Marriage: Definitions, History, Ethics, Morals, &c.

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by Tiassa, Sep 13, 2006.

  1. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    This topic arises in consideration of a long digression in another topic.

    Western politics of late have demanded some consideration of whether or not homosexuals should be allowed to marry one another. The issue of same-sex unions is not new in history, despite some claims to the other.

    - What is marriage?
    - What purposes do the institution or processes of marriage serve in society?
    - What are the roles of the participants?
    - How has marriage existed and evolved through history?
    - What does any of this mean for people?
    - What does any of this mean in terms of the contemporary discussion?​

    These and other questions persist even without the "gay fray"; the feminist movement of the 20th century addressed such questions, and while many decried the feminist assessments of marriage, few, if any, solutions arose.

    Thus, submitted for your consideration:

    - "The History of Marriage as an Institution": A page reviewing certain occasions, principles, and structures in the Western history of marriage. Notable points: former Catholic church recognition of same-sex unions; English practice of "wife sale"; women's legal standing (or lack thereof) until the 19th century under English common law; women's legal standing (or lack thereof) into 20th century in the U.S.; marital rape in the U.S. in the late 20th century.

    - "The History of Marriage": from NewAdvent.org, the Catholic Encyclopedia.

    - "Same-Sex Marriage is a Feminist Issue": from the National Organization for Women.

    - "The Freedom to Marry: Keep Dancing": commentary from Advocate.com; discusses a recent decision by the New York court system regarding same-sex marriage.

    - "Women and Law": served from the University of Texas; examines Victorian-era considerations and feminism.

    - "Marriage": from Wikipedia.

    - "Female can't bring court action ....": discusses 1828 judicial outcome regarding a woman's right to sue, a woman's ownership of property, and recalls English jurist William Blackstone's expression of relationship between husband and wife ("the husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband").

    - "Commentaries on the Laws of England": from Wikipedia; discusses Blackstone's Commentaries and their influence: "The Commentaries are often quoted as the definitive pre-Revolutionary War source of Common Law by US courts".

    - "The Laws of Nature and Nature's God": Blackstone's Commentaries; see Book 1, Chapter 15 regarding marriage.

    - "The Heterosexual Revolution": a New York Times article by Stephanie Coontz; considers the changing face of marriage in light of traditionalist assertions in the contemporary political arena.

    Links and information are, of course, invited; more importantly, though, what is marriage in your opinion, and where does that opinion come from? Is it really so much or so little as we make of it? Spiritual bliss? Procreative utility? Ownership?

    All that, and a bag of chips?
     
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  3. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    Marriage was probably begun as a form of ownership of the woman. A legal contract so as to alert other males that she was already owned!

    Roles? The woman was supposed to love, honor and obey the husband. Then the fucked up and gave women all those silly-assed rights, fucked up the whole thing!

    Existed and evolved? Hmm, do you have about a thousand years to study that topic, Tiassa? It might even take longer, and probably wouldn't all be correct, either.

    As a contemporary discussion, marriage is really just a legal situation that two people enter into so as to be recognized by the society (legal and otherwise). We can also get out of that legal situation by just filing a few legal papers with the authorities ...ain't no big deal to get divorced, thus it ain't no big deal to be married. We've ruined the ideals of marriage as a permanent situation between a man and woman. There are no longer any ideals about it, and some even enter legal agreements ...just in case they don't want to be married anymore!

    Hope I helped,

    Baron Max
     
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  5. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    In our society, marriage as legally defined confers certain advantages. For example, a job with health insurance benefits usually provides medical expenses for the spouse.

    If we extend such benefits to gay or lesbian pairs, why not extend them to other close bonds? After my divorce, it would have been a boon to me to have my employer's medical insurance pay for my adults son's medical expenses. What about two siblings? Is the emotional bond between husband & wife or between same sex couples more noble or stronger than the bond between parent & adult child or between siblings?
     
