Fresh Air–Some thoughts on Marriage.

I received the following today as a e-mail and received permission to publish it here on QWB. The young person wishes at this time to remain anonymous which we respect. Some of the ideas expressed I haven’t thought of for years and other ideas I hadn’t thought of at all. I want to say thank you for sending this in, thanks for trusting me with the article, thanks for allowing us to publish it and thanks for sending in some fresh air to the debate. rn

Some Thoughts On Marriage

* I wanted to talk to you about marriage and some things that I haven’t really heard anyone say about it yet. We’ve talked about some practical critiques as well as some ideological ones, but my beef with marriage is its colonization of desire and the stigmatization it imposes on other people who feel the same way. This is not a good thing for kinky people, perverts and sluts such as myself-we talk about the dangers of assimilation but tend to stay away from this particular danger because we’ve already let liberal and conservative forces arrange the trajectory of this discourse-also a lot of us are accustomed to monogamous or monogamous-modeled relationships-if not we think we are are supposed to want one or that having one might solve our personal problems.

What do you do if you are not concerned with finding your one true love and are not privileged enough to escape the scrutiny of peers, family AND the government? What if you believe that limiting yourself to one partner limits your life experiences and the people out in the streets on Saturday want to keep you silent so as not to “give the right more ammunition?” These are your own people doing what the mainstream culture does-shaming you for wishing to color outside of the line, the one positive that comes from being a marginalized person with no place set for you at the table. Part of the Right’s attack on L & G partnerships is an all out assault on queer relationships of all sorts, particularly those already recognized as common law/cohabitation and domestic partnerships. At the hear-a motivation so obviously cruel it goes unstated-the lack of support for living wages, women’s pay equity and universal health care (Things we should be marching for) is about forcing people into patterns of dependency that help perpetuate the reproduction of the nuclear family. That compartmentalization of Western Society into those impotent units of dysfunction know as the nuclear family makes for a totally compliant bunh of unhappy and frustrated people who are incapable of blaming anyone but themselves for their life troubles and that only makes for a more manageable population.  To ensure that this dependency serves the guardians of society in the manner they intend it to, anyone who does not utilize the strictly regulated conduit of heterosexual reproduction-oriented marriage in order to consolidate resources will be penalized. So why aren’t we talking about new ways of contracting and conducting resource sharing and consolidation that don’t produce privation or penetrate the personal sphere of sexuality, romance, and lust. We know how dangerous it is to have the government involved in our sex lives already: we may as well be asking the Supreme Court to reinstate anti-sodomy laws.

And who are we keeping company with this push for marriage and the emulation of the nuclear family? Naivest-minded people who view accelerated reproduction of Aryan phenotypic children as the path to the reemergence of th West as a dominant world power ( I read an interesting Nation article about this type of reproduction being monetarily rewarded in Italy to offset the growing Muslim population there. Funds that were “mistakenly” awarded to Muslim families were actually retracted.) A societal structure that values the bread-winning male over the domestic female, a conception of gender that leads to the selective abortion and infanticide of ostensible female-bodied babies. This is what the traditional family we want to expand but not CHANGE the definition of is abut-why do we want to join this sick dilapidated carnival instead of hastening its demise? Wouldn’t these very people favor the identification and destruction or segregation of LGBT children before or at birth? That is one of the major pushes for mechanisms that could determine the sexuality of fetuses and infants before they develop sexualities of their own.

Lastly, and this is a particularly big personal issue for me, the limitation of sexual mobility is one of the most effective ways to regulate communication between segregated population groups. Sex is one of the most successful integration tools for races, economic classes, political ideologues and age groups. I have met influenced and been influenced by people through sex that I never would have met otherwise and I’m sure a lot of other sluts would say the say thing. One of the prime motivations for establishment of the modern age of consent in Great Britain was the fear that upper class en were consorting with young working class women. Marriage is a solid and enduring method of segregation-parents choose residential neighborhoods, schools, extracurricular activities  and when possible, professions in order to ensure that their children only meet the right people for prospective mates. By embracing marriage we are also embracing a fundamental segregation tool.

I have so many more thoughts on marriage, but these are some of the more salient ones. I just think it is crazy to be calling ourselves radical yet lining up to support something like this. You know, there is one more thought. As internationalists we must recognize that in most parts f the world marriage is directly used as a tool of repression for queer people, women and children. We can’t pretend that it hasn’t changed elsewhere, and if we believe in prefigurative politics, we can’t expect that by virtue of embracing marriage that we will ever fundamentally change what it is really about.

What is wrong with us?