Love as a feminist heterosexual woman

 

“I think that the way you date the first time has a big effect on the way that you date from then on.” The friend who said this explained that her first partner had been a good person, and that she had learned how to date from him.

 

I’m a woman in her 20s who is also a feminist and heterosexual. Around the time that I first started to learn about feminism after beginning university, I also started dating. But dating was a difficult problem for me to solve. As soon as we started dating, I felt that my words and my boyfriend’s words didn’t carry the same weight.

 

“Dating is trouble from the start for feminist heterosexual women,” said one friend after returning from a blind date. Dating was a more secret and private relationship than I had thought. And within that relationship, it was easy for my feminist identity to become powerless. The standard of the things that I expected from my boyfriend started to gradually lower, because I didn’t want to fight with him, because I loved him, because I wanted to receive as much love as I gave.

 

“What you do isn’t such a great thing”

 

He was six years older than me, my first boyfriend. When we first got together, I dreamt of the romantic love that I had seen in the media. But unlike in TV and movies, dating for me was suffocating and not romantic at all.

 

Whatever I said, he would demand that I provide logical evidence for it. Even when I did give a logical answer, if my opinion was different from his, he would use sophistry to dismiss my point. Our conversations always ended with him saying, “You’re still young, so you don’t know much about the world.”

 

When I read bell hooks’ Feminism is for Everybody, I talked to my boyfriend about what I felt and what I realized while reading it. It was the delight and feeling that the world had started to sparkle that came when I discovered in the book the reason why remarks like, “Wearing a short skirt is just telling men to look, isn’t it?,” “You have to sit modestly, or else you’ll look cheap,” and “That guy is bothering you because he likes you – I envy you” made me feel uncomfortable. When I talked to my boyfriend because I wanted to share this joy, he told me again to convince him logically.

 

I said that feminism is a movement to put a stop to gender discrimination and the oppression of women, it wasn’t “that bad thing” (which is funny, now that I think about it) like he thought, and that men and women could be allies. But all he said in return was, “You try too hard to enlighten people.” 

 

He couldn’t stand for me to know more than him about something. When I talked to him about the discrimination that women face in the job market, he couldn’t stand it. He simply said, “Don’t worry about it. You’re young and pretty so you’ll get hired easily.”

 

▲ In the movie Love Fiction, Hui-jin answers her boyfriends question “Are you on your period?” with “When women get mad for a fair reason, the most hurftul thing that irresponsible men say is exactly that. Men who think that women’s brains are in their uteri! I thought that you alone weren’t like that, so I’m really disappointed.”

As a “young and inexperienced” person, I often confessed my worries about university life to my boyfriend, and every time he would say “It’s because you keep doing useless things.” At that time, I was in the middle of protesting a rise in tuition fees and was taking an interest in sexual assault cases that happened in classrooms, department offices, and student club rooms and trying to help the victims. I was talking about my rights as a university student, and about what it was like to be a woman in university. I think that this was all behavior related to my survival.

 

But he dismissed all of it as “useless.” He judged that it was the wrong time for that kind of thing, that getting a job was more important. I thought, “I know better than you what an important issue to me is,” but I didn’t have the confidence to say it out loud. I knew that if I did, we would have a terrible argument that would again end in him saying, “You think like that because you’re young.” I think that I couldn’t stand up to an older man.

 

“What you do isn’t that great,” “What’s that. You have to stop all that (unimportant stuff) and spend time with me.” This is how he talked about my daily activities. I strongly argued the case for the importance of my work, but he stood fast. Devaluing the activities of the organizations I belonged to, he criticized me for spending time on them instead of him. He demanded that I explain my daily schedule, but offered no explanation of his own. When he said, “Don’t call me, I’m playing computer games,” or “I’m going to be out late tonight drinking with my friends,” I felt that it would be awkward and inappropriate to ask, “Why?” I always had to justify myself, but he never did.

 

Still, he was the one who loved me most...

 

He wanted me to fit in the mold of the typical girlfriend. When I would meet up with him without putting on makeup first, he would say that I was “neglecting” him. When I would point out that his attitude when dealing with me was like he was dealing with a child, he would respond, “This is how everyone acts while dating.” When I didn’t agree with him, he cast me as his young girlfriend throwing a tantrum, and when I did agree with him, he cast me as his girlfriend who’s starting to understand the world.

