lolaraincoat | gggrrrrrrr arrrrggggghhhh patriarchy

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gggrrrrrrr arrrrggggghhhh patriarchy

Marriage and heteronormativity have been much on my mind lately for a number of reasons.

First I've been thinking about this because my appalling younger brother is about to marry a smart and otherwise sane woman. She appears to be motivated solely by the desire to be married to a man, since outside of his gender my brother (who is bipolar but not the sometimes-charming variety of bipolar, very occasionally violent, and a full-time jerk) has nothing to recommend him. Okay, well, he has some very nice relatives, I'd like to think. But otherwise he's a loudmouthed asshole.

Second, it was just Pride week here and the city announced its new tourism initiative, which will consist of, basicially, advertising ourselves as A Very Very Gay (and Lesbian!) (and Transgendered!) (and Bisexual!) City! We Like You! Spend Your Money Here! In essence that's a good thing, but it created a certain amount of worried conversation at one of the parties I attended on Saturday, which circled around the question, "Toronto: Are we really queer enough?" (Mind you it was mostly straight or straightish folks asking ourselves this, which I found charming.) Anyway, the city tourism poohbahs seem to be answering this question by pointing to the way that Toronto has gotten behind the Marriage for Everybody movement with a fervor that would do Las Vegas proud, if 24-hour-no-waiting legal wedding ceremonies officiated over by Elvis impersonators to the sound of ringing slot machines were also available to same-sex couples in Nevada. So that's made me think cranky little thoughts about heteronormativity too, as well as feeling even more civic pride than usual.

And then third that fabulous blogger Twisty at iblamethepatriarchy.com posted an even more fabulous post than usual here with a great explanation of why marriage is a bad thing for women. You should go take a look. That's pretty much what I think, too.

Every time I post about this kind of topic I feel obliged to add that this is NOT ABOUT YOU and your choices, which I totally support. We all make our decisions based on what's available to us. Some of you made really good decisions and also got lucky. I know I did. More importantly I have been the beneficiary of gobs of bad experience from which I drew lessons, plus massive amounts of class privilege and racial privilege and more recently heterosexual privilege as well.

But the problem remains: marriage is an economic institution which extracts labor from women to benefit men. It is other things as well, obviously, but all the other things that marriages are or can be do not erase that fact. Even marriages with more than one man involved, or no men at all involved, exist in the context of patriarchal society (which is why the homophobic question is always "who's the wife?" not "who's the husband?") So the problem with marriage isn't our specific situations but patriarchy in general, in which the ideological construct of marriage is a tool. And this is so even though many of us - including me - ended up with partnerships at the very end of the happy side of the spectrum of what women can get from a marriage-like arrangement in a patriarchal world.

In our case, when Fishwhistle and I started out our lives together I forced us to do a very careful accounting of the work of running a household, and then to split it down the middle, including the provision that paying attention to what was or was not getting done was work in itself. Also, we had to agree that the word "nagging" was sexist. (This process was so painful that it nearly ended the relationship right there, but I think it was worth it.) Also, we have avoided the whole wedding thing, which has kept some of the pressure off of us to conform to gender norms. Maybe most important, we have been freed up from the worst of the economic pressures that hold patriarchal marriages together by three crucial facts: neither of us needs the other's benefits package to get access to health care (yay Canada!), we don't have kids (yet), and my income is steadier and higher than his, at least right now.

I don't have a conclusion for this, really. I just wanted to say, it's been on my mind.

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Hmm. I think we need to set aside at least one evening to thrash this out, in August. Because I am sure we could each make some points that the other hasn't yet thought of, and it would be fun.

But Twisty? Is . . . a tad out of touch with the reality of most dual-career couples, as I know them. She's nuts, in other words, when it comes to the class of educated women I know. I wouldn't even open my mouth when I met her, however, since it would be like trying to discuss sex with a virgin.

Given that you LIKED that screed, I'd say we could have a fun conversation, sugar.

But I think that part of what she and other anti-marriage bloggers are confronting, head-on and with horror, is the cost imposed by reading children. For EVERYONE involved, including the fathers. Because part of that cost to wife-and-mother that she is ranting about there is really not so much patriarchal oppression as it is generational oppression: the toll that the younger generation exacts from us older folk, as we rear them.

Life is not all about me, me, and me. Sometimes, it's about your child. And your community. And others. And if you're at the point in life where I am (with abundant resources, some moderate amount of wisdom, and some power) . . .well, yes it is appropriate that I should devote some time to serving others. Including my children. Twisty? Doesn't understand the fact that if everyone were as self-interested as she is, that our species would die out.

In our case, when Fishwhistle and I started out our lives together I forced us to do a very careful accounting of the work of running a household, and then to split it down the middle,

Yes, yes. Same here. Mr. Cordelia does AT LEAST as much home maintainance as I do, and in fact, he does all the drudge work (dishes, laundry, yard work, etc) because I am better at the higher-order management skills of being the manager of this household and the kids' complicated lives. So, he puts in just as many hours and (from my POV) does the less satisfying work. This? Is not patriarchy. It is, arguably, however, a system in which the middle-aged serve the young (both our own kids and our students).