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  7. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    I've started reading Marriage, a History, by Stephanie Coontz; from the outset one of the things that seems fairly clear is that our contemporary, Western idea of "traditional marriage" is itself an aberration from the traditions of history. This isn't much of a surprise to those of us who recall that history is rife with arranged marriages, bride prices, and the intrusion of economics and politics into family life. It seems that our romantic notions of one man, one woman, to love and cherish, &c., is a transitional point in history; our societies have earned the luxury of experimenting with this notion of marriage, and certainly it dominates my outlook on the subject. In fact, the observable failure of most marriages to meet the standard of a "traditional marriage" (as classified by contemporary political conservatives) is one of the reasons I probably won't ever be married. It sounds nice and all, but it's not realistic.

    In the meantime, to consider Dinosaur's point:

    In history, the bond between parent and child, or between siblings, has often been stronger than the bond of marriage. It is probably a matter of custom and economic pressures that interfere with the extension of labor benefits to adult children: my parents' insurance covered me into adulthood, and they just paid out for it. But consider, for a moment, the political situation as pertains to the gay fray: a gay man cannot marry his lover of decades. The brother who disowned him years ago when he came out of the closet can step in and interfere with the transfer of estate assets after the gay man dies. The lover is out in the cold. There, indeed, the siblings' "bond", no matter how superficial or merely legalistic, is stronger than the bond of a shared relationship covering some thirty years.

    Strange, then, that the Clintons--accused of a loveless marriage of convenience for political and economic purposes--would be more in accord with historical precedent than a marriage built on love, an emotion known to be irrational and often resembling psychosis.
     
  8. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    The need diminishes? Everybody knows each other? I don't understand?

    It seems to me that the larger the "tribe", like a city with a million people?, the need for a legal authority/ownership document would be MORE required, not less. No one, not even the most outgoing persons, can know a million people! At most, so I've heard and read, is that it's only possible to really know about 25 or so people ...the limit of the tribal society.

    Baron Max
     
  9. Jaster Mereel Hostis Humani Generis Registered Senior Member

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    Marriage, traditionally, has always been about three main things. As far as I have discerned, they are:
    -To build and consolidate political alliances between families.
    -To produce children.
    -To remove competition for mates within the group.

    Gay marriage ignores these things, since it makes the marriage purely about the emotional attachment between the two individuals. Marriage is not about love, it's about politics and producing children.
     
  10. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    (Insert title here)

    I, too, have long recognized this theory, but researchers have found it doesn't hold up to scrutiny:

    The story that marriage was invented for the protection of women is still the most widespread myth about the origins of marriage. According to the protective or provider theory of marriage, women and infants in early human societies could not survive without men to bring them the meat of woolly mammoths and protect them from saber-toothed tigers and from other men seeking to abduct them ....

    One way a woman could hold a mate was to offer him exclusive and frequent sex in return for food and protection. According to the theory, that is why women lost the estrus cycle that is common to other mammals .... Human females became sexually available year-round, so they could draw men into long-term relationshps. In anthropologist Robin Fox's telling of this story, "The females could easily trade on the male's tendency to want to monopolize ... the females for mating purposes, and say, in effect, 'okay, you get the the monopoly ... and we get the meat'."

    The male willingness to trade meat for sex ... was, according to Fox, "the root of truly human society" ....

    People in the mid-twentieth century found this story persuasive because it closely resembled the male breadwinner/female homemaker family to which they were accustomed. The male breadwinner model of marriage ... wasa a late and relatively short-lived way of organizing gender roles and dividing work in human history. But in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s most people believed it was the natural and "traditional" family form.
    (Coontz, 35-36)​

    Researchers variously discredit the theory. Coontz notes that the pattern, thought to reflect nature, does not hold up among primates; female babboons paired with a male see no greater share of the food than other females; food sharing among chimpanzees occurs in greatest proportion between mother and offspring, not between pairs, and food can certainly be used as a persuasion to sex, "But males cannot control the sexual behavior of the estrus females" (36). And male and female chimpanzees alike are observed to attend to a female's infant when they want a share of her food. Furthermore, Coontz points out that as a general rule, women's foraging contributed the majority of the group's food, and that observations of an African hunter-gatherer society in the 1960s calculated that a woman with a child under two years old could cover the same amount of ground and bring back the same amount of food as a childless woman. Women in contemporary "primitive societies" do often hunt, and there is a reasonable theory afoot that says the transition toward male-dominated hunting parties came with the development of weapons effective for hunting solitary, fast-moving animals (37-38). Chasing down a gazelle, I suppose, is difficult with a child at the teat.

