gggrrrrrrr arrrrggggghhhh patriarchy
Jun. 26th, 2007 06:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
...
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.
...
God, this is long. Oops.
Date: 2007-07-02 02:30 pm (UTC)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.