Bye Bye Tradition: Hello Freedom

Katie Beswick @ElfinKate offers her vision of a future free from ‘tradition’. And it’s a beautiful thing.

Now that the government have done the right thing and voted ‘aye’ to extending marriage rights to same sex couples, it’s time for an overhaul of all the ideologically ingrained daftness spewed from the mouths of purple-faced white men in the name of ‘tradition’. Let’s be honest with ourselves, ‘tradition’ is a dangerous concept – usually invoked by those wanting to sustain current systems of power, or, at the other end, tedious bores who wish to rub the smugness of their conventional life choices in the faces of those more fabulous. I do actually think this; I’m not just being hyperbolic for attention-seeking purposes.

Enabling heterosexual couples to form a civil union would be a welcome start. Equal rights to civil partnership will mean that, in the unlikely event I ever secure a romantic relationship I wish to legalise, I will not be known as someone’s ‘wife’. ‘Partner’ seems so much more solid a terminology – I mean, imagine a dimly lit hotel room: a buxom secretary giggles in post-coital self-satisfaction as an unfaithful husband whispers, ‘I must shower, my wife has a superhuman sense of smell’. In this story, tradition would have the wife at home sobbing into a chintz apron while the 9 carat wedding band cuts dents in her skin and the colicky baby screams in one of those rocking wooden cradles. But replace the word ‘wife’ with the word ‘partner’ in that sentence and the line’s not so giggly; it reveals the cheater for what he is, a lusty cad who is mocking someone he made a legal promise to stay faithful to. The cheated ‘partner’ may or may not be the loser in this model. She or he might just as conceivably be in the boardroom as the kitchen.  Or in a different hotel room, conducting an affair with better dialogue.

The historical ‘tradition’ of being a wife is not so pretty as simpering bridal photos would suggest – what with forced marriages, sanctioned rape, legal beatings etc. It’s time to embrace alternative paradigms; preferably, ones that include accepting adultery as par-for-the-course in human relations and making allowances for this in a re-vamped moral code where Christian notions of morality do not reign supreme.

But it’s not just romantic relationships that civil partnerships should cover. There are plenty of other domestic arrangements and unconventional life-long companionships that would benefit from a bit of legal security and tax relief – mothers who live with an adult child for example, siblings who set up home together. Rather than stigmatising these kinds of people as freakish loners, we should afford them the same right to protect property and wealth that we afford romantic partners. I’m not supporting incest here (still not sure where I stand on that), I’m just suggesting that the preferential treatment of sexual partnerships over the myriad other versions of love is the definition of inequality.

The next place I’d like to see ‘tradition’ ousted from the lexicon is in education. The recent u-turn on educational reform puts a welcome halt to the careering train-crash that was the Ebc proposals, but is still undercut with a discourse about ‘tradition’ led by the aging middle classes. Most tellingly, in the news that Gove still wants to see ‘easy’ coursework replaced with exams that will, by virtue of being old-fashioned, restore rigour and improve ‘public faith’ in the education system. Erm… yes, because I have to recall facts of history, mathematics and literature on demand every day in real life. That’s exactly how the world will become a better place.

Can’t we have a proper educational shake up instead? One where the values that actually matter in terms of being a decent, happy, fulfilled human person are promoted. I swear, if I have to listen to some braying hooray Henry’s obsession with delivering a curriculum in which traditional Euro-Centric knowledges, comprised of dubious ‘facts’, forms the standard one more time I will throw my shoe at the telly.

And while we’re at it, can we do away with the discourse on failing state schools? I mean, I’ve met people from Harrow/Eton/Roedean and I can tell you now – not fueled by any more intellectual firepower than my mates educated at state schools in ‘special measures’. If anyone is actually interested in addressing social mobility it might be worth turning away from education (on which more or less everyone is a self-acclaimed ‘expert’ by virtue of having gone to school) and focusing instead on child poverty, housing, social care and the million other factors that shore up inequality between the rich and the poor?

Secular Christmas traditions can stay though.

I don’t think I could get through December without a bit of tinsel on a tree.

*Image courtesy of Victor Habbick at freedigitalphotos.net