The search for love, dating, is often described as a marketplace, another market where commodities are bought, sold and traded. Love, then, becomes just another commodity to be fetishised. How can we find love under the capitalist patriarchal system and more importantly how can that love ever be reciprocal?
The patriarchy and capitalism are constantly evolving, and so too are our intimate relations within those. With technological encroachment, our romantic expectations for relationships have become increasingly alienated by mechanisation. Once you could meet someone at an event or a cafe. There could be a real flesh-and-bone interaction, the catching of eyes, the subtle physical cues, that electric feeling with the presence of the person before you. Now on your screen, you either swipe left or right. It’s like buying a bunch of lottery tickets or trying on a haul of clothes in a fitting room of a chain store their products brought in from sweatshops in the global south. The process of finding love has lost its lustre or lost its humanity, replaced by a cold alienated mechanisation.
The rules of the dating game are changing as well, it’s still not clear whether newly popularised concepts like Ethical non-monogamy and polyamory can be progressive or oppressive developments under the capitalist patriarchal system. The question becomes, how can there ever be justice in any endeavour of love under that oppressive system?
Commodification
Intimacy is becoming a commodity. This commodification stretches across the spectrum of deep feelings, interactions, sexual desires and even our own gender identities. Today, a resume for a job application and a resume for love are not so different. In dating apps, it’s now typical to put in your academic qualifications, skills, professions, height, etc. Your profile becomes fungible to potential dates or potential partners somewhere out there on the internet. Of course, one could rightly argue that dating has been tied to marketing since the time of our grandparents.
However, with the encroachment of capitalism into every faucet of our lives intimacy has become more of an economic value, causing our love life to be a calculatable part of our existence, just like our work. We need to make sure that our dates have stable jobs and that he/she/they can pay the bills if we go to fancy restaurants, whether they have properties or are part of an aspirational social class. You have to put yourself out in the open market or the supposed free market, where you have to compete with one another in order to attract the potential date.
Your “self” presentation on the internet is a version of you that has been carefully curated, objectifying yourself in the best way possible. Today, regressive beauty standards have come back hugely in dating apps, you don’t want to post your pictures where your belly is out or your arms look big. In recent years, we have been sold body positivity, feminist advocacy on body image and the debunking the beauty myths and standards. But it seems like in the end patriarchy wins, since beauty standards play a big role in online dating sites, and hence the commodification of our bodies has returned. On these online dating apps, you need to have the utmost skills to present your best self including not only your physicality but also your personality. Your entire identity becomes a commodity. You need to convince others why you’re different or unique. High-profile feminist dating coach Evan Marc Katz wrote:
“Whether you’re a man or a woman, if you sound like everyone else, it will be really hard for someone to come up with a way to write to you. How do you initiate conversation with a man when all he writes is that he wants a woman who’s “kind, smart, funny, considerate, romantic, sexy, and athletic”? Well, I guess you could say “Hi, I’m kind, smart, funny, considerate, romantic, sexy, and athletic. I think we’d be a perfect match.” I don’t think so.”
The presentation of self, which Eva Ullouz describes in her book “Cold Intimacies”, is the disembodied self where people use those standardized written languages to actually dissociate themselves from the actual self, but rather create this uniformity, standardized and reified version which they created through their established conventional desirable person in their mind.
Alienation of yourself
There are a lot of cliché around love. Some of them involve gender roles and expectations, of gendered behaviours in love. How one is supposed to behave if they are a specific gender. If you’re a woman you have to wait for a proposal, you have to be protected, you shouldn’t pay the bills, etc. Even today, among supposedly progressive people, these generalisations still reflect the realities on the ground. Even if the dowry is considered a thing of the past, the reality on the ground in Thailand is that it still commodifies women as a possession of parents.
The higher capitalist status a woman possesses, be it in education, level of income, profession, or language skills, the higher the dowry rate will be. Social relationships and parents have groomed their children to obtain capitalistic values, so when their fruits are ready to be harvested, they can be certain they will get the highest yield. This commodity system is not disadvantageous for only women, it also pressures men to be the perfect “breadwinner”, for a family to be a suitable mate for their partner. It puzzles queer or LGBTQ people’s parents as this dowry system works so well in the binarism culture and destroys what they expected to gain from their children.
Violence
Together with the expectations, modern-day love also normalises violence in all sorts of forms that are emotional, economic, physical and cultural. In 2024, we even see a popularisation of tradwives with little mention of traditional families/marriages/husbands. Whereas in our experiences we see gaslighting, love-bombing, and non-formalised relationships…
Emotional unavailability becomes abundant under capitalism whereby most of us are trying to make ends meet at the end of the month– lives are lived in a constant state of precarity. Quality of life has reduced tremendously in the last few decades and our generation are losing a grip on the essence of living your life to the fullest, like we are born into precarity with inherited depression and anxiety.
