Because we clearly do not have more serious things to worry about, a Slate editor wrote a piece “exposing the power relationship” in “spooning” — which, he writes, “is fundamentally a sexist arrangement.”
That’s right. Holding your partner while he or she sleeps is not cute. It’s prob-lem-aaaa-tic. J. Bryan Lowder writes:
Big spoons are manly and will take care of you (provided you let them use you to take care of themselves); little spoons are fragile, passive creatures that need to be held and kept safe. This, of course, is fundamentally a sexist arrangement, one that casts the big spoon as “the man” and the little spoon as “the woman.”
He’s right. It would, after all, be absolutely impossible for a man to simply ask his girlfriend to hold him. See, couples cannot have these kinds of conversations for themselves — that’s why we need bloggers to determine all of our personal relationship and sexual boundaries for us ahead of time.
I’ve learned that I’m not qualified to make these kinds of choices for myself. As embarrassing as it is to admit, I was actually one of those fools that thought spooning was cute. Thankfully, I have Mr. Lowder to teach me that it is actually “a perverse strategy by which we nightly enact the unjust relations of ‘big’ and ‘little’ privilege that plague our society on every level.”
Yikes! Who knew I could do so much harm to society without even being awake?
#share#Thankfully, Lowder presents a solution: “conscious cuddling.”
“Cuddle sitting up,” he instructs.
Great idea! See, at first I was kind of worried about the fact that this will clearly give me neck problems. But then I thought about it some more, and realized that I’d take neck problems over perpetuating oppressive institutional inequality any day — and who knows better how to solve all of the evils of the world than bloggers? No one — just ask them.