But you know what? I think that's appropriate. And whether or not one has had a ceremony isn't all that important, in my eyes (once the issues of equitable property arrangements and health insurance have been negotiated, which as you point out, can happen without the Ceremony). Although our own ceremony (with me in purple and a beach barbeque) was really fun.

Anyway, we'll talk more (at scandalous length, and with wine, and much laughter, I hope) in August on this subject.

Yes, yes, and yes to what Cordelia says above. The real cost of marriage is reproduction. So many anti-marriage philippics hinge on the assumption that self-sacrifice is ipso facto a bad thing, that it is detrimental to personhood. I believe that it is fundamental to personhood. So perhaps the question should not be, how have women been harmed by a system that has traditionally required more self-sacrifice from them, but rather, how have men been spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically crippled by a system that traditionally allowed them so little self-sacrifice?

Anyway, "traditionally" is the key word there. Among the educated professional women I know, I don't see labor being unduly extracted. Also, I can't claim to any such sane spliting of household duties as you and Cordelia signed on for; Mr. Rasa does practically all the heavy lifting. He's just better at it, from cooking to childcare to cleaning to laundry tp gardening. I mean, we have this division worked out, but all too often he's the one picking up my slack. But then, I am and have been chief caregiver to small children, and from his point of view, that lets me out of drudge work. It's a point of view I support, and I hope he is working on an equation something like 1 yr nursing = 5 yrs laundry. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Also, and this is a propos of nothing other than you reminded me of it, did you happen to read David Sedaris' piece in the New Yorker this spring, about living with his husband in France? He was relating how when he came back home to North Carolina, a friend of the family was trying to make sense of their relationship. "But. . who's the woman?" she asked. "Oh," he hastened to explain. "Neither of us is. That's what makes us homosexual, you see."

1 yr nursing = 5 yrs laundry.

Hey, works for me. Although in my case, I haven't done any meaningful amount of laundry (I mean, perhaps one load every six months) for over 23 years.

Twisty will have to come to my house (and my friends') and explain to us how much labor is being unduly extracted, in our cases.

Except, you know, it is being extracted. But not by our spouses. Rather, by our children. From both parents.

No one should go there except by choice. From shortly after conception until that magical, golden day when you realize your child can live independently and successfully (and I hope I live that long), childbearing and childrearing is a staggering exercise in self-discipline and self-sacrifice.

The costs are visible and appalling to anyone who looks, as Twisty does. But the benefits are largely intangible and thus harder for a childless person to perceive. But they're there. Fabula is right that this sort of service enormously accelerates one's development as a person.

One of my sisters is a mathematician (and a mother) and she put it best, for me, when she observed that childrearing is a like a mathematical equation where the variables on each side of the equal sign are perfectly balanced and equal: the cost/sacrifice equals the gains. But those gains are hard to describe and perceive, if you're childless, as Twisty is. All she (and others) can perceive are the costs.

Yes, the intangibles. You can't quantify them, can't measure them, and in trying to measure the cost of marriage and family, you're only working on the visibles, it seems to me, and thus doomed to incomprehension.

Oh, I thought of the analogy! It's like attempting to watch sex with no understanding of the orgasm. A hideous grotesquerie, utterly inscrutable.

Heh. That's a very apt comparison. Yes.

I was also reminded of that wonderful Sedaris quote. It puts it so clearly. He is smrt.

Oh yes, I saw the Sedaris piece. When I am President he can be our ambassador to France. Also, when I am President you can be our ambassador to the Vatican. Also, when I am President Cordelia can be President instead.

And I do take your point, but my reading of the Twisty screed was somewhat different than Cordelia's. I don't think she's making a stand against self-sacrifice or parenting (though some of the people commenting on her post made some silly remarks implying that *they* were opposed to one or the other or both, but whatever.) I think she's making a stand against obligatory, gendered, and invisible self-sacrifice - that is, work that men don't see as work, that only women do, and that women have no choice about doing. To me this is most onerous when it is unpaid caretaking of adult men, and least horrible when it is caretaking of babies, children, or those otherwise incapable of caring for themselves (paid or not.)

Also Twisty was not referring principally to marriages or marriage-ish arrangements like yours or mine, which are relatively egalitarian, but to the majority of marriages in the world, which are made by people without our unusual luck.

Um, otherwise I guess I would just wave vaguely in the direction of my reply to Cordelia, up there. And pass you the delightful kale chips. Mmmm!

What, Cordelia gets the presidency, and I get the Vatican?? What's up with that? No, when you are president, I want Secretary of Transportation. That is seriously my dream job -- I have fantasized for years about it. I want a rail system in this country, damn it, both a passenger and a commercial one. I want to take Eisenhower's dream of an interstate road system and destroy it. And I don't think I wouuld be a good choice for Vatican ambassador anyway, because you would be getting a phone call from the Pope's Secretary of State every few weeks, and he would say, "Look, Preseident Raincoat, I understand you thought a practicing Catholic wouuld be a great choice for this post, and sure, we all like her very much, and Thursday evening canasta at her place is just giggles all around for everyone, but do you think you could explain to her that it is not so much her job to be calling up His Holiness at all hours of the night to argue theology? Do you think you could do that?"

The real cost of marriage is reproduction. So many anti-marriage philippics hinge on the assumption that self-sacrifice is ipso facto a bad thing...

I can try to find this if you'd like... One of the feminist blogs I read linked a while ago to a study that showed that, while a household of two people requires less housework than the sum of the housework of two single-person households, women on average still ended up doing more housework when partnered than when single, while men did *much* less. I found Twisty's post to be a bit opaque, and I'm not sure I agree with everything she says, but I would guess the point she's making is not that self-sacrificing work is bad; it is simply the division of such work that's the problem, and the way in which we as a society teach the males of the species to ignore the fact that the work exists at all, let alone that they should participate.

And thank you--I hadn't heard the David Sedaris quote, and I love it :D

I'm dubious about that study, because I don't know anyone for whom that is true. Women of an older generation, maybe. Twisty's thing seems dated, to me, and not particularly relevant. Or maybe it's true outside of my socio-economic layer, and that's why I don't see it. Like abortion or gay marriage, I guess my reaction is, if that's not for you, then don't do it: be sure not to get a marriage like that. Marriage is a choice, not a compulsion, in our society, and I think the more pressing social question is not inequity within marriage, but the utter absence of marriage among those who could most benefit from it economically -- namely, lower-income women left partnerless to raise children and without the security, both financial and emotional, of a husband.

I'm not at all sure that we as a society teach males to ignore work. Again, I don't know of any males for whom this is true. As the mother of one male and the partner of another, I really just don't see it. Maybe in a previous generation, sure, but in every single marriage I know (and I know tons) the man does as much work as the woman. And even in the one marriage I know where the woman doesn't work outside the home, she does the housework and cleaning because, well, he has the outside job, and that seems fair to both of them, and it probably is. It works for them, and maybe my core objection here is that so much of what Twisty is complaining about may be individual choice, at this point of cultural evolution. And people of a certain sort do love to tell others how their choices are wrong or defective, it seems to me.

I'm not at all sure that we as a society teach males to ignore work. Again, I don't know of any males for whom this is true.

I know very many--including many men in my family, so I'm not trying to put people down when I say this. And I don't mean that somebody sits guys down and says, "All that housework stuff? Not your responsibility." But--I don't know--I just remember a couple of years ago at a party some of my friends were hosting. (Everyone was college-age.) There were a couple hundred people in the house, but the floor we were on was relatively deserted--maybe only 30-40 or so. A guy threw up on the couch. And even though there was about an equal number of men and women, every person who pitched in to help clean up the mess was a woman, and it was so automatic that I didn't even realize it till later. Just attending group gatherings and such, it's so often the women doing the preparation and cleanup work that it becomes automatic to expect that that is what will continue to happen. Or, I don't know, maybe it's that men are (often, not in all cases, as obviously yours is not) taught to view housework as a series of discrete tasks--here is how you do the laundry, here is how you wash the dishes--while for women it's more a way of life--the whole house should be clean, do what you need to do to make it that way, and if you don't it will reflect on you and not on the men in the house.

I imagine my perspective is somewhat different from yours, though, as one half of my family is extremely conservative (my uncle, in all seriousness, told my mother she wasn't a liberal, because liberals are evil) and obsessive-compulsive to boot. The area where I grew up is also very traditional. Even though I don't know about internal marriage politics in particular, the spectre of the patriarchy is still so strong I have a hard time believing that in that one area, things have become equal.

[Amusing side note: one of the girls on my soccer team in high school just got married. The minister proudly announced that she and her husband had remained virgins. O.o]

We will talk! with wine! and beer! and, just possibly, kale! (I am seriously trying to figure out how to turn kale into a snack food. Kale chips! So delicious and high-fiber!But I digress.)

But as I read Twisty's acreed, there, she was not primarily interested in marriages and marriage-like-arrangements such as ours, but in marriage as an institution as more generally practiced. And she's talking about the ways that marriage as an institution maintains male supremacy - which is related to child-rearing practices, I agree, but distinct from it. She is not really arguing for rugged individualism among women everywhere - which I agree would end human life on the planet in a generation - but she is asking why adult men depend so heavily on invisible work by women. You pretty much have to be male (discursively if not physically) to expect or hope that life is about me, me, me. And those masculine illusions of individuality depend on their being able to ignore the care they get from women.

Not that women should stop doing that work, but that being blind to those forms of labor should not be possible for men, and that doing those forms of labor should not be exclusively feminine. This labor is not only the labor of forming the next generation, but also of looking after our elders and feeding and cleaning up after everyone. And no matter who does this work in our own households, it remains - in the imaginations of most people in the world - "women's work."

As I said, your partnership and mine are way over on the egalitarian end of the scale, because of our own efforts and the efforts of the men in our lives and (even more) because we are enormously lucky in class and race and level-of-education terms. Plus in my case I have a whole welfare state to help.

