OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
ANOTHER HOLIDAY, another bunch of assignments I’ve done for Everything Holidays.
This time, I had to write perky, upbeat, family-clean pieces about my least favorite holiday of them all.
Like many of my fellow involuntary singles, I’ve long loathed Valentine’s Day. I hated the entire commercial expectation–the demand, even–that everybody already have a cutesy-wootesy romantic sugar twin.
Mind you, I still hate that aspect of the sorry spectacle. But I did get to learn a few other things during my research that made the season a little more tolerable.
Thing I Learned #1: Like most of the big dates on the Christian holiday calendar, V.D. was originally an old Roman “pagan” day with decidedly earthier iconography.
At the ides of February, a little more than halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, they held a fertility festival honoring (among other members of the godly populace) Lupercus, the god of shepherds, and Juno, the goddess of women and marriage. It was, to quote one tastefully written document, “a celebration of sensual pleasure, a time to meet and court a prospective mate.”
In other words, another orgy opportunity.
They’d hold “love lotteries” in which a teenage boy would draw the name of a teenage girl from a box. As another tasteful document puts it, “These pairs were encouraged to pair off as lovers.”
Those Romans didn’t expect everybody to be a whiz at personally marketing The Brand Called You. They knew folks might need help meeting their need to join-up, and had rituals to help ’em out.
Thing I Learned #2: After the emporer Constantine installed Christianity as Rome’s new official religion, the popes installed Christianized (i.e., dour and drab) versions of the old holidays. But the populace didn’t take to the first Valentine’s Day concept–a drab and dour remembrance of saints and martyrs.
Instead, they took one aspect of one particular martyr named Valentine, who (according to the legend) had performed secret marriage ceremonies in defiance of emporer Claudius (who’d believed single and frustrated men made more aggressive soldiers) as their excuse for carrying on with a cleaned-up version of the love holiday.
Thing I Learned #3: Romantic courtship and dating, as we know it today, began with the best of intentions.
Apparently, the duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine set up a feudal court in the French town of Poitiers in 1168. She assigned her daughter, Marie de Champagne, to teach the teens and young adults of the palace to be proper young nobles. The etiquette guide Marie commissioned was specifically about how to properly, tastefully express and return romantic intentions.
The idea, besides training good servants, was to give women more power in what had been a muscle-bound society where females were seen as sex-and-birth machines. Under Eleanor’s ideals of “courtly love,” the man would have to prove the purity of his intentions and the woman would hold all the power to choose or reject.
Eight centuries after Eleanor’s ideals spread through Medieval Europe, we’re stuck with their devolved, corrupted legacy.
The “alpha males,” human Barbie dolls, rock stars, and bimbos get all the opportunities to date and mate and have dysfunctional relationships.
The awkward, the shy, and those without magazine-approved physiques, living in an isolation-inducing, suburbanized America without the fall-back option of family matchmakers, get to suffer through the soul-crushing rites of the “dating scene.” Either that, or settle for (for the guys) soulless porn or (for the gals) self-help books telling them they’re supposed to want to stay alone.
But one can take a lesson from old Eleanor. She saw a mating-and-marriage system that dehumanized women, and dreamed of something better. I see a mating-and-marriage system that dehumanizes most everyone, and should also be able to dream of something better.
If only I could imagine what that would be.
(P.S.: Applications for a cutesy-wootesy romantic sugar twin are still being accepted at this email address.)
TOMORROW: Ken Griffey Jr. gets depicted alternately as nice, mean, and nice again, without changing a thing about himself.
IN OTHER NEWS: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins; he’s my main man.
ELSEWHERE:
