and if you want to burn yourself, remember that I love you

[fitz_clementine]

1. Man, nobody has to like Valentine's Day, and I get a lot of the reasons why people don't (consumerism, the erasure of spiritual and religious aspects from what was once a holy festival, general tackiness), but I enjoy many aspects of it! And I am, wait for it, dating a woman! Even though I am also a woman!  And we are into the tackiness, let me

Comments

[fitz_clementine]

You weren't that cranky, just a little-- well, you were getting on your sparkly high horse! No worries, everybody does it from time to time; I found it mildly annoying to be told off (as I interpreted it) by a much more heterosexually-oriented person than I for enjoying a "heteronormative holiday," and more broadly, I thought that you could've expressed a distaste for the way Valentine's Day is marketed and promoted in consumer culture and popular media without making an insulting assumption that anyone who likes the holiday is some kind of uncritical dupe who likes it for really shallow reasons and celebrates it by, I dunno, buying crappy chocolates and red roses for their heterosexual, gender-normative date at an expensive Italian restaurant As Seen On TV.

I know that's not what you meant to get across in that blog post, but actually Valentine's Day is a pretty popular holiday for people-- all kinds of people-- to express their worldly, out-of-the-mainstream ways by being curmudgeonly about. < / awkward sentence structure> Sometimes I, in turn, become unreasonably defensive and snarky. I'm sorry! Anyway, I could and should have cheered you up by sending you something; I just totally forgot!!

[spacklegeek]

No, thank you for pointing this out. You're right: I suppose that is what I was doing.

See, I'd seen this on FB, thought - My god! It is kinda like that! - and then attempted to bring that revelation into my post. It didn't work, and, for the reasons you pointed out, it failed pretty spectacularly. Ironically, the commercialism of V-day does bother me looads more than this supposed idea that it's a heteronormative holiday, but I wanted to rant about that, instead.

I am sorry. Thank you, again, for saying this, because it hadn't occurred to me, and I'm glad you pointed it out. I've actually linked your post above to my v-day post, because I wanted to add what you've said to what I originally said.

[fitz_clementine]

Wow. Thank you for listening; I'm not sure that I was being terribly articulate, or terribly fair to you (especially now I've gone back and re-read that post a couple of times), but...yeah, okay, I'm just going to stop at "thank you." I'm so glad you're the kind of person who really values opinions that differ from her own and takes them into account. :)

The commercial marketing around Valentine's Day is truly obnoxious, and I can understand being annoyed by it, or even getting angry about it. I don't want to seem like I'm totally brushing off the existence of a toxic consumer culture or media culture by saying "just ignore that stuff and make up your OWN traditions!!" because it can be impossible to ignore, and because I'm sure a lot of people genuinely are made to feel worse about themselves on Valentine's Day if they're gay, or single, or divorced, or asexual, or not in a traditional kind of romantic relationship.

(Though, as mentioned in my post -- kinda-sorta-- consumerism and heteronormativity are everywhere in U.S culture all the time. I mean, romance novels are pretty dang heteronormative and heterosexist-- though I'm not saying that to make you feel bad about reading them or liking them! Just putting it out there. Advertising is ubiquitous, and basically every holiday that can be used to sell or promote a product, will be. There was a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day blowout sale on household appliances at a store in State College a little while back! Shameless.)

And, of course, if almost all of your personal associations with a particular holiday are negative ones, you aren't going to like it, and you aren't going to like being reminded of it! I'm sorry that your Valentine's Days have sucked.