Baron Max said:
Men in that state are, truly, pitiful, don't you think? I mean realistically, not romantically!
Men in general are pitiful. Life is. We must learn to make more of ourselves than we have so far.
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.
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.
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!?).
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.
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!
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, 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.
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:
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.
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.
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!
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?
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?
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 ....
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Notes:
Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: from Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005.