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I Am the Eggman's avatar

This is brilliant. You remind me of Barbara Ehrenreich's 1983 book "The Hearts of Men", in which she made similar points that the traditional social model was restrictive for both sexes -- girls were expected to become housewives and mothers, while boys were expected to become husbands, providers, and fathers. It was a simple division of labor: in the absence of modern contraceptives, a woman was likely to go through a series of pregnancies and have children of varying ages to care for, so it made sense for her to stay at home and do that while her husband worked for a living to pay the bills. The idea that this was restrictive only for women, as some feminist writers claimed, was completely wrong, but it served the feminist agenda to make that argument, so they did. Even the idea that women should have "lucrative and rewarding careers" like men was wrong, because the vast majority of men don't have lucrative and rewarding careers, just jobs of varying degrees of unpleasantness that enable them to support themselves and their families. (Footnote: I have what many people around the world would consider an incredibly "lucrative and rewarding career". I got sick of it years ago and would happily walk away from it if I could afford to. Maybe I should start my own Substack and watch the subscription money roll in, lol.)

One example that I like to use is this: Imagine a 1960s "women's lib" activist going to a coal mining town and telling the women there that they shouldn't be "just housewives", but have "rewarding careers" like their husbands. Imagine the housewives' look of pitying incredulity at the sheer cluelessness of this. "My husband doesn't have a rewarding career. He wears himself out working in a hot, dusty hole in the ground all week long because it's the only way he has of providing for us, and if he doesn't die in a cave-in he'll probably have black lung disease before he's 40. And you think I should prefer that to taking care of my house and my children? Are you mad?"

One point Ehrenreich makes is that feminism became a mass phenomenon in the '60s only because it was a necessary response to an earlier rebellion by men against their role of provider. In the '50s, two movements in American society, the beatniks and Hugh Hefner's Playboy Philosophy, argued that a man shouldn't have to be responsible for "some parasitic woman and her children" (as if, weirdly, the children had no father), and that a man was better off staying single and picking up women in bars for one-night stands when sexual desire reared its head. But "A woman's place is in the home" doesn't work when men won't keep their end of the bargain. Thus, the rise of the women's liberation movement.

The availability of reliable, easy-to-use contraceptives also changes the social equation: if a couple can have children only when they want to, what is the woman who doesn't have children yet, or who may not plan to have them at all, supposed to do with her time? Shulamith Firestone, in "The Dialectic of Sex", makes the point that until women achieved control of their own fertility, it would have been absurd to expect them to be able to achieve social equality with men. But give them birth control pills, IUDs, and other ways of managing their fertility, and everything changes.

I like the distinction you make between traditional marriage and sentimental marriage. It's not a dichotomy; marriage can be both at once, and that is, even historically, the ideal case. But from society's point of view, marriage as a social institution is the aspect that really matters. The "sentimental" side is important to us as individuals, but society only cares that people live up to their responsibilities.

With regard to the validity of gay marriage (which I'm fine with, by the way, as a social and legal thing; I'm a big fan of the Obergefell decision), there is another aspect that you haven't mentioned. Marriage is, on some level, supposed to be not just about social responsibilities, but about two people becoming one, which to most people probably sounds like either a pretty metaphor or a spiritual thing (or just BS), but there is a perfectly sensible interpretation in which it's literally true. A child, after all, is its mother and father in one flesh. Modern genetics tells us exactly how this works, but even in antiquity people knew that children combine characteristics of their parents. Christian theologians, who have terrible difficulties dealing with sex, have long insisted that the "union" of marriage is spiritual, but it seems to me much simpler, and obviously correct, to say that the true union of a man and a woman is their children. Of course, a couple can be "married" in the legal sense and not have children of their own for one reason or another, but I think historically the assumption has always been that if a man and a woman get married under law, it probably won't be long before they have children. That's the point of it.

If we look at marriage this way, though (rather than as merely a legal/social phenomenon), it becomes obvious that "gay marriage" is physically impossible, because two males can't make a child together, nor two females. I suspect that on a sort of collective-unconscious level, this fact has something to do with not just resistance to gay marriage, but more fundamentally, the traditional hostility to homosexuality itself. It is a very ancient part of our culture that it is everyone's duty to increase the tribe by having children. This attitude has been gradually fading out over the last century or so as modern individualism challenges the idea of duty itself, arguing instead that everyone has a right to do as they please, but these kinds of cultural changes are often curiously inconsistent because the real change occurs on an almost subconscious level, rather than as the result of logical analysis. So even as we move away from the idea that people have a duty to have children, we (well, not me, but some people, anyway) retain a hostility to homosexuality that logically derives from that concept of duty and makes no sense without it. It's not rational, but then again, people aren't rational, not really. They just think they are.

Again, I'm not arguing against gay marriage in the sense of social and legal recognition of gay people's relationships and commitments to each other; I'm not even taking the old halfway position of saying that gay people should have "civil unions" that have the same legal properties as marriage but are nevertheless somehow different from it (which is the sort of "separate but equal" thinking that SCOTUS rejected in Brown vs. Board of Education). I'm just noting that the concept of marriage has a number of different aspects, even beyond the "traditional" vs. "sentimental" modes that you've defined here, and the properties of these aspects are different, which can in some cases affect their applicability to gay or lesbian relationships.

I've been kind of all over the place in this comment because you stirred up a lot of quasi-related thoughts that would take a series of separate essays to expound properly, but I hope I managed to get some of it across, anyway.

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Carina's avatar

I read the entire post and agree with you, but I would still change the line in your manifesto because I had the exact same reaction as the other reader when I read “Trans people already have the rights accorded to everyone else.” Conservatives said the same thing about gay people.

Yes, you’re right that it’s different—but we already struggle to persuade normies that gender isn’t “the next gay rights,” and echoing old anti-gay arguments works against this goal. So for that reason, I wouldn’t argue that one is about equality while the other asks for special treatment. I know what you mean, but it’s too easy for people to flip it around.

Besides, I think you can make a stronger case in #8. The biggest difference between gay and trans “rights” is that gay marriage doesn’t require us to affirm something that is objectively false. If we allow people to say they’re women when they are not, all sorts of laws and customs break down. This is fundamentally different from the demands of the gay rights movement.

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