Valentine's Day Gender Roles

"Good morning to you, valentine;
Curl your locks as I do mine ---
Two before and three behind.
Good morning to you, valentine."

A Valentine's Day display in a local Stop & Shop contained a three-tiered table draped with a red cloth and containing an abundance of items in red and pink. There was a vast majority of heart-shaped items: balloons of several sizes, boxes of chocolate with their gold bows, and little, stuffed mementos inscribed with "Be Mine" in teddy bears’ clutches. These bears were relatively small and light in color with fuzzy coats and faces turned forward with blank expressions of disinterest. As a whole, the tiered items were not ones of sentimental value, but rather a symbolic gesture toward what is known as Valentine's Day, or to others, Single’s Awareness Day. They all seemed impersonal: the chocolate "I <3 Us," the chocolate roses, and the red or magenta potted plants among the mass of floating and sitting "I love yous," "be mines," and "happy Valentine's days," and consumerism can be blamed. Valentine’s Day is a “Hallmark holiday,” receiving about fourteen billion dollars of expenses annually. Its message is clear: love is bought, and such forms of gift giving is obligatory nowadays.

Another problem with Valentine's Day is how heterosexuality dominates the gift giving. Both its historical traditions and modern interpretations place the male as the dominating, "giving" figure, and women as the passive, "receiving" partner. They are socially viewed as two halves of a whole, and their roles are evident in the merchandise, where they have femininity. Girls receive flowers, “wooing” being the targeted result. Rubin's sex hierarchy would agree with this visible inclination toward heterosexuality because it is "good," "normal," and "natural," unlike homosexuality or other sexualities beyond the one-male/one-female dynamic. Heterosexually is accepted, and society chooses to celebrate it.

Meanwhile, the socially accepted role of masculinity would be challenged if men were given roses or teddy bears. Society, again, requires them to have the dominating role, just like they are the initiators and leads in sex. If they do not embrace this role, then their manhood diminishes, similar to how erectile dysfunction marks the death and inefficiency of the male body (Sex Matters, Reading 26 - Fixing the Broken Male Machine). "True masculinity is almost always thought to proceed from men's bodies" (Sex Matters 276). Sexual efficiency marks their masculinity, so it is not hard to believe social functions would enforce masculinity as well.

Further sexual interpretation of Valentine's Day and its products is debatable. This display is in a supermarket, so there is a high degree of sexual chasteness involved. Sex, while widely known, is still a secret, even forbidden, and has been since the Victorian era. Foucault argued this, and he was correct. Thus while supermarkets reach a wide audience, only a controlled intimacy is advertised. Items like roses and chocolate may symbolize attraction and sex, but the only roses in the display are made out of chocolate, the living flowers being peonies, while the chocolate is simply cheap and marketable. The message is intimacy and love can be bought with the groceries. This brings Reading 31 to mind: "Against Love: A Treatise on the Tyranny of Two" in the book Sex Matters. It addressed the history of relationships, and how in today's demanding, working world, sex has become another obligation. "The erotic life of a nation of workaholics: if sex seems like work, you're not working hard enough" (Sex Matters 333). Thus Valentine's Day has become a cheap, cheesy, and "straight" representation of a holiday.