should be free to relate with whomever they choose, however they choose.
But even more than that, one must take into serious consideration the lived realities of the people who spurn marriage and relationships not just notionally but consummately, committing themselves to non-conjugal life. These are people like myself, an unemployable shut-in who busies himself writing Medium articles and is considered to be “a bit off” at best by virtually everyone he meets. At this point, I would direct you to my thumbnail picture as a visual testament to the kinds of people we’re talking about when we talk about the non-conjugal life. Most people couldn’t handle a social status even approaching that of a perpetually single person such as myself in their day-to-day lives. So while some of us may flirt with anti-marital sentiments, we can see why most come around to the societal norm for their own well-being.
As such, it might be helpful to think of marriage as a “basin of attraction.” This is a term used by engineers, mathematicians, and students of dynamic systems (that is, people with real jobs) to describe the way in which a set of points in a system will dynamically evolve to a particular attractor. There seems to be a pan-cultural basin of attraction with respect to marriage, and it persists even in our relatively gender-liberated western culture (though one wonders how liberated we are after the recent Roe v. Wade debacle). As data points, we start with scattered views on marriage: some of us absolutely want it (e.g. religious types and townies), and others don’t (e.g. women who want independence, or perhaps men who want a plurality of partners). And in the middle are many with mixed feelings about marriage, each with their own theoretical self-determined probability of getting hitched. But over time, the data points become clustered around one common point. In this system, this means that most of us end up evolving toward marriage or some kind of dyadic conjugal arrangement. Marriage, then, should be thought of as the low point in the basin towards which the gravity of society pulls us. So while we might whoop today — righteously and rightfully so — for our independence, we may find ourselves engaged to be wed in a matter of mere years. This has little to do with hypocrisy or some blind spot in our free will. Rather, it speaks to our underestimation of just how much societal expectations unconsciously and inexorably shape us, no matter how hard we may try to reject them.
Do not, however, read this as my personal rejection of those women who whooped at that local amateur adaptation of 9 to 5. It’s far from it. I want to see the patriarchy crushed as much as anyone, and I appreciate their feministic zest. Rest assured that I whoop in support of every single one of those whooping women. I cheer them on as they move forward with their lives independently. And if any given woman among them does end up meeting someone they want to spend their lives with, and if that person happens to be a man, I won’t find fault with that. Moving beyond individual narratives, however, I do hope that, in the future, the wider population of whooping women with feminist sensibilities (and men in solidarity with the whoopers) will more often prioritize independence over societal pressures to get married. And if they do marry, I sincerely hope it comes at no cost to their independence. The kind of marriage that maintains individual autonomy is as much a blow to the patriarchy as not getting married at all.
