16
ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
personal yearnings. In this way, romantic love is a form of reductionism,
reducing the idea of Woman’ from a full range of human potential to a tiny list
of male desires.
Romanticism is a way of knowing which is wedded to ignorance. The
romantic clearly does not know his lady to be a woman capable of
self-determination and resistance. He does not recognize her ability to express
what is most human, including her capacity for rationality and critical
self-consciousness. Most significantly, the romantic is unaware of women’s
capacity for self-assertion through sabotage and resistance.4 Hie subject of
romantic poetry rarely includes stories of ‘good’ women poisoning their
romantic lover s food, or stories of admirable women being emotionally
unavailable to their lovers. Few are the poems or stories which tell of strong,
lovable women resisting compulsory motherhood, marriage, and yes, even
heterosexual romance. The cult of the romantic erases the idea that woman
can be a wrench in the machine of male domination.
Romantic love represents an attempt to love and know another from
behind a wall of domination. Indeed, true love and understanding can only
occur when both subjects are free to express their own desires. The knight can
only love the lady if he is willing to relinquish his power over her, supporting
her struggle if and when she requests it; then and only then, can they begin to
talk about love.
Romantic desire is predicated on a hierarchical separation between the
lover and the beloved, separations that are, in turn, predicated on hierarchies
based on such factors as sex, age, race, and class. Traditionally, just as the
master may romanticize the slave, men may romanticize women, adults may
romanticize children, and the rich may* romanticize the poor. These separations
are reinforced by institutions and ideologies that exaggerate differences
between identity groups within social hierarchies. In turn, while the idea of
gender is polarized and performed through rigid gender roles and children are
segregated in school-ghettos, adults are ghettoized in work places often
segregated by race, class, and sex. These structural barriers facilitate the
condition of social alienation based on ignorance. Romantic desire flourishes
between the walls of social hierarchy as the privileged paint their own
romantic fantasies of the lives and condition of the oppressed. When all is said
and done, the privileged know very little about the history and lives of those
upon whose backs their privilege weighs.
Contemporary Ecoloqy AncI TIhe Romanic Protection Of Nature
Today, society s increasingly alienated understanding of ‘nature’ opens the way
for romantic discussions of ecology. More and more, the ‘nature’ we know is a
romantic presentation of an exaggerated ‘hypernature’ marketing researchers