The Diamond Dilemma

I've never been fond of diamonds as a stone; I've actually never really been fond of many stones. Rubies seem cool, but overall, I prefer to remain unadorned. I do like my birth stone, the opal, and I have a beautiful pearl necklace that I wear on occasion. But other than that, my plain silver (slightly tarnished) claddagh ring does nicely for my day-to-day wear. The reason I'm divulging this? Is because diamonds are big business. And as much as I would love to get "an engagement Revolutionary War musket" (cuz I love history and have had favorite Revolutionary figures ever since I was in elementary school - although that is a whole other post), Emily points out that De Beers' marketing campaign "make[s] us think that a diamond - and only a diamond - represents true love and commitment". And because most of us agree on that salient point, DeBeers can also charge a heck of a lot for diamonds and make rules about how many pay periods equal an adequate amount of money to demonstrate that love and commitment through diamonds. A puny diamond - as the women I work with made clear - is almost worse than no diamond at all (what makes this assertion all the worse is that the puny diamond in question is in actuality big enough to weigh down my hand if I were wearing it, and the cumbersome nature of the ring and the cut of the ring would have been my main complaint - had the ring been on my finger).

So, I don't really like diamonds, because I don't think they're pretty. And I don't want an engagement ring - of any type of stone - predominantly for the reasons F.F. outlines here (link stolen from seeemilyblog), when she says,

"Not having an engagement ring allows me to opt out of sexist notions of a man as provider and women as passive ornament, and the sexist custom that publicly marks a woman as having been purchased and thus 'off the market' while requiring no such public statement of relational or sexual non-availability by her male partner.

Not having an engagement ring prevents Shiner from having to display his masculinity and creditworthiness for scrutiny and comment by whoever happens to sit next to me on the train."

Yes, I'm concerned about the whole blood diamondness of the whole thing as well, and it disturbs me that, as stated by Candace Gibson of the Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast, "the scary thing about blood diamonds or conflict diamonds [is] the end result is so scintillating and so precious that a lot of people don't think about the origins of the stone". That's fairly upsetting; but while that is a very large issue that needs correcting, it doesn't implicitly conflict with the feminist proposition that women as passive parties, the ones who get the gifts and are asked the questions, is a bad thing to consistently perpetuate - as is the idea that women are somewhat akin to birds, distracted and attracted to the "oh, shiny!", and that a fairly conventional gift like a diamond bracelet or an engagement ring is the best thing a guy could possibly get a girl due to that fact. The money-grubbingness of it all rubs me the wrong way.

But then, conflict comes. Jane McGrath, another contributer to Stuff You Missed in History Class, brings up a point I've never actually contemplated before: what the diamond trade, the legitimate diamond trade, does for the inhabitants of Africa. Says McGrath: "Maybe after hearing this you could think, 'Oh well, I don't want to buy diamonds any more; I'm going to tell my fiance - or I'm not going to buy my fiance - a diamond because this might have been the origin'. And that actually causes problems in itself. If we just boycotted diamonds and cut them off cold turkey, this would actually cripple a lot of African economies that really rely on it; and it would cause the loss of jobs and everything like that. And some countries, I should say, like Botswana for instance in the past 25 years or so has been able to flip its economy around and prosper from one of the poorest to one of the richest countries." Well, hell's bells. I was thinking that forgoing the gross (both as excess and distastefulness) materialism of diamond buying and the sexist message of engagement rings in particular and almost every single diamond jewelry commercial in general would be one of those no-brainer things. A win-win-win situation, if you will, for me, my nonexistent fiance, and Africa. But no, nothing is ever that easy.

Candace Gibson continues this line of thought when she says, "And you should know too that there are about 10 million people worldwide who subsist off revenue created by diamonds... ...And also a lot of the money that comes from legitimate diamond trade goes to combat HIV and AIDs." I think it is important for me to note that I don't actually begrudge anyone their diamond engagement rings or their jewelry; I don't wholly believe that every girl who wants a diamond has that desire completely separate from the De Beers ads and the Kay's Jeweler's ads and Marilyn Monroe:

That doesn't necessarily mean that she shouldn't get one - as long as it is a legitimate diamond certified by the United Nations' Kimberley Process Certification Scheme. I just think that along with getting diamonds for Christmas or birthdays or proposals or Mother's Day or Valentine's Day, girls should expect to not be showered with diamonds and to be responsible for buying their own. After all, if it really is about the love of a diamond and not about seeing how much the significant other is willing to spend, then that isn't too imposing a task. What I would like, though, is in addition to the buying of diamonds for every occasion under the sun we accept that not getting a diamond - and more importantly, not wanting a diamond - is not something requiring sympathy or consolation. Because diamonds may be Marilyn's best friend, but they aren't mine. For more reasons than one.

And just because there can never be too much Sarah Haskins, here's her take on the whole jewelry ad thing:

Depression and Quizzes

My chances of becoming depressed in the next 12 months is 4.633%. How do I know that? I took this handy-dandy depression quiz!

Aside from now feeling pretty damn good that I beat out the Europeans, whose average chance of becoming depressed in the next 12 months is apparently 7.73%, I also had an odd moment when I went to pick out my country. It wasn't there. I can't remember the last time I went to choose the United States from a drop down list and had it not be there, and usually right at the top and out of alphabetical order (which alternately annoys me and makes me happy, depending on the OCDness of my mood and how much patience I have to scroll through a list of country names). It was kind of surreal. And that lead me to thinking about how having your country at the top of a list when it clearly should be nearer to the bottom or even having your country on a list at all is a weird sort of privilege. It says something about the width and breadth and scope of your country, its significance not only in its own mind but in the world. No wonder most Americans have an America-centric view of the world. Not only are we more isolated than many other countries, sharing our border with only two other countries, but we also don't have to even normally see the other countries' names on a drop down list.

I suppose another problem with many Americans' knowledge of the world may come from our educational system as well, and that is probably more to blame than any drop down box. After all, the maps in my high school still had "Zaire" instead of the "Democratic Republic of Congo". We had an industrious student who cared enough to cross out Zaire with a sharpie and try to squeeze in the entire Democratic Republic of Congo name - a valiant but nonetheless fruitless effort that accidentally led to an unfortunate invasion of Tanzania and Zambia - but the fact remained that apparently Africa's tumultuous political climate did not warrant the school board springing for some new maps. I'm sure mine was not the only school in which this occurred. And I'm certain my old high school is not the only high school using text books from 8 years ago (and I know this because my sisters, who are 8 years behind me in schooling, still get books with the names of me and some of my classmates inscribed on the inner book cover along with their relative condition when we got them).

I had come to the strange and paranoid conclusion that the lack of a truly great educational system was all part of a vast right-wing conspiracy, stemming partially from the fact that my hair dresser was appalled by the bailout bill because it stunk of socialism without recognizing how the history of the United States is littered with examples of socialist-esque programs, like social security. It is easy to manipulate a population when they have very little understanding of the past. But I've come to a much kinder, but at the same time more depressing, view: we're all just complacent in a broken system.