This might have been with us since our parents’ time, perhaps back then they just didn’t know what to call panic attacks or anxiety attacks or PTSD etc. Looking for love, looking for “the one” has been a constant quest for most of us while living under these precarious conditions, with serious loneliness in our lives. But how do we find “the one” when our emotions and feelings are commodified and tailored to fit into the capitalist lifestyle?
How can anyone really love a commodity? Especially if you are a woman or from a marginalized gender, living with the constant fear of being sexually exploited while looking for “the one” or even going on casual dates. So too managing the discrepancy of power between the global north and south that people might favour you for their fetishism of your culture or perceived subservience.
bell hooks said that patriarchy teaches that “masculinity has to be proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression”. We can fear that we will lose what/whom we love but most of the time, these fears are tragically expressed in violent forms. Sexual violence is the oldest crime, a crime that is still permitted at large today.
Patriarchy and Male Domination
Patriarchy is something we don’t talk about in our intimate relationships or in our modern day love endeavors. It’s always around the corner. It is something we put under the rug. Patriarchy as bell hooks said, “it’s a social disease of our society”. It affects every organ, not only in our intimate relationships but also in our political systems, economic and socio-cultural systems. Male domination is the underlying turmoil that always happens to be overlooked before we try to change anything.
Male privilege is also something we are reluctant to talk about, as it always brings along with it masculine resentment and patriarchal grievances. A lot of our male friends are not comfortable if we want to talk about fairness and justice in our gendered world. Most of them will still insist upon the physical differences we have, the large number of female labour forces in the factory or girls going out at night, making their way to the bars and being able to move relatively freely.
Society is centred around men, and the standardisation is to look up to them. The “cool detached” masculinity, removed from emotional intimacy, is the epitome of what everyone should be in this dating culture; anyone who exhibits this coolness then has the upper hand in the relationships. Men are usually seen as providers or protectors whereas women are seen as receivers or carers. The power imbalance in intimate relations is obvious not only in sexual relationships but also in the other aspects of the relationships..
The gendered power relations can be understood through how decisions are made within our families, in public spaces, and in government offices– in all aspects of the society. As women or marginalized genders, we normally aren’t allowed to have opinions or even to speak up about our thoughts and feelings. Women are supposed to be passive, and submissive and to always be ready to give up dreams and their wants in society. The expectations we have in society of men and women are based on these gendered power relations.
Love Under Patriarchy Is Never An Emancipated Love
No one really knows what came first, capitalism or patriarchy. But what we know for sure is they both operate so well together that we let it unconsciously slide into our lives. It prioritises the man as the centre and the foremost achievable sex in every aspect, while “the rest”, women, queer, lesbian, gay, and others get just minor roles in the stage of life. The masculine exists in “public” spheres while the feminine should remain the host in “private” spheres.
Forms of capitalist patriarchal love can be subtle or explicitly violent, they are always with us in our daily lives. Norms around love, marriage, sex and intimacy may have changed, but the power struggle between genders is present. We have seen too many cases of “solo poly” men surrounded by tremendous amounts of emotional labour from their female partners. In fact, the patriarchy seems even stronger than before with the help of social media. Social media personnel such as Andrew Tate has had such a big influence on Gen Z that a recent survey showed that most young people have a positive opinion about this misogynist social media influencer.
Alongside these dangerous social media influences, liberal feminism’s contribution to the patriarchy shouldn’t be forgotten as well. A strong advocate of individual empowerment and “women can do it” attitude. Liberal feminism creates a double standard on women’s roles in both private and public spheres. Expecting women to be champions in households who are portrayed as strong women with kids and happy families meanwhile they are in the boardrooms of companies. That portrayal totally ignores the class dimension of the feminist struggle which intersects on race, class and gender. Today’s patriarchy is at the trajectory of capitalism and sexism holds deep intertwined roots on which the foundation of our society is grounded.
In the end, what do we want?
There is a quote from Beautiful World: Where Are you? By Sally Rooney, “Because when we should have been reorganizing the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive – because we are so stupid about each other.” This ability to love fully should be the most humanizing act possible in capitalism. We want a love that is free from manipulation, guilt, and lies for power… In and for love — we want the “life-affirming” / care actions to prove that we are still humans who are capable of connecting with one another and that love is action after action, not just feelings removed of any agency. To love, we must be conscious and make choices to be loving again and again.
Further Readings
อ่านเพิ่มเติม
all about love, bell hooks
The Radicality of Love, Srećko Horvat