Fucking – er, dating – while feminist

Last week, The Sexist posted an interview with the Jaclyn Friedman, who’s a writer, Executive Director of WAM!: Women, Action and the Media and all-around smart person. The post, called “Fucking While Feminist,” was about the challenges of finding feminist or feminist-ish cisgender men to date, and about how she makes relationships work with the ones she does find. Reading Friedman’s reflections on trying to have a love life and a sex life while making feminism your full-time gig made me think about the way that feminism has influenced my own romantic relationships (though because both my parents and grandmother are reading this, it’s probably wise for me to refer to those relationships as “dating while feminist,” so as not to make my next family gathering incredibly uncomfortable).
Friedman says that she doesn’t have a hard and fast litmus test for whether someone is feminist enough for her to date. “If I had a hardcore litmus test, the pool of men I could date would be so tiny. And then when you weeded out men who are gay, the men I don’t find attractive, the men already in monogamous, committed relationships–really, I would never get laid again.” Instead, she looks for red flags like listing Ayn Rand among one’s favorite authors, or expressing a preference for women who “don’t have drama” (“I feel like that is code for women who have opinions”).
Like Friedman, I don’t have a litmus test to determine if the guy I’m having drinks with is feminist enough for me to date. I’m not going to try to figure out in the course of the conversation if he’s read The Feminine Mystique or if he knows about the intricacies of the pro-choice movement in America. But if by chance it comes up that he does? Huge bonus. But like Friedman, I do look for red flags. If a guy makes a sexist comment on the first date and cushions it with “I’m just joking,” that’s a red flag. If he uses the word “problematize” when trying to argue with a feminist idea, I’m wary. And if he lists Ayn Rand as one of his favourite authors, this is about to be the worst date either of us has ever been on.

Dating – or in Friedman’s case, fucking – is one thing, but once you get into a long-term relationship with someone, you’ve got considerably more invested in the relationship, and if you have feelings for the person, you’re far less likely to kick them to the curb just because you found out that they liked The Fountainhead. Once you’re at that point, it gets harder to make a decision about whether or not to end things based solely on red flags. That said, sometimes a red flag might as well be a flashing “abort mission” sign. My last long-term relationship, which ended about six months ago, was full of enormous, sparkly, frantically waving red flags that I saw as minor problems, but that in hindsight, should have given me great pause. Here are a few examples:

1) He didn’t believe that a family could be “a real unit” unless every member of the family had the same last name. He didn’t believe that a married couple could really be a family unless someone (read: she) changed her last name. As though the wedding license, the ring, mortgage and any kids that might arrive weren’t enough to make you a “family unit.” Once, I suggested that if he thought this were a real problem, then he could take his wife’s name, and his face fell. “Yeah,” I said, “that’s how I feel when you say it to me.”
2) He didn’t want other people seeing me nude or near-nude. About a year into the relationship, I mentioned that I was exploring the possibility of posing for a live drawing class. As someone who’s struggled for a long time to accept and love the size and shape of my body, I thought that standing naked in a room full of strangers as they studied and scrutinized my body would be a way of proving to myself just how far I had come on the long, difficult road to loving myself the way I am. He didn’t see it that way, and was deeply uncomfortable with the idea of other people, and especially other men, seeing me in a state of undress. I pointed out to him that standing there in my underwear was much the same as standing around at the beach in a bikini, but to no avail. It became something of a sticking point – it was my body, after all, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that his objections stemmed from a sense that he, in some way, owned it. Then one night, during a particularly heated discussion of the issue, he said…
3) “This would be so much easier if you weren’t such a feminist.” Ladies and gentlemen, this is what an enormous, sparkly, frantically waving red flag looks like.

Friedman wisely makes the point that in all relationships, romantic or otherwise, and regardless of our views on gender, compromises are essential. But she’s also right when she says that compromises on gender issues, on these kinds of red flags, take on an extra dimension when a person’s gender politics are central to her worldview. For those of us who want to do feminism in every aspect of our lives, this stuff cuts to the core of who we want to be and how we want to shape the world. For us, the personal is very political. That said, everyone is different, and each of us has to decide for ourselves what we’re willing to compromise on, which battles we’ll pick, and what constitutes a relationship-ending impasse.
That decision is usually one that has to be made case by case, weighing the unique circumstances of the relationship, and sometimes we make decisions that, in hindsight, seem entirely counter to what we might have predicted. Looking back now, it seems unthinkable to me that I stayed in a relationship with a man who wished out loud that I could cast aside my feminism, my entire worldview. Learning to identify the red flags I’ve described happened in retrospect, months after the relationship had ended for entirely different reasons. But it was a valuable lesson, one I’ll take with me as I move through life and on to new relationships. Perhaps I’ll compromise on them again, like I did before, or perhaps they’ll crystallize into hard litmus tests or deal-breakers. Regardless of what the future brings, I’m heading into it a little older, a little wiser and a little better at knowing a red flag when I see one.
And by the way, I’m currently in a relationship with a man who openly identifies as a feminist, who reads this and a bunch of other feminist blogs and who knows exactly what I mean when I use terms like “rape culture” and “effortless perfection.” He does not care for Ayn Rand. Grandma, since I know you’re reading this, I think the correct term for him is a “catch.”