    Having a flexible, gender-based division of labor within a mated pair was an important tool for human survival. One partner, typically, could concentrate on the surer thing, finding food through foraging or digging. The other partner could try for a windfall, hunting for food that would be plentiful and filling if it could be caught. Yet this division of labor did not make nuclear families self-sufficient. Collective hunting and gathering remained vital to survival. (38)​

    Here's the strange thing I'm finding as I read through this book: marriage seems to be more about "in-laws" than anything else:

    In the 1970s anthropologist Ernestine Friedl pointed out that most of the functions of marriage could in theory be performed by a group of brothers and sisters. "Procreation," she wrote, "could be accomplished by irregular sexual encounters with men and women of other sibling groups, with each set of brothers and sisters supporting the children of the sisters only." The only thing such a system could not do, she said, was allow individuals to acquire in-laws. She suggested therefore that the effort to acquire in-laws was as vital purpose of marriage as the organization of reproduction or the enforcement of incest taboos.

    Friedl's comments were mere speculation before the recent publication of a huge and fascinating study of the Na, a society of about thirty thousand people in the Yunnan Province of southwestern China. Among the Na, the only society we know of in which marriage is not a significant institution, brothers and sisters live together, jointly raising, educating, and supporting the children to whom the sisters give birth ....

    .... The Na are a startling exception to what otherwise seems to be the historical universality of marriage. But this society makes one thing clear: Marriage is not the only way to impose an incest taboo, organize child rearing, pool resources, care for elders, coordinate household production, or pass on property to the next generation. It is, however, the only way to get in-laws. And since the dawn of civilization, getting in-laws has been one of marriage's most important functions.
    (32-33)​

    Who knew? Some folks, I suppose, but even Coontz claims to find the journey of her book surprising:

    This is not the book I thought I was going to write. I have been researching family history for thirty years, but I began focusing on marriage only in the mid-1990s, when reporters and audiences started asking me if the institution of marriage was falling apart. Many of their questions seemed to assume that there had been some Golden Age of Marriage in the past. So I initially decided to write a book debunking the idea that marriage was undergoing an unprecedented crisis and explaining that the institution of marriage has always been in flux.

    I soon changed my approach, but this was not an unrasonable starting point. After all, for thousands of years people have been proclaiming a crisis in marriage and pointing backward to better days. THe ancient Greeks complained bitterly about the declining morals of wives. The Romans bemoaned their high divorce rates, which they contrasted with an earlier era of family stability. THe European settlers in America began lamenting the decline of family and the disobedience of women and children almost as soon as they stepped off the boats.

    Worrying about the decay of marriage isn't just a Western habit. In the 1990s, sociologist Amy Kaler, conducting interviews in a region of souther Africa where divorce has long been common, was surprised to hear people say that marital strife and instability were new to their generation. So Kaler went back and looked at oral histories collected fifty years earlier. She found that the grandparents and great-grandparents of the people she was interviewing in the 1990s had also described their own marital relations as much worse than the marriages of their parents' and grandparents' day. "The invention of a past filled with good marriages," Kaler concluded, is one way people express discontent about other aspects of contemprary life.
    (1-2)​

    What political buzzspeak labels "traditional" marriage seems, in Coontz's assessment, without historical precedent: "When it comes to any particular marital practice or behavior, there may be nothing new under the sun. But when it comes to the overall place of marriage in society and the relationship between husbands and wives, nothing in the past is anything like what we have today, even if it may look similar at first glance" (2).

    The hidden blessing of sorts arising from the conservative press against gay marriage may in fact be that people are starting to think more about what marriage means and represents. Even I, as a child, tried to imagine my future wife; it's not an image I care to recall, to be honest. It's not that I have no idea what I was thinking, but the myth-laden projections of the future self now seem so naive and stupid that, frankly, it's embarrassing. Besides, when it came to picturing the mother of my daughter (I've always believed I would have a daughter; isn't that strange?) she was always absent, a void in my imagination. Premonitory, maybe, or just a limitation on my inner vision? A self-fulfilling prophecy? It doesn't matter much, or at least it shouldn't.

