Riffing off something I said in this post about cohabitation vs. traditionalist views of marriage , Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon takes it a step further
Cohabitation undermines the “men are from Mars/women are from Venus” ideology. If you’re going to live together without being married, odds are that you have no qualms about fucking without living together. Conservatives are especially invested in the idea that men naturally have no love for women, and that have to be lured into commitment with sex. Cohabitation really blows the doors off that, because it shows that men can actively choose to spend more time with women because they like them, not because they’re being baited with sex, which they could obviously get anyway. That people get married after living together really demonstrates that there’s no truth to the theory that men will not buy the cow if they can get the milk for free. Premarital sex doesn’t really do the same damage to the “men don’t really like women” theory, because as Figleaf said, you can always convince yourself that couples get married because someone got pregnant, or because the man is sick of having to be furtive about getting his sexual needs met.
Of course, once we buy that men can actually like women, then scary new possibilities—-that they could respect them, that women may even be equal—-start to emerge.
...
I’m sure most conservatives see 13 million straight cohabitants and see 13 million female victims, sad sacks who joylessly give up sex in hopes that they’ll get the ring one day, unaware that they will never get it because they keep giving it up. That’s a harder to argument to refute, because you can’t see what’s in people’s hearts, and so it’s easy to say 13 million women want something they can’t have.
What’s harder to say is that 13 million men want something they can have but won’t take, even though it’s easy. This model assumes that men, given a choice between fucking without sharing house and living together, would usually choose the former. But they don’t.
Not much to add to that.
The big hoot, of course, is that “traditionalists” simultaneously argue that if women have the same earnings and accomplishment opportunities as men they won’t want to marry men! That’s the great thing about the no-sex class mentality, I guess: If they can’t pillory you coming they’ve got a way to pillory you going.
Submitted by 3070 (not verified) on Fri, 2009-07-17 11:10.
The idea that every cohabiting couple involves a man who's getting sex "for free" and a woman who's wishing for the ring but won't get it because the sexually satisfied boyfriend won't give such commitment ignores one major thing:
The number of couples who do finally "tie the knot" after cohabiting for X number of years. I've known of cases where couples have cohabitted for 5, 7, 10, or even 15 years and then finally got married. Sometimes the stimulus was a child, but other times they just sort of said "What the heck."
Furthermore, if a couple is "common law" for 25 or 30 years, and stays monogamous, effectively that is a commitment, however unofficial.
Submitted by 3070 (not verified) on Fri, 2009-07-17 20:15.
Hah. My aunt and uncle have been together longer than I've been alive. He proposed a couple of times; she turned him down. Didn't see the point, apparently.