But we are pushing back against an institution that is still a tool of patriarchy, even more so in places like the US which no longer have functioning local governments. In the absence of a social welfare state, families do indeed have to become little communities, providing transportation and nutrition and hygiene and health and education and recreation services that in my view should be a shared responsibility among a much larger community. That is, for example a well-run and safe public transportation system means that parents don't have to be driving their kids to soccer practice (or even organizing the car pools.) Good, state-subsidized day care, good public schools, a good network of community centers and libraries and parks, accessible clinics and other forms of health care ... none of these replace the irreplacable in parenting, the everyday attentiveness for twenty-plus years. But they do shift some of the scut-work off of women's shoulders and they make the scut-work a visible and collective responsibility.

And that, I should add, is my view. Twisty is just pointing to the problem. I'm curious about solutions. Might a really good social democracy be enough to end patriarchy? There have been some very patriarchial forms of it in the past, as I know you know.

p.s. the cost imposed by reading children is a very sweet typo.

We will talk, yes. But for now, responding to your comment (and also to your response to Fab and Amelia):

You say over and over (to me and them) that "oh, I'm not talking about you or myself or all our friends or all these other women we know, who have negotiated a far better deal for themselves. I'm talking about marriage in general."

Any generalization to which there are so many, many exceptions is really suspect. I mean, the devil is in the details. And the details? Really don't hold up, where Twisty's screed is concerned (from my POV).

I agree with Kai, below, who argues that the master's tools can dismantle the master's house, in this case. She is rightly critical of how Twisty just derisively dismisses all the examples that contradict her thesis, that she knows of, by slighting those couples.

I found that post really condescending, vague, and not grounded in the realities that I know. Also, very much written by someone whose viewpoint is informed only by theory, and not by any lived experience.

I agree that a good welfare state helps. Yes. But the bottom line is that childbearing and childrearing is work. Perhaps those who engage in it need to be compensated by the community as a whole, which brings to mind Susan Pederson's work on maternalist feminism in interwar France, where an unlikely coalition of Catholics, feminists, and labor union leaders forced a reworking of the pay packet, to transfer income to those who had children.

I'm pretty sure that we are agreeing here that childbearing and childrearing is work - critically important work. Would Twisty agree with that? I dunno. Is there anything in her post that contradicts that statement?

I like Kai's suggestion that the master's tools can dismantle the master's house but am still trying to decide whether or not I agree with it, which is why I've been slow to respond to that one. I want so much for that to be true that I'm a bit suspicious of it, if that makes any sense.

But your statement

Any generalization to which there are so many, many exceptions is really suspect. I mean, the devil is in the details. And the details? Really don't hold up, where Twisty's screed is concerned (from my POV)

is where we disagree, I think, for two reasons. One is what Miriam said, below, about how the marriages (broadly defined) that do not oppress the people in them can still be used by the patriarchy. The other is that it depends on what you mean by "many." You and me and everyone we know - even if all of us were in partnerships that didn't oppress us, which is not the case - are still not many in a statistically meaningful sense. And we're an exceptional bunch in many ways, above all in level of education. For example, of the thirteen people commenting so far on this post? Five that I know of hold PhDs and another four that I know of have some post-BA education.

Last point: I don't know Pederson's work, but the phenomenon that Pederson describes -- right down to the "unlikely coalition" part -- was pretty common across Latin America in roughly that era. It worked better in some places than others, but definitely improved a lot of people's lives.

I would say that any time women live with men, it turns out to be a situation which extracts labor from women to benefit men. THat is, if the woman or women are not vigilant in making sure that this does not happen (which, as you correctly point out, is a form of labor in itelf). Why should this be? Why on earth should my male roommates expect me to pick up after them? We are not intimate. We have no relationship that would suggest, even in an outdated partiarchical way that I should be the one to pick up the mess. But nevertheless, there it is. Subconcsiously, they allow me to bear the brunt of making this household livable. Oh, we've talked about it. What it comes down to is that they're willing to do something when I ask but they will never exhibit the slightest initiative because "it's just not on their radar."

This, I think, has to do with how children are raised/ the society they live in. Even if a mother makes sure that her sons do as many chores as their fathers, they still see that Mom does most of the chores that they don't do, and Dad maybe mows the lawn and fixes the computer. How could they avoid making the connection- when I grow up, the women will take over and I won't have to do this shit anymore.

And even in this supposedly enlightened age, advertizing markets cleaning and cooking products to women, almost exclusively. Same thing in tv shows- men are rarely shown cleaning, and if they're cooking it's because they're getting paid big bucks to do so. Kids can't help but internalize that message. Cleaning and cooking are what women do. If I wait long enough, that woman I see hanging around here will clean up after me.

And, more's the pity, it's true. I do clean up after them.

This is not to say that I've never had a tidy male roommate (I did have one, and I fell in love with him. Come back, baby! You were wonderful!) nor that I've never had a slovenly female roommate - I have one right now. But on the whole, the women have been far tidier and more responsible than the men.

Gods, sorry for the rant. I obviously needed to get that off my chest.

Sorry, I meant "makes sure that the sons do as many chores as their daughters."

A-MEN.

on review, i guess that this is kind of responding more to twisty's thesis. sorry! delete if you want!

Although I was a radical hellion in my youth, in later years I've come to see this particular topic as a kind of "masters tools will never dismantle the master's house" type of conundrum.

