- Question
- What is love?
- Position‹3 of 6›
- Love is a societal tool
- Argument1 of 5›
Love is oppressive
Love, as it exists under current social constructs, is an oppressive tool of the patriarchy.
The argument
On this account love is not a private feeling but a set of social arrangements, and those arrangements do not treat everyone alike. The definitions of "success" in love are not the same for men and women. For men, society defines success in "love" as success on the sexual market and the ability to remain free from commitment for as long as possible. For women, success is defined by marital goals. The same word therefore names two opposite achievements — for one party staying unattached, for the other becoming attached — and the party who succeeds by delaying holds the timing in their hands. The asymmetry is anchored in how value is assigned. This is likely because many of our definitions of love are tied to beauty, which is inherently linked to age in women, so a woman's standing under these terms is treated as declining while a man's is not. It is also linked to the established idea that women should marry "up": they should marry someone physically taller than them, older than them, more wealthy than them and with a higher social standing than them. Each of those conditions builds a gap into the relationship before it has begun, and every one of the gaps runs the same way. What follows from such arrangements is dependence. The institutional arrangements surrounding love are designed to imprison women in dependent relationships, unfavourable legal contracts (like marriage) and ultimately leave them responsible for rearing children — an outcome that removes both the time and the means to leave. Read this way, love functions as a societal tool: it presents itself as the freest of all choices while narrowing the options of one party at every stage. If women were to be released from the binds of the construct of love, they would be freer.
Premises
Counter-arguments
The arguments outlined here are not directed at love in its purest form but the manifestation of love in society. They are rightly directed at marriage and dating culture, which are institutions of love but do not deal with what love is. Love by definition is not a tool of the patriarchy. Nor is it inherently oppressive. A unionists view of love may fall into this trap but many of the other definitions of love explored in this debate do not oppress female participants.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Love is not oppressive in every form, so is not oppressive by nature.