Valentine’s Day has become about more than just couples, writes Phoebe Maltz Bovy.Jeenah Moon/Reuters
Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail. She is the author of the forthcoming book The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men.
There is no such thing as Straight Women’s Awareness Day. Nor would I advocate for one. But, at least unofficially, that day does exist, and it’s called Valentine’s Day.
One can try to discuss Valentine’s Day in gender-neutral terms, as a holiday about love. There are people of various genders and orientations voluntarily subjecting themselves to prix-fixe dinners on Feb. 14. When I say that this is the straight-women holiday, it is not because I wish to gatekeep the day and prevent others from celebrating. No, I am wincing at my own demographic’s association with the day of obligatory gestures.
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It’s the gift-giving traditions – flowers, chocolates, jewellery and lingerie – that are the giveaway as to who the presumed participants are, and in which direction. Wirecutter, The New York Times product recommendation site, prefaces its “for him” gift guide as follows: “Valentine’s Day may be known – stereotyped? – as a Hallmark holiday for women. But that doesn’t mean you can’t show a little love for the man in your life.” One of the recommendations is for a male vibrator, a device I don’t doubt exists, but whose relevance is unlikely to match that of the sort that does not require a gendered qualifier. Another suggested gift is canned cheese. The entire guide, from concept to specifics, reads as forced.
But as straight womanhood itself has evolved – evolved, that is, into an identity about which many exclusively-man-dating women profess ambivalence – so too has straight women’s observation of Valentine’s Day. What was once a day of romance, or of flaunting of coupledom, or of unmanaged expectations and wilted carnations, is now … all of that, but also something else.
Like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day is now accompanied by discourse acknowledging the feelings the day can produce in those for whom the day is a reminder of personal setbacks in the relevant area (lack of children, mourning a parent, unhappily unattached). But Valentine’s Day is a bit different in that both the holiday and the sadness it can inspire have been commercialized.
The gift-giving traditions associated with Valentine’s Day, such as flowers, chocolates or lingerie, make it clear who the presumed participants are.Luisa Gonzalez/Reuters
By “commercialized,” here’s what I mean: I was recently at a dollar-store chain in search of Scotch tape (jealous?), walking through what I realized was the Valentine’s Day aisle, when I noticed, ensconced between a pink T-shirt with a heart and some pink heart-patterned hair clips, a pair of “ladies’ crew socks,” with the message “You are all you need.” The Valentine’s-themed window of a more upscale store nearby bears the phrase, “To me, with love.” And in the United States, Target is selling, to mild controversy, a pink sweater with “Dump Him,” in big red letters, across the bust.
I am by no means an anti-materialism activist, she types, aware of the contents of her wardrobe. But I find something off-putting about both having and not having a date on the 14th now being promoted as shopping events.
Where did the expectation that straight women spend money on not-Valentine’s-Day come from?
Blame a 2010 episode of the sitcom Parks and Recreation. For it was this show that invented Galentine’s Day. Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler) explains the holiday thusly: “Every February 13th my lady friends and I leave our husbands and our boyfriends at home, and we just come and kick it, breakfast-style. Ladies celebrating ladies.”
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From there, a whole commercial apparatus has sprung up around defiant manlessness as midwinter marketing opportunity. A 2019 Wall Street Journal article covered this phenomenon from a business perspective: Effectively, the market for Valentine’s Day as such was drying up, so companies looked elsewhere. Walmart, for its part, had tried, circa 2017, selling female-friendship merch to girls, only to learn from market research “that the concept appealed more to adult women.” Once this was established, “the company shifted to products such as wine glasses that read ‘wine is my valentine’ and flasks that say ‘ex-boyfriend tears’ – and started referring specifically to Galentine’s Day …”
As a done-with-men movement has taken off since 2017 and #MeToo, so too has an associated seasonal category. And the primary audience for getting together with platonic-sense girlfriends in a pink-filled room is, yes, straight women. If you’re a lesbian, you’re probably not the market for don’t-need-a-man paraphernalia, at least not in the greeting-cards sense.
So maybe straight women should take it for what it is and accept Feb. 14 as a day for asserting female heterosexual desire. A fun, no-merch alternative to a compensatory Galentine’s Day would be to reclaim Valentine’s Day for straight women as being about what we want, across the board: men. Make it a day for appreciating whatever it is about men that brings you pleasure. If that means an intimate evening with the man or (let’s be modern) men in your life, wonderful. If it involves some alone time with a Canadian hockey soap opera, there’s nothing wrong with that, either.