 

I tried to act according to these dating rules that he taught me. I learned them. How to be a girlfriend who listened to her boyfriend’s worries, who paid attention to her outfit so that something bad didn’t happen to her, who never got too comfortable around her boyfriend.

 

I didn’t want to fight with him. Outside, there were so many issues that I thought were unjust that I earned the nickname “Fighting Cock,” but I didn’t want to be like that in my closest relationship as well. Though I could stand without a microphone in front of more than 100 people and loudly shout, “This is wrong,” I shrank back in my relationship with my boyfriend. I felt that as soon as I did something like that, our relationship would be in danger. A thousand times, I thought, “What if he leaves me for being overbearing?” “Still, he’s the one who loves me most,” and “I probably can’t find another guy like this, so let’s put up with it.” 

 

So throughout our relationship, I suffered from this personal contradiction. Being with “a person who would be great if it wasn’t for that one thing” meant giving up my identity. When counseling my friends, I would say, “Your partner’s behavior is problematic. Rethink your relationship.” But I couldn’t do that myself. My politics, which should have started with my closest relationship, were a failure. But it was harder than you’d think to break up with him, because he was great except for that problem.

 

His dating style of devaluing me and making me depend on him continued throughout our relationship. I didn’t know it at that time, but that is typical negging, and the relationship was eating away at me. What kind of relationship should I have had with a boyfriend who didn’t acknowledge my feminist identity? Or rather, what kind of relationship could I have had with him?

 

I liked the “nice girlfriend cosplay”

 

We weren’t standing on equal footing. His behavior was accepted as being “appropriate for public life,” but the same standard didn’t apply to me. I always argued to him that we must become a society in which women and men are equal. He, of course, didn’t deny this. He just always asked questions in return. “What do you think about the problem of men always suffering from reverse discrimination?” “Aren’t feminists going overboard in demanding women’s rights?” Still, he didn’t flatly reject what I said, so I thought that he agreed with my position on gender equality.

 

We didn’t fight. Our arguments were closer to one-sided lessons delivered by my boyfriend, and all I could do was provide “excuses” for myself. When I said I wanted to hang out with my friends until late at night, he didn’t “allow” it. When I pointed out that he was out with his friends until dawn sometimes, he replied, “You don’t contact me at the right time when you’re with your friends.” I said, “You don’t contact me when you’re playing computer games, when you’re alone, or when you’re with your friends,” and he got angry and unilaterally ended the conversation. Then I had to apologize first. I had to give him understanding, but he didn’t have to do the same for me. When I got upset, it was “sulking,” but when he got upset it was righteous anger.

 

I was really confused about how to deal with him. Whenever I showed my feminist identity, he would reject it. I was distressed, but it was hard to talk to my friends about it. I was afraid that my feminist friends would say, “You’re putting up with all that? Are you really a feminist?” and that my non-feminist friends would say, “Ah, so you’re a woman after all.”

 

Maybe the reason I put up with all this is because of the ideas of the people around me about a “nice girlfriend.” When I got angry at my boyfriend, he got even angrier at me – so I couldn’t get angry. Unexpectedly, the people around my boyfriend had a good image of me because of this attitude. He often told me what they said. “They said they’re jealous because you’re so nice,” “You’re understanding about what men do.” My boyfriend was really proud about getting these positive evaluations of me from people he knew. And the remarks he passed on became dating standards for me.

 

▲ “Nice girlfriend,” “Compliant girlfriend,” “And I am?” Post-its with the norms given to me. My concerns at the time. ⓒKong-kong

 

“That’s a form of violence”

 

One day I went to a job fair with a university friend. I posted a picture of us at the event on a social networking site. My boyfriend called me and said, angrily, “Are you crazy?” Stunned, I asked what he meant, and he answered, “Didn’t you just post a picture of yourself with another guy?” The incident was incomprehensible to me. Had I hugged my friend, or kissed him? My boyfriend had already gotten advice on the situation from his friends, and most of them said what I had done was wrong.

