When I was a junior in high school, several people told me that my friend, John*, had liked for me a long time and wanted to ask me to homecoming but decided not to because he heard me talking about another guy. For two years, I had felt guilty that I was that girl—the girl who is so often portrayed in movies, oblivious to the fact that one of her best guy friends was right there in front of her the entire time, while she was concerned with her own feelings and self-absorbed problems.
In a moment of candor, I asked John if that was true: did he not ask me or admit his feelings because I was so self-absorbed? He quickly assured me that none of that was true and he refrained from asking because he knew he only had feelings for me as a friend. It was his friends who insisted that we should like each other; he never even knew that they told me it was my fault for talking about another guy until I spoke up and asked him myself. He reminded me that I should not have felt guilty because it is no one’s responsibility to be romantically available to someone else.
There are many questions that come up with this topic, but I think one of the most important lies in the time it took me two years to ask him about it. Why did it take two years and John to make me realize that I am allowed to not reciprocate feelings and I don’t have to feel guilty for that? Because of the patriarchy and its plethora of messed up tropes—that’s why.
The notion that a male’s feelings for a female are somehow more important than her own feelings, and that her own romantic endeavors are “trivial” in comparison, is part of a societal double-standard in which the wishes of men are more highly valued than those of women. And that is what leads to entitled jerks (John used a much stronger word than this, but I’m keeping it PG) who believe to be the center of female attention. And that is what feeds into the broader psychosocial paradigm that contributes to rape culture. And what is almost worse is that many females, myself included until yesterday, do not even realize that they have fallen prey to these perpetuating ideals of being less worthy or deserving. This isn’t about hating men, this is about teaching females to recognize their own self-worth, their basic rights to feel.
Source: http://giphy.com/gifs/feminism-wonder-woman-patriarchy-3o85xKPAEDCuXxRepO
There have been ebbs and flows in the history of feminism. We spent a few centuries going backward socially, especially with the “cult of domesticity.” We read about such oppression in literature, like in Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which Ophelia, among other female characters, is told how to feel about everything, including her love life. Despite viewing this as wrong, we continue to recycle such tropes, those which become self-perpetuating from an art of the root of public consciousness. This is so dangerous because art is our attempt, as humans, to understand and communicate in the world: when these societally memetic ideas, codified as tropes, shape what people believe about the world and its inhabitants.
Not only are there real issues regarding women and their feelings about men, but there are significant dilemmas within the world of women—pressure to have the right balance between being mothers and career-minded individuals. Many females feel like they are “bad women” if they choose to be a mom over pursuing a career, or if they choose a career over motherhood. We cannot blame all problems on men; that is simply just not the case today. But how do we remedy all of this?
We can try to oppose those views when we find them and count on the fact that, one day, those beliefs will die out as more people are made aware. Each and every one of us is the future. We will be around for countless more years so we must decide what those years are going to look like, and neither John nor I intend on having them look like that flawed paradigm. Enjoy rom-coms (I always will), but remember that you are 100% entitled to your own feelings and that no one, no matter their gender, can tell you that you are wrong or selfish for feeling the way you do.
Source: http://giphy.com/gifs/betawards-bet-awards-2013-3o7qDNLF8D2Lqe8GGc
*Names have been changed for privacy