How Social Conservatives Are Ruining Marriage
The more shit I read about how The Institution Of Marriage cannot survive the participation of same sex couples in contractual arrangements sanctioned and provided for by the government of all the people, by all the people and for all the people, the less I want to get married myself.
As I’ve stated before, I’m not a great personal advocate of the institution to start with, and the more people like Katherine Jean Lopez and Ace of Spades shit all over feminists like Jessica Valenti for agreeing to try to make it something less of a wholly religious, patriarchal institution that strictly exists for the subjugation of women and their sexuality to men and their sexuality, the less keen I am. And then I read about how asswipes like Tucker Carlson thinks fucking can save a bad marriage and Dennis Prager thinks women should just submit to their husbands who, without the bounds of matrimony and civilization, would devolve into rape-y chickens, and I frankly begin to worry a lot about being involved with people to whom the institution is important. And let’s not even get me started on the Wedding Industrial Complex.
You know what small things give me hope about marriage? Watching people who don’t — and can’t — take the availability of the institution to them for granted fight for their right to get married. Watching the enthusiasm with which, in a variety of non-traditional outfits, same sex couples flocked to courthouses and simple ceremonies, flush with the pleasure of having the state sanction their love and their relationship. Watching the emotions and pride in people’s eyes when they can take part in a state institution that they thought their love for another human might permanently bar them from. Scrolling through pictures of same sex weddings on newswires was enough to make even me think that there might really be something to this whole marriage idea that wasn’t encapsulated in Being A Princess For A Day and rom-coms and sad little people clinging desperately to an institution that has failed to live up to the expectations of more than half of the participants in it.
But then I read Sam Schulman’s recent Weekly Standard piece in which he defends marriage as not — I swear to fucking God — about love or individual commitment or promises meant not to be broken (he ought to know, he’s on his third). In fact, the very idea that marriage is about love and commitment, to Schulman, is an idea gayer than the Stop H8 movement. Schulman then defends straights-only marriage on the grounds that it is the only institution that, for centuries, has more-or-less successfully subjugated women and kept men from sleeping around — unless you’re Sam Schulman, Dennis Prager, Newt Gingrich or Rush Limbaugh, in which case it apparently doesn’t keep one from having multiple sex partners and wives. Yup, Schulman thinks that marriage should only be for the straights, to keep us from fucking each other too much.
An example of the kind of marriage that Schulman decries:
The relationship between a same-sex couple, though it involves the enviable joy of living forever with one’s soulmate, loyalty, fidelity, warmth, a happy home, shopping, and parenting, is not the same as marriage between a man and a woman, though they enjoy exactly the same cozy virtues. These qualities are awfully nice, but they are emphatically not what marriage fosters, and, even when they do exist, are only a small part of why marriage evolved and what it does.
The entity known as “gay marriage” only aspires to replicate a very limited, very modern, and very culture-bound version of marriage. Gay advocates have chosen wisely in this. They are replicating what we might call the “romantic marriage,” a kind of marriage that is chosen, determined, and defined by the couple that enters into it.
Basically, Schulman says that the only things about the institution of marriage that make it remotely attractive to anyone uninterested in conservative religion and the subjugation of women don’t require marriage and, in fact, might not exist at all.
And lest you think that I’m getting too paranoid that this guy wants to slap a chastity belt on us — or, rather, that he’d like to buy my dad one to slap on me — this is what Schulman explicitly defines as the purpose of marriage.
The first is the most important: It is that marriage is concerned above all with female sexuality. The very existence of kinship depends on the protection of females from rape, degradation, and concubinage. This is why marriage between men and women has been necessary in virtually every society ever known. Marriage, whatever its particular manifestation in a particular culture or epoch, is essentially about who may and who may not have sexual access to a woman when she becomes an adult, and is also about how her adulthood—and sexual accessibility—is defined. Again, until quite recently, the woman herself had little or nothing to say about this, while her parents and the community to which they answered had total control. The guardians of a female child or young woman had a duty to protect her virginity until the time came when marriage was permitted or, more frequently, insisted upon. This may seem a grim thing for the young woman—if you think of how the teenaged Natalie Wood was not permitted to go too far with Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Grass. But the duty of virginity can seem like a privilege, even a luxury, if you contrast it with the fate of child-prostitutes in brothels around the world.
Just to break this down:
- Parents (probably fathers) and marriage protect women from rape.
- Pre-marital sex is degrading to women.
- Marriage basically only exists to determine who can fuck certain women.
- A woman’s only choice (and that of her family) is to protect her virginity until marriage or end up a child prostitute.
Not content to simply sound the horn of Jericho at the walls of his precious institution, shattering the illusion of many Americans that the institution is about love, fidelity, building a life together or even an equitable and state-recognized partnership, Schulman decides to dance on the ruins.
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