I want to get this off my chest before I forget.
A college-age girl in a bed next to mine in our ward seriously pissed me off. When her friends visited, almost all their conversations revolved around their love rivals. They dissected each girl’s qualities, but the most basic line lay with whether the girl was a ‘gold digger’ or not. If not a gold digger, then she must be a ‘slut’. All because she spent more time with boys than with girls, or the way she was dressed and talked. It didn’t seem to occur to them that boys can be gold diggers or/and sluts as well.
It was truly depressing, but it got me thinking about the whole ‘gold digger’ thing. Where did it come from? How it came to be so part of pop culture? Why is it so heavily associated with women? The origins of ‘gold digger’ are, of course, a person who literally digs for gold, e.g. gold miner. Around the 1930s through cinema, it became a nickname for women who openly went after wealthy men. It was associated with mistresses or “kept women”.
Nowadays, though, a woman is widely assumed to be a gold digger if she’s lesser known, more attractive or a lot younger than her romantic partner. It’s also assumed that she earns an income from being with her partner. There’s a belief that she aspires to marry him and become a trophy wife.
There are more but right now, I’m thinking it’s young women’s distorted idea of post-modern feminism. If my guess is right, then it’s so problematic that I don’t even know what to think. It seems an original idea that backfired or misinterpreted through time?
It’s also one of those little things I dislike about the Romance genre. There’s a consistent streak of ‘women are fundamentally gold-digging whores’ throughout so many romance novels, from 1900s to today. It’s such a biblical concept that I still can’t believe it exists in this genre.