Are Engagement Rings Anti-Feminist

When I read the following article about a young straight man getting stuck with a $10,000 engagement ring, I couldn’t help thinking in terms of gay marriage and gay relationships. I think that with most gay couples at this point in time, at least from what I’m hearing with friends and from what I’m doing with Tony, we are all equals in our relationships, at least when it comes to rings. In other words, I’m not buying Tony a $10,000.00 engagement ring, and he’s not buying one for me either. We’ve had rings already for a long time. But if we didn’t have them we would buy wedding rings or engagement rings for both of us, and not just one huge ridiculously expensive ring for just one in the relationship.

I’m sure there are gay couples who might think differently somewhere (especially if one is much, much older than the other…those younger second husbands of gay mid-life crisis relationships make out like bandits), but this is what I’ve always known in the circles where I travel. This all gets into a more complicated area, and how in this case there is no gender power in most gay relationships…or gay romances…but I’ll save that for another post.

In any event, in this article a young man who was engaged to a young woman came home one day and found she’d left him, canceled the wedding plans, and decided she wasn’t ready to get married. No problem there. We all have the right to change our minds. Good thing she realized it before they got married. However, as is the case in most of the straight relationships I know, the young man was left holding a $10,000.00 engagement ring that he’d purchased for her with his life savings. And these rings are not investments, at least not unless you have the Hope Diamond or there’s some significant storied famed that comes with the ring. The retail mark up with jewelry is a crime.

When he tried to sell the ring he’d spent most his life savings on, he found that he could only get a third of the original price.

“The offer was staggeringly low,” Opperman says on his website. “Rather than get mad I decided to break even.”

The article goes on to discuss how young men who have been taken this way, and left holding an item that had been marked up tens times its worth, can get back something so they aren’t at a staggering loss. And there’s an emotional investment here, too, that can’t be ignored. If a guy is willing to part with his life savings to buy a tiny little hunk of metal with a clear stone, he’s definitely in love and he’s willing to do anything.

And I can’t help thinking how counter-productive this is to feminism and all the things we hear about these days when it comes to equal rights for women. It just seems to me there’s a double standard when the man is expected to spend thousands of dollars on an engagement ring and he doesn’t receive something of equal value in return. In the same respect, this tradition of engagement rings is just as antiquated as the tradition of the bride’s family paying for the wedding.

TransAmerica Reality TV

From the producers of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, comes a new reality show that might be titled TransAmerica

According to a press release sent to the Huffington Post, Doron Ofir Casting is seeking “beautiful,” “dynamic” and “fashionable” transgender women to take part in a new reality series that will explore the personal and public lives of modern day women who self-identify as trans. “TransAmerica” hopes to redefine stereotypes by exploring the complex world of dating and careers for transgender women, in an effort to both entertain and educate audiences.

You can read more here. I hope they do this right, in the sense that it’s not something that resembles a carnival or sideshow, like TV producers tend to do with anything LGBT, especially with the T part. There are a lot of misconceptions about transgender people out there, and I would hate to see anything that would only promote more misconceptions. I also think there is a hidden aspect that’s rarely discussed often. More straight men out there who aren’t willing to admit it find transgender women highly attractive. If that weren’t the case, the transgender adult entertainment industry wouldn’t be doing so well.

I wish we would see more of this in LGBT romance.

Gay Superdads

This is truly one of the nicest pieces I’ve read in a long time. A gay couple in Arizona, a state like Pennsylvania that doesn’t allow legal same-sex marriage, is adopting fourteen kids.

Despite living in a state where gay marriage is still prohibited, the longtime foster parents have successfully cleared several legal hurdles on their way to adopting a family that requires a 15-seat van just to go to the park, Today.com reports.

The Hams’ journey began back in 2003, when the Phoenix couple took in Michael, then 5, a victim of abuse who was living in a group home.

This is another example of real life heroes who often go unnoticed.

You can read more here. The article goes on to explain one of those things that many people consider real life coincidences, or twists of fate. I’ve been studying metaphysics for a long, long time, and I don’t believe there are any accidents.