 

I said I was sorry. I knew that if I didn’t apologize, he would keep harassing me. I was getting more and more tired of the relationship. I asked my friends what they thought about the possibility of me breaking up with him. After I told them the whole story, one friend said, “(Name), that’s dating violence.”

 

Dating violence, happening to me? It was hard to acknowledge. I could feel that when I did, my everyday life would crumble. This was dating, as I had learned it. I choked back excuses. “No. I know quite a bit about that kind of situation.” “I know what violence is, but in my case...”  But what I finally said was, “Do you think so?”

 

My friend told me to think about it all one more time. Wasn’t I being treated like a possession? Did we really have equal rights in the relationship? What would my situation look like from an outsider’s perspective? And with a serious face, my friend said, “If you continue dating him even knowing that this is violence, I’m going to stop being your friend.” I answered from habit, “He’s really good to me normally.” It was a weak answer. I started to feel ashamed.

 

But still, when everything I had suffered was labeled “dating violence” by another person, it all became clear, miraculously. I could understand why I worried about our relationship, and what kind of effects his words and actions had had on me. I had been fooling myself. I had been carefully pretending not to know that his words were verbal abuse that were chipping away my self-esteem. I broke up with him. Finally, I no longer had to constantly justify my words and behavior. 

 

Conversation without feminism, literature, society, or politics?

 

After that, I went on a blind date that my friend set up. It was my first time meeting someone who was decided in advance as a potential boyfriend. We had a typical date. We asked each other personal questions at a pasta restaurant.

 

He asked what I was interested in. At that time, it was representations of women in literature. I thought for a second about how to explain this and answered, “I like books.” When he asked what kind of books, I named a few: “Kim Yi-seol’s Bad Blood, Yi Kwang-su’s The Heartless, Na Hye-sok’s Kyonghui...”

 

I was about to say that I had enjoyed them, but before I could even finish my answer, he asked, “Aren’t you interested in anything besides that kind of thing?” What do you think he meant by “that kind of thing”?

 

I didn’t know what to say. So far during our date, he seemed to be proud of having a “man’s” role. Every time he said something, he specified whether it applied to men or women. I thought of the things I’m interested in. Women, literature, society, politics... talking about them at our first meeting didn’t seem like a good idea. So how could I describe myself? I didn’t think he’d want to hear that kind of thing. And I didn’t expect to form a relationship with this person who treated gender equality like an unusual topic.

 

I told my friends about the date. They said, “Most blind dates are like that.” I started to wonder – where and how do heterosexual feminists find partners?

  

▲ Some of the things that explain me: bell hooks’ Feminism is for Everybody, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, a sticker from an event called I Am a Feminist. ⓒKong-kong

Invisible inequality: the narrative of dating

 

The inequality between people who are dating is no longer obvious. We grew up learning that (on the surface) women and men are equal, at least. An equal relationship is a must, and open gender discrimination is not possible. But it’s hard to complain of the forms of gender discrimination that are not widely recognized by society. People draw a line, as if saying, “We’ll recognize anything up to here as gender discrimination, but in return you must not ask for more.”

 

We’re in a strenuous tug-of-war. Discrimination and violence are getting more delicate and less visible. When a boyfriend is verbally abusive to his girlfriend, doesn’t recognize her as being equal to him, and disrespects her, it is treated as a “private matter.”

 

Young women are pressure to believe that they live in a society that is no longer gender discriminatory. People who reject this idea are “feminazis who doggedly persist even though they were born in a good era.” People who discuss gendered power relationships in the private sphere are considered especially tiresome. But inequality still exists in intimate relationships. It’s just hard to notice because it’s become a “normal” part of dating.

 

The violence hardens into standards about what girlfriends “have to do” and becomes the taken-for-granted narrative of dating. It’s hard to break free of that narrative, because nowhere do gender-role standards operate more powerfully than in romantic relationships. The moment that the role required of a girlfriend or of a boyfriend is refused, the relationship screeches to a halt. After my first relationship ended, I kept wondering: can I have an equal relationship? Can I put my politics into practice in my most intimate relationship? [Translated by Marilyn Hook]

 

-Published: July 20, 2016. *Original article: http://ildaro.com/7536

 

◆ To see more English-language articles from Ilda, visit our English blog(https://ildaro.blogspot.com).

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