No question, world-wide, there are many women who are oppressed by the institution of marriage--some of them horrifically so. Although dead-beat dads get most of the negative press, there are probably some guys roaming the earth who would like to opt out of the whole marriage deal as well; being a life-long bachelor without "heirs" isn't much of a picnic in many cultures and subcultures. But, although as a global institution, marriage may be the master's house, women helped build that house, too. And women have the ability to help transform it. Which is exactly what many of those "intellectuals and hippies" that Twisty blithely dismisses (imo) are doing.

No, not every single woman has a huge degree of personal agency. Just as few women are in a life situation where it's possible to be a "radical feminist dyke spinster aunt"--to quote Twisty. But many women can and do regularly use what agency they posses to transform a generic, structurally oppressive institution into a marriage that is intensely personal, that may look far different on the inside than it does from the outside. A relationship that's as equitable and mutually satisfying as possible given their circumstances. And their children will most definitely take note!

So, yeah, on a large scale institutions like marriage reproduce oppression. But these institutions are not static, nor are the people who participate in them powerless to change them for the individual or collective better. Which is basically to say that all those aberrant "good/equitable/not-too-bad/slightly subversive/etc." marriages that ofttimes get skimmed over as unimportant exceptions really do add up in the end! Institutional change may happen at a slow rate, but it will/does happen. The fact that same-sex marriage is legal in so many parts of the world and the fact that many people now have the option of choosing not to marry or have children is evidence of that.

On an entirely personal level, living the swank life of privilege that I do (heh), I have come to see that marriage is pretty much whatever one makes of it (but most of all, never marry someone you wouldn't be willing to go into business with!) More power to Skye Lamont if that sort of thing works for her; I sure as hell wouldn't go for it, but I don't like liver either.

Also, I'm in agreement with what Cordelia said about marriage + children. Speaking only for the US here, for a country that loudly professes to think that kids are important, we don't come close to walking the walk. Parents get a totally raw deal here. Kids barely get enough of a deal for it to even be considered raw.

This is really interesting (and really welcome here, too - what's with this crazy talk about deleting?). Some of it I agree with, some I wish I agreed with, some I'm not sure about, and some I don't agree with at all.

So yes, absolutely, never marry someone you wouldn't be willing to go into business with! is true as true could be, with a handful of You Are So Right on top. And that's because marriage is a whole lot like forming a business partnership. And that's because because it is about (besides everything else that marriage is or can be about) the exchange of property and labor. For women, the fetishizing of all the other aspects of marriage - romance and social acceptance and so on - can obscure the underlying economic reality, causing us to enter into some really unfair and unequal partnerships that we would otherwise never have considered.

I also strongly agree with this:

But many women can and do regularly use what agency they posses to transform a generic, structurally oppressive institution into a marriage that is intensely personal, that may look far different on the inside than it does from the outside

But it's regretable, to me, that women (and men too, if this transformational effort has any chance of success) have to expend all that energy pushing back against an oppressive institution. Also, to me it seems very important to look closely at that institution from time to time and remind ourselves that it is oppressive - because without that consciousness I can't do the pushing back. Without that consciousness, my determination to fight the patriarchy just collapses into pointless irritation with Fishwhistle over cleaning the litterboxes, and the next thing you know I'm Skye Lamont. And nobody wants that.

I hope very much you're right about using the master's tools to dismantle the master's house, but I don't know. At the moment I am gobsmacked by the spectacle of an otherwise sane person marrying my horrible brother, and this has made me more impressed than ever with the resiliance of the patriarchal ideology of heterosexual pair bonding. But check in with me again in six to eight months, when she divorces his ass, and maybe I will think differently.

But I definitely disagree about the harmlessness of Skye Lamont. If she were to go around the media saying directly that this "surrended wife"/Total Woman stuff was her kink, sexual fetish, whatever, then sure I would say more power to her. Well, I would still roll my eyes rudely, the way I do about furries, but I would try not to do so in public and I would strongly support her right to do whatever gets her off as long as it harms nobody else. But that's not what she's doing. Instead, she's going around the media talking about her wacky lifestyle as if it were not a kink, but instead were natural and the way things are supposed to be. And by doing that, she (and the people who report on her) do the work of patriarchy. They reinforce the joists holding up the master's house.

Re Cordelia and childrearing, I am in agreement too, kind of. But in a complicated way. We have a long discussion up there if you want to take a look. I think she and I and you agree that having a functioning welfare state would go a long, long way to making marriage less oppressive to women (as well as improving the life chances of all the children living under such a state.)

Wow this got long! Sorry about that.

The comment on Twisty's post that most resonated with me was the woman who pointed out that being single and over 40 is not especially swell either. From a purely practical viewpoint, it's expensive and a lot of work. I do all my lifestyle maintenance now; I am not sure it's that much more effort to do it for two and be able to take advantage of the monetary savings. Arranging logistics as a single person can be quite exhausting, and it's inefficient and occasionally frightening not to have a significant other as a default backup.

There's an aspect in which I feel that I have somewhat failed at adulthood when I am still listing my mother as my emergency contact number. I do not feel like I'm making much progress on a sustainable old age, either. A lot of women manage to amass some moderate amount of property through marriage, even if the marriage doesn't last. I've never quite got it together to become a homeowner, and I feel it a lot more as I get older.

And I will cop to enjoying heterosexual privilege in public. Being in a relationship after a long spell of being on my own, I truly appreciate the comfort, convenience, and public recognition that goes with being part of a straight couple. Last weekend we did a lot of group socializing on an out-of-town trip, and it reinforced for me how much I missed couples socializing when I was single. It may be unpopular to admit here where we are all so enlightened, but it feels really nice to be "normal" at least in this.

I think Cordelia has effectively covered my feelings about the responsibilities of child-rearing. Again, cruising through the responses to Twisty's original piece, I gotta go with the person who laughed at Firestone's plan for "treating children as people" when it comes to toilet training and other parenting activities that require long-term consistency. Not becoming a mother is one of the few regrets of my adult life, but I never for a minute regret not starting out as a single mother (one never knows how these things will turn out in the long term). Even a co-parent who never changes a diaper can at least provide some financial relief and just physical presence for basic level childcare.

I also have to say that I bring some spiritual aspect to my view of marriage. I do believe that there is a value in formally making a public statement of commitment. I think that the words of the traditional ceremony, "before God and these witnesses," are what makes it different from just a private contract. There's an aspect of marriage that takes place within a community in a way that living together, no matter how long you do it, does not match. Obviously a lot of people feel this way, or they wouldn't be so eager to advance same-sex marriage.

I should also point out that many women come out even worse in divorce than they do in marriage. There's still more shame in it for women than for men, along with the greater economic losses. Formal marriage actually does provide significant legal rights and protections, especially for the disadvantaged partner, compared to less formal arrangements.

Maybe it's just all pie in the sky for me, since I haven't actually been married before, but I still hope very much to have the chance to participate in it. There is a lot to be said for the way it creates an explicit community, and I have seen how it gives a lot of people significantly improved self-confidence and feelings of belonging and security to have a an acknowledged partner.

What you say about marriage creating explicit community is an interesting thing, and of course true whether your marriage is opposite- or same-sexed. I think that is the reason that marriage acquired such an important place in orthodox Christian theology; a religion that thinks of God as, essentially, community (as Trinitarian theology does) seeks to emulate that community in earthly structures. This is the way that the Church will eventually get around to hallowing and recognizing same-sex marriages (probably millennia from now, but hey, at least we finally let Galileo off): by recognizing that the importance of marriage is its resonance with Trinitarian theology, not its resonance with Creative (and thus reproductive) theology.

That's interesting to look at the Trinity as a proto-family. Maybe I just have too much taste for the obvious in my growing-up image of the Holy Family as Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but I think it's really important to have Mary in there, and Joseph is actually a pretty stand-up guy.

Marriage is just one of the sacraments that recognizes the role of individuals in the community, though. Baptism formally introduces new members of the Church, and confirmation recognizes them as full, adult members within the community. Marriage as a sacrament is also a way of publicly recognizing an important status change for two people within the community, both in how they relate to one another and how they relate to the community at large. So to me it's part of the continuum of how the church acknowledges life changes in a public and formal way.

As I have discussed extensively with Cordelia, I don't think Christian scripture really has much to say about carnal (not to mention reproductive) love. All the sexy parts of the Bible are in the OT, and I think the underlying reason for that is that Christians can be made (through conversion) but Jews must be born. The NT is all about the purity of agape, while the OT is a family saga that acknowledges the importance of eros in perpetuating the community. There are a lot of ways in which marital love seems to me an uneasy compromise in Christian doctrine, viz St. Paul.

When I was very young, I took a cold beady-eyed look at the women in my neighborhood in Idaho (all married except for some widow grandmothers) and thought, hmmm, wives have to work a lot more than husbands. It was true all over as well as in my family (and my mother worked incredibly hard to care for my brother and me, and her parents, who started living next door when I was about five, until they died). But I didn't want to do that much work.

And given the obscene overpopulation of the earth and our destruction of hundreds of species a day, I'm afraid I don't buy the "must sacrifice to have children" argument either. (And given how many children are stuck in the U.S. foster system--well, don't get me started on that.)

So, word.

I live with a woman. We had to negotiate, painfully, work loads (and renegotiate as needed). (Recently for example, we traded: she now scoops the eight litterboxes daily, and I do the load of dishes daily. I still do the heavy lifting with litter because I am better suited physicall for it). We figure we have a pretty good tradeoff because when one of us leaves, the other can barely keep up. If one partner leaves and the other's work load does not substantially change, well, there's a problem right there.

We both work fulltime, and more, and while in theory, I suppose such a process could and has been worked out with male/female partners, I bet ours is better than most. We take turns being "mom" or "nurturer" (although neither of us is particularly nurturing by "nature" -- and we have different styles and needs -- approach me to nurture me when I'm sick, and I bite!).

And you know, every professional woman I've talked to about this issue admits guiltily deep down we'd like a wife in that old tradition!

Because, wow, that was a fantastic deal! Too bad my dad had a midlife crisis and dumped my mother for a grad student--after all she'd done, including economic support from her inheritance, she cannot claim any of the economic benefits (a few years after that divorce, she might have been able to get a percentage because she paid for his way through to his doctorate).

