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Samhita Mukhopadhyay - Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life

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Book:
Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life
Author:
Samhita Mukhopadhyay
Publisher:
Basic Books
Genre:
Books / Romance novel
Year:
2011
Rating:
5 / 5
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Romance and love are in a state of crisis: Statistically speaking, young women today are living romantic lives of all kindsbut theyre still feeling bogged down by social, cultural, economic, and familial pressures to love in a certain way.

Young women in the modern world have greater flexibility than ever when it comes to who we choose to love and how we choose to love them; but while social circumstances may have changed since our parents generation, certain life expectations remain.

In Outdated, Samhita Mukhopadhyay addresses the difficulty of negotiating loving relationships within the borderlands of race, culture, class, and sexuality-and of holding true to our convictions and maintaining our independence while we do it. Outdated analyzes how different forms of media, cultural norms, family pressure, and even laws, are produced to scare women into believing that if they dont devote themselves to finding a man, theyll be doomed to a life of loneliness and shame.

Using interviews with young women that are living around, between, within, and outside of the romantic industrial complex, Mukhopadhyay weaves a narrative of the alternative ways that women today have elected to live their lives, and in doing so offers a fresh, feminist look at an old topic: How do diverse, independent young women date happily and successfullyand outside of the box?

Samhita Mukhopadhyay: author's other books

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Table of Contents

To Ma ,

for sacrificing everything so I could have the opportunity to ask the questions you never had the luxury to ask. (I also dedicate this to you with the hope that you dont kill me after reading its contents.)

My motto, as I live and learn, is:
Dig and Be Dug In Return.

Langston Hughes

INTRODUCTION

THE (NEW) PROBLEM That Has NO NAME

This story starts just like every other story of heartbreak. It was the summer of 2007 and I was living in San Francisco. I had just broken up with my boyfriend for the third time over the course of our tumultuous two-year relationship, and this time was the last time. I was mourning the loss of yet another relationship (three in six years, oh my!) that never really made me happy, but still, I was devastated. Maybe I was devastated because I was picking the wrong partners (which looking back was true), but there was more to it than that. In my teary-eyed state, I ventured out to Dolores Park to smoke cigarettes, pondering my last few years of constant heartbreak and feeling especially sorry for myself. (Like I said, this story starts like every other story.) I looked around me at a handful of happy couples and thought what every newly heartbroken person thinks: What (the fuck) is wrong with me?

I hurried to the bookstore, like I always do when Im sad and looking for some escape or commiseration. Ive always been drawn to bookstores during times of heartbreak. Usually, I am comforted or distracted enough by others testimonials to love gone bad that I forget the stinging pain of a new breakup for a few hours.

But this time something was different. This time a trip to the bookstore didnt make me feel better because I was upset with more than just the end of the relationship. I needed something more this time. I was looking for a paradigm shift.

As I browsed through the enormous section on dating and self-help (all eight shelves, I kid you not), I saw book after book telling women what they were doing wrong, what they failed to understand, or what they needed to do better to make their relationships work. Almost all the books on the shelf were geared toward women (mens dating books do exist, but more on that later). What I was seeing in front of me, however, was an industry unchecked, overflowing with pages and pages of advice claiming to hold the secrets to your love life, implicitlyand often explicitlylinking a womans very identity with her romantic status, equating her romantic success with her success as a woman.

As I skimmed through book after book (it was a long day), I realized these books, which claimed to be new and revolutionary, trailblazing, and mind-blowing, were merely echoing mainstream clichs that bombard us every day of our lives: In order to have a good relationship, you have to act a certain way; feminism was responsible for ruining womens love lives; all men are inherently one way while all women are inherently another way; the point of a womans life is to find The One; and the only thing worth spending your time and energy on is searching for, finding, and getting said One.

I left the bookstore enraged by the way these books, and the mainstream values they regurgitated, were trying to convince single women that theres something wrong with them. And I realized the question that no book addressedwhich I now see as one of the biggest of the biggest challenges of our generationwas how savvy, smart, successful, politically conscious women date and find love, on our own terms in a world that is still defined by traditional gender roles, impossible expectations, and archaic relationship models.

According to the sexist manifestos that do exist for women to consume and try to emulate, feminism garnered us privileges that are now ruining our love lives. These so-called experts have a warped and distorted view of feminism, obviously. But as I star ted to think about the relationship between feminism and, well, relationships, I had to admit that I too found certain limitations. I realized how feminism was being distorted and mischaracterized, but I was also seeing and experiencing where mainstream feminism was coming up short when it came to womens love lives.

Unlike the clichd writers who hated on feminism, however, and argued that it was too radical, I saw feminism as not radical enough. Popular ideas of feminism have not provided us with enough tools to connect authentically in a world where love and romance have become increasingly commodified. I thought about all the amazing young women I knew who didnt want to date in traditional ways, but who still wanted to date and fall in love. As they sought to negotiate their love lives, many were frustrated by the tension that exists between a sexist dating advice industry and their own strong desire to date. We get so much messaging about what were doing wrong, and so much advice about what we could be doing better, that when it comes to real-life dating, that messaging has a real, strong, and devastating impact.

I decided it was time for an intervention. I wanted to point out what was wrong with mainstream ideas of romance and dating as seen through movies, books, TV, and the self-help industry. And I wanted to point out where feminism had been misappropriated, and also where feminism had legitimately fallen short. And finally, I wanted to push for a new type of feminism, one that recognizes womens complexities, nuances, and differences and provides us with tools to navigate our personal lives. So I decided to write a feminist book about dating that is both a feminist critique on how we understand dating and a road map to guide us through our feminist dating adventures.

Outdated is about conundrums and confusion; its about the contradicting messages we get from popular culture, feminism, our social circles, politics, and the romance industry. Its about charting trends in how women and men are talked about in the media; its about pointing out hypocrisy, and its about dealing with a world that is still reliant on antiquated ideas of gender.

Love in the Time of Feminism

Throughout this book, I refer to different types of feminism. I have always been reluctant to characterize feminism in waves because it ignores all the many places and spaces where feminism has happened that have never been labeled as feminist. But it is important to know what historical moments have impacted which generations and what people are referring to when they use certain terms. So I present to you the briefest history of feminism ever written:

First-Wave Feminism: Used to describe feminist activism in the first half of the twentieth century and best known for the work of the suffragists, a group of women who fought for womens political power and earned us the right to vote. They also worked for marriage equality and other sexual and reproductive rights.

Second-Wave Feminism: Started in the 1960s and open to debate as to when exactly it ended, but its generally agreed upon to be sometime in the 1980s. Second-wave feminisms main issues included equal pay, reproductive rights (birth control), sex-based discrimination, and equal rights in marriage. (Second-wave feminists, like first-wavers, engaged themselves in many movements at once.)

Third-Wave Feminism: Started in the early 1990s and was, in many ways, a response to feminism being treated as if it were over. Third-wave feminism brought hope for a new generation of women that were more diverse and took on issues that were not just focused on gender, but that extended to other intersections of identity, such as race, class, sexuality, ability, gender identification, geography, and so on. Third-wave feminism is often associated with riot grrrl culture (which is how I was introduced to feminism in my suburban New York townthrough Bikini Kill tapes and zines).

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