    One last citation, from the introduction:

    Almost everywhere people worry that marriage is in crisis. But I was intrigued to discover that people's sense of what "the marriage crisis" involves differs drastically from place to place. In the United States, policy makers worry about the large numbers of children born out of wedlock. In Germany and Japan ... many planners are more interested in increasing the total number of births, regardless of the form of the family .... Japanese population experts believe that unless the birthrate picks up, Japan's population will plunge by almost one-third by 2050. SO while federal policy in the Unitd States encourages abstinence-only sex education classes ... and the media tout teenage "virginity pledges", Japanese pundits lament the drop in business at Japan's rent-by-the-hour "love hotels". One Japanese magazine recently pleaded: "Young People: don't hate sex".

    The United Nations kicked off the twenty-first century with a campaign to raise the age of marriage in Afghanistan, India, and Africa, where girls are frequently wed by age twelve or thirteen, often with disastrous effects on their health. On the other hand, in Singapore the government launched a big campaign to convince people to marry at a younger age. In Spain, more than 50 percent of women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine are single, and economic planners worry that this bodes ill for the country's birthrate and future growth. In the Czech Republic, however, researchers welcome the rise in single living, hoping that will reduce the 50 percent divorce rate.

    Each region also blames its marriage crisis on a different culprit. In Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, governments criticize women's families for demanding such high bride-prices that it is impossible for young men to marry .... But in Italy, commentators are concerned about the growing number of mammoni, or "mama's boys", who choose not to marry. These are educated men in their twenties and thirties with good jobs who stay in their parents' homes, where their mothers continue to cook, clean, and shop for them. More than one-third of single Italian men between the ages of thirty and thrity-five live with their parents.

    Two Canadian authors ... recently argued that the crisis in family life is caused by too much gender equality. In societies with high degrees of gender equality, they predict, birthrates will fall until the culture eventually collapses and is replaced by a society that restricts women's options in order to encourage higher fertility. But in Japan, many women say they are avoiding marriage precisely because of the lack of equality between the sexes. In China, traditional biases against women could end up making it impossible for many men to ever find wives .... By 2020 China could have between 30 million and 40 million men who cannot find wives.
    (2-4)​

    About the only conclusion I can draw at this point is that the buzz of "traditional" marriage is a farce at best. Coontz writes that the 1950s model of family "was the culmination of a new marriage system that had been evolving for more than 150 years" (4). Of course, she also writes that from the outset, the sentimentalized marriage based on love "already showed signs of the instability that was to plague it at the end of the twentieth century .... The very features that promised to make marriage such a unique and treasured personal relationship opened the way for it to become an optional and fragile one" (5).

    Perhaps that's a question for the topic in its own right: Is this "traditional marriage" buzz, in fact, a reflection of our own American tradition derived from Western values? And what limits do we prescribe? After all, if marriage is about love and satisfaction, then indeed the "crisis in family life" pinned on gender equality is in fact a necessary byproduct of our vaunted "tradition".
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005.​

     
    Last edited: Feb 12, 2008
  11. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    Well, you missed my point completely. Wanna' try again? Read my post carefully in response to your original post ....then I hope you'll see what I meant.

    Baron Max
     
  12. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    Hmm? Well, Tiassa, perhaps we just have the "owner" wrong? I.e., perhaps the male was not/is not the "owner", but the female IS?

    Notice also that he mentions the male's ego in wanting a monopoly on the female? He might want that monopoly, but it's the female who makes the decision?

    One other thing that always makes me wonder ....in every culture known to man, even in written texts of people we don't know, human males have always denigrated females who "slept around" too much! So wouldn't that tendency also force the female to make her choice, then try her damnedest to stick to it? No male wants a female who is overly promiscuous, so in order to have what he wants, he is also forced to make a choice of female.

    I don't like that theory at all. Because, unlike other animals, the human offspring takes years and years to develop. So there had to be some mechanism other than just sex to hold the male and female together. And why would a male give meat/food to a female who was eight months pregnant???? See? Makes no sense in that regard. The two must have been exclusive partners prior to her pregnancy or the females would have starved to death during pregnancy.

    No, I still think it's an ownership issue ....now the question is "Who owned who?" ...LOL! And I'm not so sure that it isn't the female who was actually the owner ...it does make some sense with regard to the pregnancy and child-rearing time involved. I.e., the deal had to have been made earlier.

