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Where and With Whom Writers Live: Who Cares? March 26, 2020

 So I’m sitting in the sauna, and I’ve just finished the gripping and lyrical book The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and I don’t want it to be over, so I keep reading, through the acknowledgements and onto the back flap of the cover, where I learn that Coates lives somewhere with his wife.

And still in the sauna, I get to thinking about the factoids authors choose to put in their bio-blurbs. Often they bio-blurb the most mundane, heteronormative aspects of their lives: where they live, and whether there’s a spouse and kids living with them. Do readers care about the nuclear families of writers? Personally, I would rather hear how many bookshelves Coates lives with and what secret inspirational snacks he keeps in the back of his refrigerator. Why do so many creative, progressive writers stick to the dull script of “Author lives in Random Location with her Literarily Irrelevant Husband and two children, Moot and Point”? Regular readers of this blog already know why: matrimania, a term coined by social scientist Dr. Bella DePaulo for society’s obsession with marriage as this mystical, magical entity that trumps all else in our lives.

In search of answers, I grabbed some hard-back novels and nonfiction books off my shelves and examined the author bios. (more…)

How Singlism Supports the Other Isms February 22, 2020

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. –Dr. Martin Luther King

The world stomps on single people, not only socio-culturally, but also in law, finance, and business. The U.S. federal code alone has over 1,000 laws that privilege married people over unmarried people. In a 2013 Atlantic article, my colleague and I calculated that this institutionalised “singlism” costs the average unmarried American at least one million dollars more in their lifetime than their married peer, because of discriminatory laws governing Social Security, taxes, retirement accounts, insurance, and more. The injustice is clear. Yet as we’re buffeted by the waves of racism and sexism rolling across the U.S. in the wake of the Trump administration, my fellow singles’ advocates and I discuss whether we should focus on these weightier “Isms,” instead of on singlism. I say no–we should fight even harder against singlism. Coined by social scientist Dr. Bella DePaulo, the term means discrimination against un-partnered people. Singlism isn’t as blatantly horrific as racism and sexism; its power comes from its insidiousness. Some of the most progressive people I know have told me singlism isn’t real, or that I’m “just bitter” about coupled people’s (ostensible) happiness–similar arguments as were made in the early days of feminism, and which are still made about racism today (the awful “post-racial world” argument). Singlism fuels all the other bad Isms: not only sex/genderism and racism, but also ageism, ableism, class-ism, and heterosexism. (more…)

A Leftover Woman Speaks, With Her Voice and Her Face February 17, 2020

The New York Times posted an “Op-Doc” on YouTube focusing on Qiu Huamei, a successful lawyer and (judging from the short video at least) an engaging, intelligent, sensitive, and progressive woman with excellent taste in haircuts. Unfortunately, Qiu is ostensibly still kinda sucky, because at the advanced age of “over 27”, she is–gasp–STILL SINGLE. This makes Qiu a Leftover Woman aka Sheng Nu aka a woman who has to field daily microaggressions from people who feel threatened not only by Qiu’s unmarried status, but by her own relative indifference to finding a husband.

The Op-Doc shows Qiu talking to an amatonormative reporter about her single status. We see her gamely going on a few unfun dates. Most painful are the scenes when she returns to her small hometown south of Beijing after a five-hour bus (or train?) and motorized cart ride, to be greeted and then grilled about why she isn’t trying harder to get married. You can watch it for yourself here, but I’m going to pull out some key quotes below to illustrate the unintended (and intended) microaggressions that single people–especially women–weather every day. Note how Qiu struggles (with more success than I’d have) to compose her facial expressions, when the reporter criticizes her looks and when a promising date says he wants to be the power player in the relationship. In the most resonant clip, her sister literally screams at Qiu for not caring about marriage and kids.

Some of our Copious Readers who don’t believe in singlism (we do have trolls!) may suggest that the more egregious microaggressions are mistranslations or misconstrued translations. No. I have lived in China and Taiwan and speak Chinese well enough to understand (after, ahem, repeated viewings) that what the speakers are saying is exactly what you (as a presumed English speaker) are reading in the subtitles. Here’s a small sampling of the pokes and dings our intrepid independent heroine Qiu receives in this short video:

From the reporter: 

Sorry if I’m being too straightforward, but you’re not beautiful in the traditional sense. . . You might think you look young, but you’re fooling yourself.

From the male chauvinist date: 

As a woman, you don’t have to give advice, just tell me what you need. . . I don’t want my wife to be stronger than me.

From her sister (yelling):

It’s tiring to start a family, but who doesn’t want to have one? Who has a comfortable life after marriage?

Allow me to don my psychic psychotherapist cap. The sister obviously hates the life she built for herself after caving to heteronormative and amatonormative social pressures, and she may have unvoicable mixed feelings about the small male human scooting around in front of her lap and face, who is intermittently blocking the blast of venom she’s trying to unleash on her less conventional sister.

Ok, I’m removing my psychic psychotherapist cap now. Here is where we at Onely acknowledge that the sister is just one of millions of women who are pressured into (more…)