Would the would-be intelligentsia PLEASE stop calling St. Valentine's Day a "Hallmark Holiday." This celebration goes back far, far beyond the invention of the modern-day greeting card. Like so many of our Western holidays, it is an amalgam of secular and Christian celebrations. The commemoration of the martyr Valentine, known for his kindness and works of charity, was grafted onto the pagan fertility/mating festivals that marked the arrival of spring. So whether you approach this holiday from a religious or romantic perspective, you are in tune with its original meaning. So the greeting-card and gift companies exploit it...well, well, well, welcome to America, folks! It's called capitalism - get used to it! And a happy St. Valentine's Day to all!

The tone of this entry suggests that somehow there's sexism in the Japanese model - or at least more sexism than our own. I can't see how it's different.

First, Valentines day isn't a long tradition in this nation either. It doesn't date back to Valentine's prison card, but to Hallmark's marketing of it (probably about the same time Japan started?).

Second, how is our holiday any less full of crap than Japan's? Every guy here feels obligated to do something that is better offered freely - just as gifts to one's boss should be.

Broadsheet could have taken another angle: "Japanese woman identify with Western men: Valentine's Day is a sham."

Just because St. Valentine and Feb. 14 have echoed together throughout the years doesn't mean our current holiday has much to do with him or the way he has been celebrated before.

Christmas supposedly dates back to Jesus - or futher, to some pagen holiday that was later Christianized. But the 12/25 celebration now popular in the US is less than 100 years old (back at the turn of the century it was a rowdy drinking fest without any commercial aspect). It would be highly inaccurate to describe today's consumption orgy as the same thing that went on at 12/25/00 - or at 12/25/50, for that matter.

That is the approximate spending discrepancy of men to women in the U.S. on Valentine's Day. Unless you,re from Japan, the tone of the article rings hollow.

I don't have a problem that women are buying chocholate for men, I have a problem with giving a gift to your boss. What kind of nonsense is that? Thank you for riding my ass and making sure I know that I am totally replaceable, here's some chocholate. There is also the whole thing that your boss, makes more money than you do. Bosses are supposed to provide gifts to their employees, not the other way around, but I guess things are different in Japan.

Oh and Valentines Day is bullshit, just a way for women to demand romance and diamonds. I personally don't celebrate it, anniversaries are for romance and gifts. Jewlery means something on an anniversary or birthday, but on Valentines Day it just becomes a race for men to find the cheapest diamonds they can find, or spend ridiculous amounts of money on flowers that DIE in a week and makes everyone who's single, acutely aware of their singleness.

V-Day is over, and now I don't have to hear "it's just a Hallmark created-holiday" anymore. Thank god. I'm sick of the bitterness and people, here's a newsflash: Valentine's Day has been around a lot longer than Hallmark. And when I say "Happy Valentine's Day, I love you" to my husband, it's not because Hallmark made me do it. I'm sorry single people feel it's shoved down their throat - yes the media will make a mountain out of any molehill - but get a check on your bitter attitude!

I'm quite happily married thank you. We say I love you every day, I don't need some bullshit holiday to tell me to do that or be nice to my husband or to be romantic spontaniously.

You know what made me bitter to the holiday, women. You know what I hear in my office all day, how much booty the chicks are getting. All the cooing over flowers that got delivered, all the women with husbands and boyfriends sitting around squealing about all the stuff they were going to get, like it's freaking Christmas. Do they get anything for the guy? NO THEY DON'T, there was absoulutely no talk about what they were doing for their other. Today, it's all about them showing off their new rings and necklaces and basically talking about how much money their guy spent on them via activities and gifts, still no mention of what they did for him, which makes me think, sex, and I personally don't think sex is a "gift" of equal value to the money and effort a man is expected to put in. Then on the other side, I heard the guys bitching about having to plan something, trying to figure out what kind of gift to buy so they won't get yelled at. Yeah, that's love freely given.

At least with Christmas, Thanksgiving, Yom Kippur, Chanukkah, Fourth of July, ect. people know what they are celebrating. Sure there is food and gifts, but at least people KNOW WHY the holdiay is special. History can not even come up with a coherant reason. It's all maybe this Ceaser didn't want men to marry, or maybe it was the saint secreting them out of prision, they don't know, they can't even come up with WHICH St. Valentine we are celebrating. There are 3 contendors. So without a good solid historical reason for this holdiay, I happily call it what it is: a bullshit holiday

LOVERS have a holdiay, it is called your ANNIVERSARY. No need to run around with ballons and flowers proclaiming "look everyone, someone likes me!"

Mind you, giri choco is even more crap. The idea that you have to buy gifts for people who have power over you and make more money than you is outright insane. If I were Japanese I would bake really really terrible chocolate cupcakes and give them to all my bosses with a big smile and a "I'm sorry I'm such a terrible cook, please accept this humble token of my appreciation, I really can't afford to buy box chocolates and I think it's the thought that counts anyway, don't you agree?" song and dance, and the next year, I'm sure they'd politely suggest that maybe I'm too busy to spend all that time baking cupcakes and I should just send them a card. Or else I'd get to secretly gloat behind my smile about how they feel obligated to eat my terrible cupcakes and even pretend they're delicious (or, I'd ostentatiously burst into tears if they dared criticise my cupcakes.)

Man, I watch too much anime.

Anyway, Valentine's Day. Chocolate is tasty, but diamonds have blood on them and flowers, unless they're in a pot with dirt and roots, are dead. Candlelight ruins your eyes, sexy lingerie is actually a gift for the man who buys it (my husband has been alternating between pestering me to buy more sexy lingerie and/or buying it for me for years), and movies and dinner are nice and all but if you only do them once a year, that kind of sucks in and of itself. I find the things that women are supposed to find "romantic", which are pushed so hard on men to provide and on women to demand, mostly repulsive and/or useless. If he can afford to buy you a diamond necklace, think of how many DVDs he could buy for the two of you to share instead! Or how many great books he could buy and you could read them over and over! Or, if it's the resale value of the diamond you're really interested in, he could buy you some very attractive stock in growth industries. I mean, almost *anything* is worth more, in practical terms, than a diamond. Why doesn't he hire you a maid for a day so you don't have to clean your house? In Maryland you can hire one for $88 a day. I don't think you can buy any diamond that cheaply.

And as several posters pointed out, why the hell doesn't the woman reciprocate? Unless sugar daddy is making 10 times your salary or more, or unless he sucks so badly in bed that he basically has to buy you like a prostitute to make it worth your while to give him any (and if so, either ditch the guy or please admit to yourself that you are a whore), you owe him something equivalent in return to what he's giving you, and no, that's not sex. You're supposed to like the sex, too. Now if he makes 70K and you make 30K, it is obviously absurd to imagine that you can afford to spend as much on him as he can on you, but you can buy him a CD by his favorite band or a DVD or a nice case for his cell phone or *something*. If he spends $500 on a diamond necklace for you the least you could do is buy him a $120 Nintendo DS or something.

So Valentine's Day is dumb. I'll take it seriously when other women take their obligation to get stuff for their lovers as seriously as they take their lovers' obligations to buy them stuff.

BTW, this year I am dead broke, but every other year I've bought my husband exotic cheese for Valentine's Day, since his equivalent to chocolate is cheese. If he ever bought me anything more expensive than a box of chocolate, though, I'd chew him a new one. We need that money to buy things that are actually valuable to us. Like, uh, video games and DVDs. (So we're still shallow. We're just shallow about totally different things. :-))