There are a lot of good reasons to give Valentine’s Day the side-eye. It’s a holiday, as many people dutifully point out every year, that’s more about selling candies, cards and jewelry than it is about love, promoting a backwards version of (hetero)sexuality in which men trade expensive gifts for sex – a philosophy perhaps most crassly expressed in the ad slogan for Kay Jewelers: “Every Kiss Begins With Kay.”
It’s a day that causes stress for a lot of couples and resentment amongst the single. And those little chalky heart candies with the words on them, whatever their kitschy charm, are really kind of crappy as candy.
But there are bad reasons to dislike Valentine’s Day as well. Amongst the Men Going Their Own Way of the world, “National Vagina Worship day” is the holiday they most love to hate; in their minds, the “bitches” don’t deserve any kind of respect at all, much less flowers and candy.