I agree with you, and I agree with her. I do things that support and perpetuate the patriarchy every day, from wearing high heels to working in an office where all the junior associates are women and the head honcho is a man to paying another woman to take care of my children. You pick and you choose; living a life that contradicts none of one's ideals is a lofty thing, but it's hard, it may be impossible, and I've chosen an easier road when it comes to most things.

Which is not to say that easier (speaks societal shorthand pays joint taxes gets joint benefits legal co-parenting heterosexual stamp of approval) is easy (unequal division of labor male privilege constant societal reinforcement of male agency and female responsibility). Easy kind of sucks too, a lot of the time. It's my anniversary today, and now I'm kind of depressed about it, damnit, Lola and I just had a fight with my husband over laundry/babycare/how I spend my time/housework. I sometimes wish I'd just fucking stood up for myself a lot earlier, but I was afraid, and tired, and in love, and scared, and lazy. It takes more courage and strength than I've got to fight for yourself all the time.

That said, marriage does some wonderful things, too, as institution and as personal commitment. I really do wish everyone had the right to do it.

Word.

I'm concerned that quite a lot of arguments hinging on the fact that the speaker has transformed their own marriage don't really account for the legal underpinnings of marriage, nor do arguments about extending the right to marry really address my abhorrence for the obligation and compulsion to marry.

I appreciate that you mentioned Canada's health care system as one factor which undermines the coercion underlying the marriage contract, because personally I'm not interested in actively dissuading people from getting married - I am very interested in removing the importance of marriage as a legal category. The people who've commented above about marriage making community are spot on - and that's just the problem for me, because it implies that unmarried people are not a legitimate and valued part of the community, and that they deserve a marginalized relationship to the state and to other people.

I would be much more willing to consider the possibility of transforming the patriarchal baggage of marriage as a social institution if first we severed all the legal privileges (and obligations) which go along with it. There are a lot of really practical ways to do that, starting with the health benefits question you raised, to flexible rules for establishing a legal "household," to ensuring equitable child care and family leave for everyone.

I am very interested in removing the importance of marriage as a legal category</>

You all need to move to Quebec. So fast. That's been taken care of for 20 years. Fewer than 20% of all couples (all flavours) get married. Ever. I only got married because I did not have time to wait for the 2-years-living-together-for-the-official-couple-regognition thing to pass. And the law's changed since then anyway. I would not have gotten married to Stéphane otherwise. We'd be together, but not married.

See, now that? So cool.

Adding on here to what you've said, what also disturbs me is that, in invoking anecdotes of "good" marriages (egalitarian ones, by our definition of "good"), we tend to continue to focus on the nuclear family--the community of husband and wife (or even wife and wife) and children, but a community which includes no others. People who proudly proclaim they are "child-free" are, in my view, embracing patriarchy's focus on individualism build on the largely invisible work of (other) women.
If you have no children, that choice is only possible because other women have children. Without the next generation, we who get old will suffer. And if you have no children, you do so with the assumption that, when you are old and need one, there will be a young doctor that some other woman birthed and raised.

On a sidenote, women who argue that marriage isn't so bad because they know of women who have good ones ignore the possibility that the exceptions are allowed only so that the vast majority of oppression can be rhetorically countered. Those in positions of power can (and do) allow a small percentage of any oppressed group to succeed in order so they can deny any institutional problems exist.

This is interesting and I shall ponder it. Thanks.

I was recently at a talk by Judith Halberstam wherein she talked about "March of the Penguins" in terms of what all the non-reproductive penguins are doing. The Christian Right has touted the movie as a dramatization of heroic monogamy and nuclear families, but without all those other penguins to help keep off the cold the penguins who happen to be reproducing wouldn't make it.

Which was a long way to illustrate the trite "it takes a villiage," but dude - it totally does.

I think you mentioned in passing in your response to someone's comment - but now there's been a lag between when I read it and when I'm writing, and I'm too lazy to re-read everything, so I may be repeating something you've said.

(Huh?) Anyway - I think about several aspects of this, of course, a lot, in terms of caretaking (of parents, in my case). Mostly, of course, the unpaid and invisible nature of the work, but additionally, the fact that it is so gendered. And the fact that it's "feminine" work is, of course, connected to the fact that it's unpaid and invisible. And unsupported for the most part by the economic and social structure in other ways (e.g., in addition to being unpaid, it's only possible for those in relatively privileged situations to take time from paid work to do it).

The patriarchy drives me nuts. It's not about whether it's OK for women to get married, or have children, or whether it's easier or better to stay single; it's the way that patriarchy (and our particular patriarchy) defines and the range of what all of those choices can be, and can provide.

The patriarchy drives me nuts.

I'm thinking of stitching this into a nice needlepoint sampler for my office wall ...

Yes, you were on my mind as I was writing this (along with many others.) All that frequently unpaid, undervalued, often unpleasant and always invisible work that - no matter who actually does it - gets defined as "women's work" ... you've done so much of it in the past few years and continue to. And just because it's necessary work and sometimes even emotionally rewarding work (as Fabula Rasa and Cordelia rightly point out, above) does not make its invisibility and undervaluing okay. And by invisibility - I know you know this, but - I don't just mean that nobody but you recognizes that here is this particular series of caretaking tasks that absolutely must be done. I also mean the political and social invisibility of the work you're doing: because the larger community around you (in its organized political form) doesn't see your work, you don't get any help in doing it.

