With the rise of the stalk "Wang Baochuan who digs wild vegetables", complaints and criticisms of "love brain" have been raised again on the Internet.
Wang Baochuan and Qin Xianglian, two women from ancient Chinese legends, were recently given the title of "Love Brain Patriarch Grandma" due to video clips on short video platforms and social media such as Weibo.
Especially Wang Baochuan, who has been waiting for Xue Pinggui for 18 years in the cold kiln, because he has been eating wild vegetables to satisfy his hunger in the TV series "Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan", and it has become popular. The latest rule of "Love Brain".
Wang Baochuan is not the only film and television character identified as a "love brain". With the emergence of "Wang Baochuan who digs wild vegetables", various platforms have also followed up with a "big inventory of love brain heroines". Those who love first and stay away for love The characters whose families have suffered a lot are listed without exception. On the contrary, those female characters who do not engage in love but only engage in career or do not live for men have become new role models for women. "In Qinger's "I swear by Xiao Jian's life" is regarded as a sober speech to reject "love brain"-although the original play is to express that for Qinger, Xiao Jian's life is more important.
Romantic expectations:
Sweet love will always come
Looking forward to sweet love and the arrival of the perfect lover is not a new phenomenon in social media. "Peach blossom wallpaper" (a wallpaper style that looks forward to the luck of the peach blossom), picking up a perfect boyfriend, and looking forward to crush (a network term, meaning a kind of love that doesn't know what to do) The "infatuation" from the start) and other content such as giving yourself a response, also often appear on the homepage of many people.
Although groups such as "I met a crush today" and "I crushed today and did not respond" are often criticized as "love brain gathering places" like Douban, we obviously cannot ignore that there are indeed a large number of women who are looking forward to love with sincerity.
A common reflection point of view is that this is because what women have heard since childhood is the "love fairy tale of a prince and a princess", which leads women to always pay special attention to love. It is these over-exaggerated and emphasized love stories that make women particularly easy Love is the "love brain", and therefore, some parents will deliberately keep their daughters away from the stories of princes and princesses in order to prevent their daughters from becoming "love brains" - especially "The Daughter of the Sea" is represented.
Although Andersen wanted to express the little mermaid's pursuit of love, soul, and ideals, for many people, this is a story of a little mermaid giving up her voice for love and eventually becoming a bubble. Obviously, the little mermaid is a typical "love" in the current context. brain".
In many, many romances, the girl always meets and falls in love with the perfect "prince", and ends up with two young men in love who endure hardships (often always accompanied by opposition from various forces) and obstacles) into the marriage hall.
These stories equate happiness and perfection with marriage, and believe that the ultimate destination for women is to enter into marriage with a man who loves each other. Here, love, sex and marriage have achieved the three-in-one relationship as desired.
Therefore, it is extremely important for feminists to debunk the hypocritical nature of romantic love stories.
Such an analysis is based on a critique of social structural contradictions and gender ideological discourse, and is of vital significance to the promotion of women's awakening and the progress of social civilization.
But this certainly does not mean that we deny the positive meaning of romantic love.
In the past, the pursuit of romantic love was a resistance to traditional ethics. Whether it was the slogan of "freedom to love" that emerged before and after the May 4th Movement or the earlier stories of "running for love", both were a struggle against the feudal ethics.
As Li Haiyan said, the traditional Chinese emotional requirements are based on a Confucian feeling structure, a network of moral emotional coordinates with the Confucian emotional system as the core, which requires individuals to regulate their behavior and form a normative emotional system. identity.
Here, marriage is a public institution that carries social and economic functions, while romantic love is just an existence that cannot gain the trust of mainstream society.
Thus, romantic love stories in ancient societies are admired because they express an expectation of personal agency and a belief in the universality of emotion in a "spontaneous, sensual, and personal fantasy".
The fact that women are the dominant parties in the union of men and women in romantic love stories actually implies that women are pursuing the autonomy of love and sex, which is a kind of resistance to the feudal patriarchy based on patriarchy. "Especially those men and women in "A Dream of Red Mansions" who dared to rebel against ethics and pursue independent love are particularly valuable.
Even in contemporary times, romantic love is often considered to be closely related to individual autonomy and initiative. From this perspective, anticipation and pursuit of love is not a "love brain" attack, but a search for another way and possibility of self-realization. .
It's just that we can't ignore it, the same pursuit of love, but there are differences between the sexes that can't be ignored.
Diet for men and women:
Gender Gap in Intimacy
Along with Wang Baochuan and others, there is another film and television drama character - He Yichen (the hero of the TV series "Why Sheng Xiao Mo").
Wang Baochuan dug up wild vegetables for 18 years, while He Yichen ate bamboo shoots that he didn't like for seven years.
Interestingly, Wang Baochuan, also known as "Love Brain", was used as a textbook against "Love Brain", but He Yichen was a model of "good man".
Of course, this has to do with the fact that the gender of the audience of the love story is female. A character like He Yichen can satisfy women's imagination of a perfect lover, but on the other hand, it is also related to the characteristics of the other half. "The heroine) is a character similar to Xue Pinggui, so He Yichen may also be included in the list of representatives who mourned his misfortune and angered him indisputably.
If the characters and plots of film and television dramas are just constructed content and have a certain degree of falsehood, then the sharing of individual experiences on social media can more truly reflect those "love brain patients" and those who try to wake up the "love brain". some kind of confrontation between groups.
"Pick up mobile phone literature" was once popular among the Douban groups, which put the most representative posts of each group and the general views of the group into the group chat, conveying the views of the cartographer in a seemingly exaggerated but typical way.
