Het-Dating While Feminist

The Feminist Blogosphere has been aflame lately with posts about how hard it can be for hetero feminists to date. Not because we're all so scary and emasculating that we castrate every straight guy in the room upon entering, but because being a feminist suggests a pretty high standard for a partner: we aren't women who will take any shit. We are NOT women who read Cosmo, let alone scour it for Sex Tips: How to Please Your Man-Child. We are NOT women who spend a huge portion of our incomes trying to make ourselves somehow more conventionally attractive to please the man looking for arm candy. We are not the women who will put up with a lot of "boys will be boys" rhetoric: we are not women who take any crap.

At the bottom of this post, I'm listing links for the blogs I've read over the past ten days that this post is a response to. There are questions about what kind of a litmus test a feminist could use to determine if this guy is going to make a good partner; questions about criteria, statements about red flags, and how not to narrow your dating pool too small. It's all very good reading, but a lot of what bothered me about these posts was how willing some of the women speaking were to make exceptions to the rules for the sake of getting laid. This can be touchy territory. I'm never so heavily invested in having sex with a man that I'm not more than happy to cut loose if I should be dating a guy and he exhibits dealbreaker behaviour. I do appreciate partnership enough that I will let some things slide while I'm dating men, but now that we mention it, I always live to regret that. Food for thought.

What it always comes down to is this: How do you feel when you're around this person? Do you know with confidence that you can be exactly who you are around this person without frightening him off? How does he respond to your ideals, your values, your goals? Do you feel like you have to squish a big part of yourself down in to something really small to be able to hang on to this person? Does he take you seriously? This all seems obvious, but I feel like it's huge.

When looking for a male partner, or when dating several and trying to feel out which one is most worthy of your exalted time, here is where we all seem to start.

MUST:
-Be Single. (If you're in to monogamy.)
-Be attracted to women. (by that we just mean not-gay.)
-Be attractive to me. (duh.)

BROWNIE POINTS:
-Ecologically minded
-Childfree with intent to stay that way
-Involved with social activism
-Vegan or Vegetarian

RED FLAGS:
-Only liking male media (music, authors, movie directors, etc)
-Having primarily friends who constitute dealbreaker material
-Making any kind of remarks however cutsey that are demeaning to women
-Any kind of blanket remarks about how anyone else should behave

DEALBREAKERS:
-Exhibiting extreme racism
-Abusive in any way
-Any kind of bigoted behaviour, really
-Anti-choice

More of my inner monologue: What does he want to do with his life? Is he interested in sustainability? Is he vegetarian? Is he interested in self improvement (which naturally suggests that he is wiling to recognize that he is not a perfect god-like figure who needs to be worshiped by every female within a ten mile radius of him)? If the specimen on question has the kind of job that eats his soul, and has no intentions of changing this, I'd probably start backing out. If he has a job whose greater goals are not goals I can respect, but he's cool with them, I'd be backing out. Can he imagine living on a farm someday, ever? Is he interested in building community? Will he put up with my constantly reminding him why eating meat is really bad for everyone involved, which is everyone? Is he willing to admit that he's sometimes WRONG?

What kinds of media does he like to take in? One of the things that many bloggers touched on were movies and books that constituted dealbreakers. I definitely think that only whiny little white boys like Fight Club, but I'll make exceptions for that if the guy is otherwise a really good person. Being a fan of Ayn Rand is obviously out of the question. Does he have any female authors on his shelves? Any female musicians in his collection? Does he watch movies that cater to the man-child crowd, or is he interested in greater things?

You can see where I'm going with all this. The bottom line is the basic question of whether this person is going to be comfortable with You Being You. I know this is the most cliched statement of all time, but it's a fact. Will you feel like you have to hide your ideals when you're around this person, for fear of breaking his balls? If the answer is yes, MOVE ON.

The Sexist with Jacklyn Friedman on Fucking While Feminist
Feministing on Dating While Feminist
Feministe on Dating While Feminist
Heartless Doll on Hellcat Dream Girls
The Sexist on Establishing a Dating Litmus Test
Pandagon on Red Flags while dating
Pandagon with Sex Tips
Change.org on Lori Gottleib

(so much more could be said about Lori Gottleib, but that's tangential to the topic at hand... just wanted to throw it in there.)