Does being a lover girl make me a bad feminist?
Every week, PhilSTAR L!fe explores issues and topics from the perspectives of different age groups, encouraging healthy but meaningful conversations on why they matter. This is Generations by our Gen Z columnist Angel Martinez.
I have a confession: I’m a lover girl to my very core. I dream of being wooed with grand proclamations and gestures, and gifted flowers and chocolates and customized playlists. I refuse to make the first move or split the bill on a first date, and want a man who is wired to pursue and provide for me. Basically, I subscribe to everything dictated by young adult novels and chick flicks.
There’s a kind of shame surrounding that admission—and it’s not because I’m too old to be using rom-coms as a foundation for real-world ideals. In a time when women now earn and enjoy their share of liberties, I feel like I’m betraying those on the frontlines of the feminist movement by adhering to such old-school ways of romance.
For a while, I figured this was just a “me problem”—that I needed to do some healing, recentering, and reflecting. But Enrico Baula, a professor from UP Diliman’s Department of Behavioral Science, tells me that women are biologically and culturally conditioned to be hypergamous. “Women are inclined to date up: to choose a man who is more assertive, yes, but also smarter, more responsible, more financially capable,” he says. “The idea stems from our desire to pass down the best traits to our children, thus increasing their chances of survival and procreation.”
From a religious perspective, feminist theologian Agnes Brazal says that both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas looked at men and women through an active-passive binary. “This understanding of the nature of women and men has extended from childbirth to leadership as well as in the wider society, at home, and in benign courtship rituals,” she tells PhilSTAR L!fe. Upon Spanish colonization, Maria Clara became the epitome of the Filipino woman: modest, shy, and well-mannered.
Years of struggle led to the advent of fourth wave feminism, which coincided with the rise of social media. Granted, the movement mutated into a commodified brand (think: the rise and fall of the girlboss), but I witnessed how the internet allowed for the proliferation of some relatively progressive ideals. At around this time, Bumble was launched: a dating app that required women to kickstart the conversation. “Bumble provided them with this space to engineer changes towards equality and alleviate pressure, responsibility, and expectations,” Brazal notes. In her study on the changing of modern courting scripts, she found that young men want to share the task of initiating, which they deem to be an anxiety-filled role.
Exposure to these generational shifts should have impacted me and influenced how I approach modern-day relationships. Yet, I find it difficult to reconcile my reputation as a strong independent woman with my refusal to participate in these new norms.
And to my credit, I have tried! At the risk of giving too much away, I will say that I have chased after men once upon a time. I was young. I thought I’d get the sense of empowerment my predecessors promised. But considering how everything turned out, I only felt desperate and, frankly, a little gross.
Owning the lover girl label also leaves a bad taste in my mouth because some of those like me use their personal preference to police the promiscuous. Wielding the same weapons men used to slut-shame and silence us, these self-proclaimed “high value” women assert a sense of false moral superiority over something as arbitrary as a “body count.” Although it’s perfectly valid to not enter into a “hoe phase,” as it’s referred to these days, we’re no better than those who are taking the time to explore.
My lofty aspirations now of being loved by men admittedly feel naive as misogyny happens in powerful online networks, with some damaged and jaded incels and Andrew Tate supremacists inflicting violence towards women, trans, and non-binary people.
Sometimes, it feels like we’ve reached an impasse. But Baula says this discourse is normal: The old and new cultures are simply “clashing, arguing, debating, and conflicting” until they arrive at a mix of what we know and what we could be. “The pressure that comes with Gen Z today is that there seems to be this sense of what is right that everyone must follow. But if you’re not really a fit for these new-world ideals, then you shouldn’t try to conform,” he advises.
At the end of the day, both Baula and Brazal tell me that it’s my choice how I navigate dating. The goal of the feminist movement, after all, was to transcend the institutional restrictions imposed on us. But Brazal highlights that our choices do not exist in a vacuum, thus the importance that we are aware of what is conditioning them. “Women must recognize that this freedom to choose would not have been possible without the gains the movement achieved in the past,” she notes. There are also others who don’t have a choice and live in far more limiting environments, who must be liberated.
Following this logic, I think being a lover girl doesn’t cancel out my politics—it just lands me on the conservative side of the spectrum. (Who would have thought?) I have to accept that I am simply a product of the media I consumed, the family I grew up in, and the values that I’ve identified with over the years. What is considered truly bad feminism is implying that there is only one way to be a woman in the dating scene today: policing others’ choices under the guise of empowerment, and prescribing even more archaic standards for women to conform to.
Generations by Angel Martinez appears weekly at PhilSTAR L!fe.
