LOVE SUCKS

by  Jeanne Leonard

    In her essay, "Love and Dependency", Sharon Bishop says that love is a state where two people are sexually attracted and have plans to carry on with their love indefinitely. She believes that the sentiment of love is a natural one. She contrasts love with loyalty to a corporation and commitments to pay bills. These things, she argues, are not natural but are institutionally imposed on all our lives for the "betterment" of society. But love arises naturally, and there are no sanctions or rewards (in honest healthy love) imposing on it.
    Bishop says that to be in love (again, in a healthy way) we should always have another specific individual as the object of our love and we should love that person for who she or he is and not what that person can do for or give us. Caring about another person's good is also implied in healthy love relationships. Bishop holds that caring about another's good involves relieving that person of his or her pain and providing them with satisfying experiences as efficiently as we possibly can. One can care about someone else's good either directly (providing a "shoulder to cry on") or indirectly (not "waiting up in bed" for your partner when you know she/he has to work unrestrained). Bishop also states that reciprocity of feelings is necessary to a love relationship: each individual should reciprocate the love sentiment at the same level of intensity as she or he receives the sentiment.
    Bishop claims a love relationship cannot last without reciprocity of feelings, caring for your partner's good, and loving your partner for her or himself.
    I agree with Bishop's analysis of what it means to love someone because every notion that I have about love seems to fit somewhere in her analysis. I think that communication of needs is important to a love relationship, and this would probably be included under Bishop's category of reciprocity. I also believe that having interest or joy in each other's lives is important. Bishop adresses this same idea under her catagory of "caring for the other's good." She says that if we are attempting to recognize what is satisfying to our partner (so that we can help contribute to that satisfaction as defined in caring for someone's good) we need to pay attention to and care about her or his interests.
    I could go on forever about what I think it means to love someone, but everything I think of could easily be placed under one of Bishop's categories. Therefore, I agree with Bishop's analysis of what it means to love someone -- her analysis covers a lot of territory.
    Shulamith Firestone, in her essay, "Love and Women's Oppression," holds a more negative view of modern love. She claims that women are preoccupied with achieving a "perfect love" that they devote no time to creating their own culture. So their love ideals are derived from the male culture ideals which are purposely distorted, unrealistic and self-defeating to women. But women still strive to achieve these impossible ideals and all the while the men are "sucking" the women's strength, bolstering their spirits, giving nothing back to the women.
    Like Naomi Wolf, author of The Beautv Mvth--How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women, Firestone says that the only "objects of beauty" deemed appropriate in our culture are females. Females, then, find it difficult to identify with males as objects of beauty because males are not presented as such objects in our culture. Therefore, females find only vicarious identity in the man's desire for the females. While the male desires the female, the female sexually reacts (is aroused) to the male's desire to herself instead of her own desiring of him. She can only identify with herself as an object.
    Firestone also states that men hardly reciprocate tenderness initiated by the female, since doing so would constitute recognition of her equality. This whole sexual process is contrived to keep the female dependent on the male. Again, like Wolf, Firestone asserts that women are viewed as, and made to feel that they are "interchangeable." By constantly making light of women's sexuality or beauty, women begin to see their identity as directly related to their sex organs or the symmetry of their features. Once a woman bases her whole identity on her sex organs or on her physical appearence, she begins to feel less unique, average and typical. After all, whatever she has is replaceable by any other of her sex. Also, as Marilyn Frye has pointed out in her book, The Politics of Reality, all of this concentration of women's sexuality and looks is a way of objectifying the female and denying her of her personhood. She becomes a female object and a person second. This ideal beauty/ love concept is prevalent in today's society. Both men and women believe it and struggle to achieve this impossibility. It seems that it is difficult to achieve Bishop's "love ideals" when romantic love is still being used as a power tool by many men. (Most men, according to Firestone).
    If Firestone's societal analysis is true, then heterosexual love seems doomed. And it does seem that Firestone's is valid in today's society. Naomi Wolf's book The Beauty Myth is one of the most recent works on how images of beauty are used against women and in this book, many of Firestone's criticisms are reiterated. According to Wolf and many other contemporary writers, women are suffering from being objectified from impossible "ideals of beauty." Firestone asserts that women are wrongly concerned with fulfilling their designated roles as the loving, giving, "beautiful" wives and mothers and lose ground to men in modern society -- which is all contained in this ideal.  Firestone's analysis seems correct, and Wolf and Frye support this. So long as these distorted concepts and structures of love are in existence, modern heterosexual love doesn't seem to stand a chance. But, if we (as a culture) can overcome these misconceptions, then women and men alike can look to Sharon Bishop's outline for ways to better cultivate their love. Bishop's suggestions will never work, however, as long as love continues to be a tool to oppress women. As long as few people question the present system, then men, as well as women, will remain in the dark and suffer from the inequalities of modern romantic love.