Our roles in romance are in every case personally determined, if on the basis of public instruction, and the kinds of roles one chooses to play with one’s lover cannot be dictated a priori. To say that a woman ought to be submissive, and also to say that she ought not, is nothing less than a kind of emotional fascism, a way of dismissing and degrading huge numbers of women who find that their personal preferences do not match up to the latest official line. “The totalitarian woman” might be a better designation for the conservative tendency to confuse questions about public equality with questions about personal roles; but the tendency to confuse the demand for social equality with an authoritarian attack on love is to be found on the other side as well. Romantic love requires equality, and to deny this or to enforce it from the outside is the denial of love as well.
n Robert C. Solomon, “Love and Feminism,” in Philosophy and Sex, ed. Robert Baker and Frederick Elliston (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), adapted from Love: Emotion, Myth & Metaphor (Doubleday-Anchor, 1981)
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