The Glass Slipper: Women and Love Stories

Preface

Preface The woman in love feels endowed with a high and undeniable value. —Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex The original impulse to write this book came from teaching young women who face a peculiar double bind. These students consider themselves the most independent and self-determining generation of women in history, yet their expectations of love do not seem to match their real-life observations and experience of romance and marriage, and they’re not sure why. Magazine articles, self-help books, and psychology studies quoted on TV and the Internet tell them how to find the right man but seem to have helped very little. Though most of my female students rhetorically reject the traditional feminine motive of economic security in marriage, they often worry that they won’t be seen as desirable if they project independence and self-interest. The lure of being chosen by the desirable man who pursues, and the fear of not being seen as a desirable object worthy of emotional attachment, are more powerful than the threat of what they might lose through submergence in a relationship. So the old idea of a woman’s value as defined through her ability to attain the love of the high-status man lives on to a surprising degree. Courtship is still celebrated in movies, novels, magazines, and TV as the most special time of a woman’s life, as opposed to a man’s. Though Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949, well before the Second Wave of the women’s movement in Western nations, it seems to me that many women still seek to be adored in love, perhaps more than ever. De Beauvoir claimed that women both want freedom and fear giving up the privileges of dependency. I would argue that in a society in which there are suddenly greater sexual freedoms than ever, women counter their anxiety about continuing sexual exploitation by clinging to romantic love as a kind of emotional affirmation that they are worth more than the exchange value of their bodies. The ideal and hope of being adored, protected, and given lifelong emotional security becomes insurance against the increasingly heavy demands for a kind of sexuality that is still devalued for women, though paradoxically it’s also encouraged and inflated. In other words, women react to the pressure to be both super-desirable (literally adore-able) and yet strong and independent by holding on to the Victorian split xi xii PREFACE between the good woman, who is loved, and the hypersexual woman, who may be exploited. If they’re loved, they feel they must be good. How do young women meet their desire to find someone to love while not compromising a strong sense of self? There aren’t many role models or guides for that, and so romance has become an unexamined area where many women remain squeezed between unappealing options. Heterosexual women often live with anxiety about the price paid for condemning “men,” which includes the “good” men and the desirable mates. My students resent critiques of romance as “man-hating” and radical or extreme and are anxious to assure me and themselves that they are not cynical or hostile . . . unlike feminists. Or they may define their own feminism as the power to get what they want, and vigorously endorse using their desirability as a kind of power tool. These conflicts around romantic love parallel women’s similar ambivalence and anxieties surrounding beauty, youth, sexuality, and motherhood. As the recent work of psychologists Laurie Rudman and Kim Fairchild has shown, both women and men perceive feminism and romance to be in conflict.1 Overwhelmingly, the “postfeminist” young women I encounter reject Second Wave feminists’ analysis of love as a power dynamic. They see romance as a semimagical space of perfectly mutual and enduring feelings; if there is an imbalance of power, in their view, it isn’t “real” love in the first place, and everyone will find “real” love eventually, so there is no problem to discuss. After all, they argue, if I need you and you need me, there is no power issue: it does not occur to them that desire, need, and dependence can assume a variety of forms that don’t necessarily harmonize or equalize. I see this topic as timely and important because romance is an area of life that informs most Western women’s choices, in a way that is evolving along with modernity . While the Glass Ceiling limits female...