In such group chats, the "life group" that shares the content of marriage and love on a daily basis and the "I met a crush today" group that discusses the object of their heart are often set as representatives of "love brains", and they will be immersed in men and even "scumbags". "Men" lies, believing that he is always special to the person he loves, and that he and "him" are the representatives of happiness and sweetness.
Correspondingly, groups such as "persuading grouping" will play the role of piercing the illusory bubble, trying to wake up the "love brain" group with "remarks against ears" that pour cold water.
This kind of collision seems to be a confrontation between groups, but in fact it is more inclined to the two camps of love discussion in online discourse. One side believes that true love will last forever, and the other side is committed to awakening every "love brain".
Obviously, it is not so much against the "love brain" that it is against the supremacy of love, but rather against sacrificing oneself and giving everything for an unworthy "scumbag", rather than stopping the loss in time.
From this point of view, whether the love object is worth paying for and whether it can maintain personality independence in the relationship is an important criterion for judging "love brain".
But we can't ignore that women are indeed more likely to be "love brains" than men, and there are also historical reasons behind this.
As mentioned earlier, romantic love is often associated with freedom, especially for women, the pursuit of romantic love is actually the position of women in the intimate relationship between the sexes. Women actively create love in the relationship, and use such love Make yourself the object of love, and then confirm the self-identity expectation in the other person's discovery.
It is no wonder that the sociologist Giddens emphasized that romantic love points to projection, which he believes is two-sided, "on the one hand, clinging to and idealizing others; on the other hand, projecting the future development. the way."
Giddens opposed the idea of romantic love as simply a man's trick to fill women's hearts with vain untrue stories and illusory dreams. He believed that the rise of romantic love knots had a special background, especially in connection with the family-centered shift from "paternalism". It is related to the transfer of "authority" to "mothering education", and therefore, romantic love is fundamentally a kind of feminine love, which means that romantic love has a natural inequality in gender status.
Often, women who dream of romantic love and look forward to self-identification from it tend to invest more emotionally than men, and men, while they may be addicted to a woman, do not understand the essence of love as "colonizing the future and re-emphasizing the future" self-identity-related ways of organizing one’s life”, which naturally predestines that romantic love has a different status in the hearts of men and women.
Maybe that explains why those romantic love stories are more emotionally relatable and more important to women.
When the cultural and social structure makes women have needs and expectations for romantic love, but it is difficult to meet her in reality, a consummate love story can play a comforting and healing role, making them believe that heterosexuality can create a consistent appearance , The subject who is sincerely satisfied.
In other words, romantic love stories can be emotionally satisfying for women, not only for the Smithton women studied by "Reading Romance" author Radway (who generally see reading romance novels as an escape from everyday life), but also for Most women who spend romantically.
And men obviously do not need to use additional cultural products to satisfy their expectations and imagination of love, because love may not be so important to them.
Is romantic love really going away?
Part of the reason for the different status of love in the hearts of the two sexes is that compared with men, women are less able to obtain affirmation of their sense of worth from public channels, so there is a special link between their sense of worth and their romantic love identity.
Perhaps because of this, many feminists believe that the core of love and sex is a power struggle, and men have the upper hand and continue to prevail in this struggle. "This male gender power is reflected in the ability to define love objects, and the ability to formulate courtship rules and express romantic feelings” ([French] Eva Ilos, “Love, Why It Hurts”).
It is important that both women and men need male identification, even when patriarchy is challenged.
For modern women, the ways of realizing their sense of value tend to be diverse. Therefore, they do not need to rely on romantic love, or traditional standards created by society to obtain self-identification, and then see through the gender inequality in some romantic love. easy.
Negative attitudes toward love also become understandable after realizing that each love story is just an attempt to make women rely on male approval to realize their value, and it is nothing more than the fact that gender inequality is covered up.
Behind the declarations that "the wise do not fall in love" and "it is better to engage in love than to engage in career" are women's self-protection methods after seeing through certain love bubbles.
Some people may have questions: Can you still believe in love if you go on like this?
Or, will romantic love continue to exist?
In fact, love will not die out because of the development of modernity, but it will enter a new stage and show new characteristics, for example, Eva Illoth sums it up as the deep division and duality of love - "One On the one hand, it serves as a source of transcendence, and on the other hand, it serves as an occasion for intense competition to show gender identity." She borrowed Bourdieu's concept of "symbolic domination" and proposed "emotional dominance", which "is used to express the relationship between the sexes through a more A large degree of emotional severance allows greater control over emotional interactions, greater ability to choose and restrict the other party’s choices.” In the past, in intimate relationships, men occupied an absolute dominant position, but in contemporary love culture In a romantic relationship, the two sides are in some kind of competition. Of course, this competition is based on the feelings and self-identity of both parties. Therefore, when a romantic relationship breaks down, it will still affect a person's self-identity.
Another major feature of contemporary love is that it is based on rational choice. The direct consequence of rationalization in the three fields of science, technology and politics is that love loses the power to generate love beliefs, because the rational behavior model "profoundly changes." The structure of romantic desire destroys the cultural resources through which people experience passion and sex in the past", and it is no wonder that Iroth thinks that "love and reason have jointly constructed the modern relationship between the sexes, and both love and reason have been rationalized. change".
Chizuru Ueno believes that one of the results of the second feminist movement is the disintegration of Foucault's three-in-one romantic love culture of love, sex, and marriage.
Love, sex and marriage in contemporary social concept of love may exist independently, and the unity of the three is no longer the only and established pursuit of people.
Of course, this does not mean that the romance of love has disappeared, because even if modern love has the characteristics of rationalization, it still points to an emotional longing and the longing for a better life brought by emotions.
Although the "love brain" is being criticized, we can't deny that urbanites still need romantic love stories-those that can create an emotional utopia for us.
Author/Pazilia
Beijing News