ALTERNATIVES TO MARRIAGE: Maggie replies

The question, as I see it, that has been asked, is how do we create a culture (or subculture) that values intimacy, connection and sexual restraint in an all-male context? The answer Jonathan is that I just don't know how to do that. All-male environments through most of human history tend to be organized around different lines and principles.

But I am pretty sure that creating a legal instrument with some benefits attached is not going to do the job. (Why, for example, is intimacy and connection and sexual restraint not such a problem in lesbian relationships? They don't have a legal status with benefits, do they?).

In truth I am very sympathetic to the underlying needs being expressed. I think (I know this is really retrograde but. . .) men need women and that gay men are men, too. They too need an escape or refuge from the quintessentially male world of agon. (This is why the subject of gay men who marry women interests me, I just realized now) But you have now wandered onto territory where all I can express is my good will, and confess my ignorance. I suspect the answer may lie less in reshaping sexual relationships than in defining one's self in a larger way outside the sexual context, but that is really only a guess.

You ask Jonathan, how men and women who are sexually attracted to each other would do without marriage. I think large, complex societies do need formal laws, but the laws help protect the boundaries of an already existing social institution, they do not create a new moral order in themselves.

In fact, the marriage idea is continually regenerated among men and women out of the need to manage sexual diference and the hard fact that sex keeps on making babies, unexpectedly and irregularly, as Eve's clients can tell you.

This is why in all the human societies we have ever known, some version of marriage exists, and it is always about bridging the sexual divide between men and women in a way that produces enough babies who have both a mother and a father. (I think when you describe this argument as being circular, Jonathan, you are not doing justice to what I am saying.) Why are men faithful to women? Because they don't want to hurt them, is one reason. Because once married, they can be good fathers only to children of their wife. Because men know in their now deeply repressed male hearts that to be the hero, they have to protect women and children and that means dramatic control over male sexual impulses. (Did you see the movie Pretty, Dirty Things? A classic retelling of this heroic male theme with an African-immigrant man).

I do not think, in short, that you can accomplish what you want by legal instruments, per se. I once wrote a column favoring reciprocal beneficiaries as the solution. Since them I have become increasingly convinced that benefits are not the point, and that launching down the road of creating quasi-marital institutions is a road that ends, logically, in gay marriage.

So the real question is: Is that a good idea, or not?




posted by maggie at 6:56 AM | link

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