    Interesting. Very interesting.

    Baron Max
     
  13. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    Don't know ...don't give a fuck. If I can't understand what you say, then there's no reason to ever respond to you. Fair enough?

    Baron Max
     
  14. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    I actually skipped the citation concerning the Blackfoot tribe: indeed, the folk tale describes the females selecting their males, and there is a sense of pity about it. Hell, I figured I quoted enough of the book. Interestingly, though, by Robin Fox's theory, I still wonder why people find prostitution so distasteful in modern society. Maybe it's a jealousy factor among wives in the era of "love marriages". After all, even Jesus hung with whores.

    But then again ... aw, hell, the considerations of adultery in the early chapters of Coontz's book would make for even more hefty citations. Suffice to say that at one time it was okay to be in love with one's mistress and inappropriate to be in love with one's wife. Strange? Just a little? I'm sure it made sense to the folks at the time, but I'm one of those unfortunates indoctrinated with the "love marriage" ideal.
     
  15. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    Why do you say "pity"? And really, while I'm a male, I'm not so sure that the females aren't the ones who do the selecting!! ...regardless of what the male ego wants to believe!

    Well, while males "seem" to be willing to stick their dicks into almost anything that's warm and wet, I think they're also somewhat leery of doing so! Just think of it from the male point of view ...you're going to stick your dick, your wonderful, precious dick, into the same hole that some other male just stuck HIS rotten, stinkin', filthy dick into?!! Oh, my god ...that's worse than anything I can possible think of, including nuclear devastation! ....LOL!

    So if that attitude was prevalent in males in the early days, it's no wonder that marriage was incorporated into the caves. I've also wondered just what Joe Caveman would do or think if he walked into the cave and found Mike Caveman fuckin' the woman that he went out to hunt meat for? I have this suspicion that he might not like it ...and probably wouldn't give her the meat, either! So while she might be sexually satisfied, she still don't get to eat? Would she like that?

    Yeah, but he didn't fuck 'em, did he? See? He didn't want to stick his dick in the same hole as all those other guys!!!! How horrible!

    I must admit to not understanding that attitude. But then it seems that I'm one of the few on the planet that actually feels quite strongly about marriage and fidelity. And I'm also single ....does that say anything to us????

    Baron Max
     
  16. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    37,884
    It seems a part of the narrative.

    From Coontz, pp. 34-35:

    The men and women of the ancient Piegans did not live about together in the beginning. THe women ... made buffalo corrals. Their lodges were fine .... They tanned the buffalo-hides, those were their robes. They would cut the meat in slices. In summer they picked berries. They used those in winter. Their lodges all were fine inside. And their things were just as fine ....

    Now, the men were ... very poor ..... They had no lodges. They wore raw-hides .... They did not know, how they should make lodges. They did not know, how they should tan the buffalo-hides. They did not know, too, how they should cut dried meat, how they should sew their clothes.​

    In the Blackfoot legend, it was the men, not the women, who needed marriage. Hungry and cold, the men followed the women and found out where they lived. Then they gathered on a nearby hill and waited patiently until the women decided to choose husbands and allow them into their lodges. The female chief selected her mate first, and the rest of the women followed suit.

    Doesn't it seem the men in this tale are rather pitiful? So says me, I guess.

    But that's just it: the taboo against prostitution and prostitutes goes well beyond merely having sex with them. Seems unreasonable in light of Fox's prostitute/provider model. Of course, Fox's model is one of those coming undone.

    'Tis a strange one, but the first chapter finds a subsection by the title, "Nothing is more impure than to love one's wife as if she were a mistress". Perhaps it's not quite accurate to say it is okay to be in love with one's mistress, but Coontz notes that a Roman was expelled from the Senate on the grounds that he had kissed his wife in front of his daughter, a "disgraceful" act. Excessive love, apparently, was considered adulterous, which under the Christian paradigm became idolatrous. "Although medieval Muslim thinkers were more approving of sexual passion between husband and wife than were Christian theologians, they also insisted that too much intimacy ... weakened a believer's devotion to God" (17-18). Apparently Samuel Pepys, who apparently married for love, wrote in a diary of a particularly affecting piece of music, that the performance "did wrap up mysoul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife" (17)

    It seems something so socially important as marriage, so the sentiment went, should not be tied up in notions of love and passion, which are known to be irrational. Perhaps love would flower in a proper marriage, but it was not a guiding influence. The idea of taking a lover outside of marriage seemed to be accepted on some level as a rational outlet for irrational passions, thereby sparing the marriage such chaotic injections.

