I.
In the Dear Future Husband music video, Meghan Trainor says she won’t cook for him or anything, and then she rejects him because he can’t do that strength thing at the fair! Isn’t she basically saying that she won’t conform to female gender expectations, but she expects to get a man who conforms to male gender expectations?
–my then-12-year-old sister
Based on a cursory examination of her song lyrics, I made a list of things Meghan Trainor is offering:
- good at songwriting
- sex
- all the right junk in all the right places
things she won’t do:
- bake pies
- lose weight
- waste all her time and money trying to look right
things she expects:
- commitment
- monogamy
- dates
- flowers every anniversary
- dealing with her craziness
- apologizing even when she was in the wrong
- spending more time with her family than yours
- giving her the left side of the bed
- opening doors
- not having a dirty mind
- buying her a ring
- treating her like a trophy
And yeah, flip the genders and this would all be received differently. But I don’t know, which reception is right?
II.
It’s a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, “Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn’t love me. He just couldn’t deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me.” Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? … We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water.
–Zadie Smith, White Teeth
I mean, I’m a consequentialist, I don’t really think desert is real. I guess the criteria for whether everyone “deserves” something, or has a “right” to it, are: is everyone having the thing a good goal? and to what extent is getting the thing under people’s control?
So clean water obviously fulfills these. I mean, I don’t think there are many people who could have access to clean water if they’d just get off the couch and stop being lazy but instead drink parasite-infested water out of a sense of entitlement.
Love, though? I don’t know. “Everyone has a romantic partner they’re happy with” would be a great situation but I don’t think it’s an important goal: there’s not much we as a society can do to make that happen, at least not much that’s unambiguously good. And your romantic success is, yeah, something that’s under your control to a large extent.
III.
I hope you don’t think you’re not worthy of love or anything because you totally are
–unnamed friend
The more I think about this message the more I don’t understand it.
Is it some sort of empirical claim about my attractiveness? Is it a more moral claim–that I deserve love because of my moral worth? (Who would she say isn’t worthy of love?) Or is it not meant as a claim with a truth value but as a recommendation for what attitude I should take, along the lines of “love yourself?”
It’s not crazy to say “you deserve to make a million dollars a year” to someone even if they are not, in fact, making a million dollars a year. Maybe you think they are currently being underpaid due to their failure to negotiate and their employer would happily pay them more. But it’s also not something you would say to just anyone. If you spend enough time thinking about markets it is hard not to develop the prior that the market price is fair.
IV.
I don’t know if I’m worthy of love, or what the fuck that means. I think I’m worthy of existence. I think I’m worthy of clean water. Love gets more airtime in songs and novels, but have you tried clean water? Clean water’s pretty great.