It's a political problem, with political solutions that all of us can imagine, starting in the US with the (re)construction of the welfare state. You know that already so it's useless to go on about it. But anyway. I miss you and I'm thinking of you, and I wish we could have a revolution RIGHT NOW on your behalf and everyone else's too.

Hi! *waves*

I think we should market those samplers. It really does, though (drive me nuts). It, like the war machine, is so massive and pervasive that half the time it's invisible because you're standing in it ("you're soaking in it!"). And when you stand at an angle that does get a clear view, it either makes you furious or queasy. Or both. Shee-yit!

Anyway. I've mostly been thinking about the parental caretaking stuff because of doing it, but I didn't actually make my tie-in to your actual topic, which is that it all - the entire structure of how care is (and isn't) taken of individual people - is very informed (or even defined) by the structure of gender, and its correlate marriage.

Which, tangentially, is part of why it also drives me nuts that gay marriage is the defining issue of public political discourse about gayness. Not that I don't get it about health insurance and taxes and social recognition and stuff, but I also get that there are political reasons underlying why it's so often the institution of marriage that is the doorway to these things.

You know, this sort of thing is on my mind a lot too (especially since just getting married, though we've created an established pattern for household work from living together beforehand), because A) we have a deeply, deeply unequal division of labor and B) I enjoy it. I mean, I was a soc major--read Hochschild's Second Shift and neo-Marxian theories on exploitation of housework and all of that--and yet I do 99% of the household tasks. I can totally totally understand and respect your careful division of labor, and yet the constant negotiating and work that would be necessary to maintain something like that for us would be more onerous than doing things I actually enjoy, like cooking and making budgets. It's unpaid, but in the scenario where I do the work, I can (and do) obtain gratitude and appreciation for the work, while in the scenario where we work out who does what when, we'd both be unhappy.

And yet I feel selfish, for keeping him ignorant and helpless in the household. He's mentioned a couple of times that he'd like to learn how to cook, and he has great knife skills (better than me), but doing things for him does something for me.

So, I feel like I've succumbed to the patriarchy if I do the chores, and yet like I'm being selfish by taking them away from him. A girl can't win. I'm going to go weep into my cheesecake batter.

I'm sorry I'm coming late to this; I meant to comment earlier and then it slipped my mind until I saw your reminder.

Originally I meant to weigh in on Amelia's argument about the single state being hard enough to make the unequal divisions of labor in marriage and/or couplehood seem attractive. Because the single state is hard. Around my house, I do the visible and invisible labor, I do the traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine work. There is no one to share with; if I don't do it or hire someone to do it, it doesn't get done, and that is an awful lot of responsibility to shoulder, and although I don't mind doing the work, and consciously chose to be in a position as self-reliant as I could possibly manage, I can see why other people might want to try and share that load somehow -- and that doesn't mean that after a long week at work, I don't sometimes wish that I had someone, anyone, who'd just mow the freaking grass for me, just once.

Reading many of these posts, however, has changed the focus of my comment a bit. Because anyone who says that the institution of marriage is equitable on the basis of her own limited intellectual-elite experience is, I believe, troublingly blinkered. My own work puts me in daily contact with people from all socio-politital-economic strata, and I can state with a fair amount of assurance that marriages as equal partnerships are in a minority. And even in a comparatively enlightened country like the US, even if you discount marriages formed within one of its many traditionally conservative ethnic or religious communities, even if you discount its huge economic underclass whose marriages take place in conditions more arid and proscribed than anything we luckier folks are ever likely to experience, even then there are plenty of marriages whose survival relies pretty much solely on women's sweat equity. I know women educated in Seven Sisters feminist splendor whose fundmentalist upbringings underpinned and undermined their feminist educations so that twenty years later they are struggling to understand how they could have walked into their own oppressive and sometimes dangerous marriages with their eyes wide open.

What I don't think anyone here is touching on, though (and why I think that the answer to your question Might a really good social democracy be enough to end patriarchy? is no, at least not for several generations of extensive and careful education, and how fucking good is the world at extensive and careful education?), is that a lot of women want their traditional marriages. For every Twisty, there is an equal and opposite Skye Lamont. For every woman who, like you, negotiated the terms of her partnership to include some semblance of gender balance, there is a woman who, like my own SIL (who also makes more money and has a stabler job than her husband), wants her partnership played out along quite traditional lines and resents any incursion into her defined space. For everyone like me, mostly happy in my singularity, there is a woman who, like my acquaintance C, considers every day she spends unmarried to be a personal failure and considers marriage something to be contracted at any cost. (Our societal marginalization of single people does not make her any likelier to wise up soon, either.)

I guess my point is that we can talk about the patriarchy until our lips crack and our tongues turn blue, but as long as there are women out there who are willingly buying into it and all it entails, no emerging socialist state or uprising of the educated masses (which, you may recall, are in serious populist disfavor right now in America anyway) is going to change a thing.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

gggrrrrrrr arrrrggggghhhh patriarchy

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God, this is long. Oops.