    I think all it suggests is that the current generations of Western society are wrapped up in a myth that may or may not be reflective of what is "best for people".

    I mean, think about it: given the socioeconomic and political importance of marriage in history, it could get to be a real drag if a wife hated her rapist husband; if he spared her the misery of unwilling sex, or she spared him taunts of inadequate performance, perhaps cooperation was easier. I'm just speculating. At the same time, however, what if those displays of marital love and passion went unacknowledged by a more pragmatic, practical, or functional spouse? Instead of resenting the spouse, just go get a lover and pour the affection there; household and family business could, perhaps, continue without the interruptions of petty, passionate disputes.

    The people in these marriages in history are merely utilities to an end: "Theologians chided wives who used endearing nicknames for their husbands, because such familiarity on a wife's part undermined the husband's authority and the awe that his wife should feel for him" (17).

    Transpose that notion into a modern scenario:

    Husband: Hmm ... the herd is weak this year. We'll be short on meat. And the weather has the grain all off-kilter. This could be a tough winter.

    Wife: Sweetheart, you're too serious. It's a drag. You never take me out anymore.

    Husband: Er ... hello? We're facing possible starvation this year?

    Wife: Always with the business. What about my needs?

    That could put some serious friction into the machine. Enough to break it if applied to enough gears at once.

    And yes, I'm aware of the chauvinism of the above example.
    _____________________

    Notes:

    Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005.​
     
  17. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    23,053
    Oh, okay. I think that narrative made it seem much more pitiful than necessary! But, Tiassa, it's not too far from the actual truth of the way it is today ...the man lusting after the woman who has "touched his soul". Men in that state are, truly, pitiful, don't you think? I mean realistically, not romantically!

    Hmm, no, I don't think so. I think you might be reading too much into all the bullshit and not focusing on the realities of it. I'd suggest that it really is just a simple matter that's been propagandized so that people could talk about in mixed company! And let's not forget that many more women are against prostitution than are the men, so naturally they're going to make it much more taboo than it really is just to make the point.

    I think this, too, is something that you might be reading too much into. For example, it seems to me that he's talking about the TYPE of love ...one type for the mistress, but another type of love for the wife. And that makes sense, don't you think? And especially when men of today even talk about how nice it would be to have a wife in the home, but a mistress/whore in the bedroom ....two distinctly different types of love (whatever the fuck "love" is!?).

    Well, that's all well and good for the men, and men did that very thing for centuries. But the male ego would NOT allow the wife to do that ....never in 400 million years!! And thus we have the thing that's at issue in marriage from the time men were stupid enough to give women equal rights and the vote!

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    But, Tiassa, I think one of the biggest problems in marriage today is something that I read a long time ago that made soooo much sense to me. In any relationship between two or more people, there must always be one partner who is the dominant one ...the boss.

    In most marriages, the ideal of equal partnership is probably the cause of more conflict than anything else. It just can't work that way ...humans just aren't like that, regardless of what they say about equality and all that bullshit. Equality leads to little more than constant bickering, arguing, conflict and war.

    I don't know, but I've probably idealized marriage to the point that I'll never get married, ever, never, as long as the sun shines and I can breathe. Marriage makes virtually no sense to me ....for sex, or companionship, or friendship or fatherhood or anything else. No sense .....OTHER than as the owner of property, and that makes little sense in my present state of mind. I have a dog who is a much better companion and friend than any women I've ever known!

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    Baron Max
     
  18. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    Tiassa, another thing I just thought of ......

    Women are at their most attractive to the male very early in life ...say, between 16 and 25 or so. After that, her physical attractiveness begins to deteriorate rapidly. So if she is to secure a mate, then she must get him quickly, in her prime, and hold onto him somehow. Marriage was the "hold onto" document that protected her in her ugly, wrinkled, undesirable years. Thus, women were the prime movers in the marriage vows, not the males ....and that might also explain why the females of the past were so eager to overlook their husbands having mistresses or going to prostitutes?

