[We'd like to take this opportunity to welcome our favorite love, sex and relationship blogger - Lena Chen - to the CollegeCandy team. Lena is smart, funny, and her perspective on all things relationship is incredibly thought provoking. We're so pumped to have her here, so be sure to let us know in the comments what sorts of things you'd like Lena to discuss!]

Marriage isn’t a right; it’s a privilege. Depending on the time, place, and partner, getting married could be harder than getting into Harvard, if not downright impossible. As recently as fifty years ago, miscegenation laws would have forbid me from marrying my boyfriend (or any man not my race) in certain areas of the United States. Before that, the legal and social benefits to getting married were denied to minorities, immigrants, and the poor for centuries. Marriage is, for lack of a better analogy, membership into the biggest country club in the world.

For me, getting married would be a personal endorsement of some of the worst societal norms in existence.

The supposed “right” to marry has never been much of a right at all, and our understanding of marriage as a basic liberty is unique to contemporary times. Thanks to my predisposition for heterosexuality, it’s a liberty I could easily exercise, but I’d much rather march in a rally than down an aisle, because I find it difficult to take part in a practice that is denied to others (plenty of them my friends). Even with the best of intentions, I can’t imagine that my own wedding will serve any purpose but to reinforce existing norms, such as the idea that a relationship is only valuable if recognized by a third-party institution. Read More »

From the moment John Edwards dropped out of the race in January, everyone knew this would be no ordinary primary season. Remaining contenders Obama and Clinton were very similar politically and both were making history by challenging the twin traditional societal norms of racism and sexism.

The upshot being of course that as the death knell sounds for the Clinton campaign politicos are not only discussing how she lost politically but also how the “female-thing” influenced voters.

I myself am hesitant to immediately point to sexism as the cause of her loss—just as I would have been equally reluctant to point to racism had Obama lost. Yet the uphill battle that Hillary’s campaign faced in the news media is a reminder of the difficulties of being a dominant and ambitious woman in today’s society.

While during the campaign we heard the tired old argument that a woman is too weak to be president especially during a time of war and that world leaders wouldn’t respect her (umm… yes let’s just discount Margaret Thatcher shall we?), Hillary came under intense fire for her personality as a woman. Read More »