THE LOVE DEBATE: Maggie v. Jonathan

Ah, camping in Canada were you Jonathan? Lurking in the woods for days to avoid my fearsome intellectual daggers, no doubt! (Sorry, I am sleep-deprived and getting giddy).

Where to begin. First of all Jonathan, I went out of my way to say these questions were not mass weapons of Socratic destruction ("Only a fool could disagree Maggie, I see that now!"). I do not think they lead directly to conclusions about gay marriage, but they are a way of at least beginning to explore exactly how and when it is cruel to tell people they cannot love as they like, or at least marry where they love.

And to point out once again the things men and women have to do to sustain a culture of marriage are (subjectively) quite hard. I do not think the soulmate principle is going to hold families together, or persuade men and women to put their children's well-being over their own subjective feelings of happiness, intimacy, all that "spousal comfort," of which you speak, and for which men and women trade in their spouses all the time.

All this of course is not to deny that marriage aims at love, any more than the fact that parenting can be hard means parents do not love their children. But it seems to me marriage actually does very often require the kind of cruelty of which you speak: the cruelty to say that (close the kiddy-poohs' ears, please) love very often must not be allowed to conquer marriage, if children are to be raised by their own mothers and fathers.

On your question about promiscuity and marriage, I do not think actually that gay men are a special class of promiscuous people. I think this is what tends to happen to male sexuality when you withdraw from men the need to appeal to women--also the desire to be good to and for a woman. In an international study of 16,000 people gay men and straight men differed hardly at all in their taste for sexual variety: "Asked how many partners they desired over the next month, men on average said 1.87, while women said 0.78. . .More than a quarter of heterosexual men wanted more than one partner in the next month, as did 29.1 percent of gay men and 30.1 percent of bisexual men, the study said. Just 4.4 percent of heterosexual women, 5.5 percent of lesbians and 15.6 percent of bisexual women sought morethan one partner."

Expecting an institution which developed over thousands of years to manage the sexual relations of men and women to simply transfer in a unisex way strikes me as unrealistic. I do not think there is much evidence that making a set of legal benefits available is going to affect the sexual culture of men untethered from female sexuality very much. Or, as Mona Charen once famously quipped, "It is not marriage that civilizes men, Andrew, it's women."







posted by maggie at 9:11 PM | Link |

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