    Baron Max

    PS- yes, I know males get old and wrinkled, too, but it doesn't seem to lessen their attractiveness to the female in the same way or as early in life .....right? No, I don't know why!!

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  19. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Men in general are pitiful. Life is. We must learn to make more of ourselves than we have so far.

    In my corner of the Universe, it would be an interesting moment:

    Tiassa: But Misty said ....

    Mother: Who's Misty?

    Tiassa: Oh, just this hooker I know ....

    Seriously ... it would be a difficult thing to explain in a custody hearing over my daughter, if things ever came to that, were I to have a number of friends who were whores. As to my mother's reaction ... well, that would be rather interesting.

    The context of "love" is an interesting proposition, and an important one. But what we might be able to agree upon about love is foreign to the consideration of the impurity of loving a wife as a mistress. The wife is utility, the mistress is fancy. Fanciful things, in such a context, are often irresponsible. To feel such devotion and passion as we might recognize in modern love was considered irresponsible, even idolatrous. Whatever differences we might discover, Baron, 'twixt your perspective of love and mine, most, if not all of the common points would fall into the realm of irresponsibility by older doctrines.

    Reading Coontz has me in a frame of mind that would say you're being too simplistic about it. But I'm not sure where to begin; it strikes me that there's a lot about your position that is more subtle than it seems to me. I don't know what those things are, though. It is true that the periods when female adultery was accepted were sporadic and short, but "the thing that's at issue in marriage from the time men were stupid enough to give women equal rights and the vote" sounds considerably shortsighted. Part of the problem I'm having being more specific is that the other night I sat down to take some notes from the book for future record. I figured they'd be good to have on hand to consider in future writings here or, maybe, elsewhere. (Yeah, yeah ... where's the book? I ask myself that question all the time to the point that the question is an obstacle of its own.) Unfortunately, I'm up to about eight pages of citations, and I'm wondering what the hell to do with it. Make the type smaller, I guess, so it's only six. Anyway, the .pdf runs eight pages right now, and can probably stand for smaller text, but it's a fair amount of text. There's more than I could use in any one post. But the problems began long before equal rights and woman suffrage become valid factors.

    But the criteria upon which that one is selected, as well as the terms of the dominant's authority, has long been subject to scrutiny. Rarely has it produced much deviation from the standard of male dominance. There are exceptions, to be sure. But ... anyway, I'm taking a position before I know what it relates to. For instance:

    Inequality leads to suffering, though. And that seems to be a vital question. I'm having some difficulty formulating my specific objection here, in large part because I'm wondering what snagging points you see that I either don't or else don't see as large issues.

    Actually, a private joke among some close friends and I, and one I treat delicately because I have a wonderful daughter, is that occasionally in discussing the issues with others, I've been backed into a corner regarding her mother, and all I can say is, "Hey, at least I wasn't stupid enough to marry her." For some reason, that point seems to resonate. And to be honest, we were an awful match in that context; that we lasted long enough together to breed is ... interesting, to say the least. But I don't get what, short of legal status and a licensed and sworn obligation that should be inherent, and not obliged to someone, which is therefore a headache, does marriage actually get people? I don't see it in my corner of the Universe. So it's not just that we were a bad match that we shouldn't be married.

    Likewise, there is a question about gay marriage; it makes logical sense, but has no living feel to me: Why? Unlike the objectors, I wonder why gays would want to marry because I wonder why anybody wants to marry. The whole concept of marriage is so discordant to my perception and understanding that whatever else about the woman, I still wouldn't have married her because I simply don't get marriage and what it's all about. One of my frustrations with conservatives on the concept of gay marriage is that I don't see why it's an issue worth fighting. Marriage is such a bizarre, artificial process in my understanding that I don't see what the big deal is.

    Why? Why does anyone, aside from a myth, aspire to marriage?

    Dangerous. But the issue of attraction is a relatively recent concern in understanding the history and traditions of the marriage concept. And the idea of a "hold onto" document ... people found myriad justifications for marriage and even more for divorce. And, traditionally, males ....

    Well, here's one from Coontz:

    In France, a 1556 edict required parental consent for men up to the age of thirty and for women until age twenty-five. A later law in France provided that a couple of any age who married without parental consent could be banished or imprisoned.

    These rulings could be catastrophic for women and children. Elizabeth Pallier and Pierre Houlbronne, for example, had lived together for eight years, had children together, and eventually, though belatedly, were married in church. According to traditional canon law, this was a perfectly valid marriage. But when Pierre got a job at the Palais de Justice, a post that suddenly made him a very desirable marriage partner, his parents petitioned to have the marriage declared invalid because he had not received their consent. In 1587 the court upheld the parents. After eight years with Pierre, Elizabeth instantly became an unwed mother. Her children were suddenly illegitimate, with no claim on their father's property. Pierre, on the other hand, was free to contract a more advantageous marital alliance. (137)

    And to think this is a refined consideration of marriage, distilled through the unique filters of Western customs and traditions. The sad tale of Elizabeth Pallier is hardly unique, but history has enough examples of absurdity that it comes to seem like a bad joke:

    There was a remarkable continuity in the legal subjugation of women from the Middle Ages until the end of the nineteenth century. In the thirteenth century the English jurist Henry de Bracton declared that a married couple is one person, and that person is the husband. When Lord William Blackstone codified English common law in 1765, he reaffirmed this principle. Upon marriage, he explained, "the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended." Blackstone noted that "a man cannot grant anything to his wife, or enter into any covenant with her, for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence." This doctrine of coverture, in which the legal identity of a wife was subsumed ("covered") by that of her husband, was passed on to the colonies and became the basis of American law for the next 150 years. (186)

    And it goes on, and on. Human society, for the most part, has evolved around screwing women in one way or another. The idea that a woman had any sort of guarantee or decent security doesn't seem to hold up. Women, through most of history, have been absolutely vital to the equation: in the hunter-gatherer form, women's gathering usually provided the bulk of the available food for a group; in the farming society, the basic industries of community life were impossible without the women. The pattern suggests that men continue to seek to reduce women in society, perhaps in order to justify their own existence, much less dominance. The idea of attraction comes more with the age of romantic marriage, a very recent conceptual evolution, from the mid-eighteenth century, or so, until the 1950s, a period called "the long decade", between 1947 and 1962 or thereabout in the United States, during which marriage crystallized into an almost caricaturized idyll best-defined by images like Ozzie & Harriet, or Leave it to Beaver.

    I like to show my students an hourlong film put out by General Electric in 1956. In this long advertisement for electricity, mom discovers that her new clothes dryer gives her the chance to bond with her daughter and pick up some of the "groovy" slang of the expanding teen pop culture. Mom then shows her daughter how to use the family's new freezer and self-timing oven to make a meal that will impress the cute roommate her older son has brought home from college. The visitor likes his oven-baked ham, frozen orange juice, and electrically whipped dessert so much that he skips the dreary lecture he'd planned to attend and takes the ecstatic daughter dancing. All this was achieved by living better electrically.

    My students are incredulous that people would actually sit and watch this corny stuff for a whole hour. But one day the grandmother of one student was visiting class when we watched the GE film, and shementioned having seen it in the 1950s. To her, it had been not a cliche but a revelation. (231)

    Before the age of romantic marriage, attraction was for the mistresses. It just taxes a married couple's responsibilities either to the community or to God for the husband and wife to be passionately devoted to one another. That is a very traditional value in marriage that still exists in muted echo as politics leads people to reconsider marriage in the early twenty-first century.

    Anyway, before I get all carried away ....
    _____________________

    Notes:

    Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: from Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005.​
     
  20. Athelwulf Rest in peace Kurt... Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,060
    I don't see how same-sex marriage necessarily ignores the last item you listed. I don't know about you, but whether I was gay or straight, I wouldn't want my partner to be taken away from me.

    The general idea of what a marriage is changes with society. What marriage used to be about isn't necessarily what it is now about. Many people today don't marry just for politics, or just for whatever other stale ideas there are. It's very common today for people to want to marry someone because they love them, even if they're straight.

    Why actively preserve a now stale idea of marriage instead of let people have the kind of marriage they want to have? After all, whose marriage is it?
     

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