AlwaysArousedGirl has a nice catch related to the real interest ‘wingers have in keeping marriage heterosexual. This time it’s Sam Schulman writing in the Christian Science Monitor, even though he’s more often found in rabidly conservative and neocon rags like The Weekly Standard, the Wall St. Journal, Commentary, and Orthodoxy Today.

Marriage is not about couples or lovers – it’s about the physical and moral integrity of women. When a woman’s sexuality is involved, human communities must deal with a malign force that an individual woman and her family cannot control or protect.

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Marriage is a necessary defense of a woman’s sexuality and her human liberty from determined assault by men who would turn her into a slave, a concubine – something less than fully human. Human communities need to give women some additional degree of protection – through law, custom, religious decree, or sacrament…

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Modern marriage is only the least worst version of marriage that has emerged from all this – but it is still necessary for women. What protects women, ultimately, is that marriage laws and customs confer upon her independence something extra – dignity, protection, sacredness – that others must respect.

Read the quote in context here.

This guy Schulman is a real piece of work when it comes to understanding the dominant paradigm’s insistence on the bogus Two Rules of Desire and the whole general ideology of women as the “no-sex” class.

Writing more confidently in Orthodoxy Today, for a readership he knows to be more conservative than the relatively liberal Christian Science Monitor he wrote

...marriage benefits women, again not just in law but essentially. A woman can control who is the father of her children only insofar as there is a civil and private order that protects her from rape; marriage is the bulwark of that order. The 1960’s feminists had the right idea: the essential thing for a woman is to control her own body. But they were wrong that this is what abortion is for; it is, rather, what marriage is for. It is humanity’s way of enabling a woman to control her own body and to know (if she cares to) who is the father of her children.

Yes, marriage tends to regulate or channel the sexual appetite of men, and this is undoubtedly a good thing for women. But it is not the ultimate good. A husband, no matter how unfaithful, cannot introduce a child who is not his wife’s own into a marriage without her knowledge; she alone has the power to do such a thing. For a woman, the fundamental advantage of marriage is thus not to regulate her husband but to empower herself—to regulate who has access to her person, and to marshal the resources of her husband and of the wider community to help her raise her child­ren.

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Every human relationship can be described as an enslavement, but for women the alternative to marriage is a much worse enslavement — which is why marriage, for women, is often associated as much with sexual freedom as with sexual constraint. In the traditional Roman Catholic cultures of the Mediterranean and South America, where virginity is fiercely protected and adolescent girls are hardly permitted to “date,” marriage gives a woman the double luxury of controlling her sexuality and, if she wishes, extending it.

He said it here.

It gets worse, by the way. You know how everyone goes around saying it’s radical feminists who think all heterosexual sex is rape? Check out Schulman (who incorrectly identifies the very conservative feminist Catharine Mackinnon as a radical feminist.)

Radical feminists were right, to an extent, in insisting that men’s and women’s sexuality is so different as to be inimical. Catharine MacKinnon has proclaimed that in a “patriarchal” society, all sexual intercourse is rape. Repellent as her view is, it is formed around a kernel of truth. There is something inherently violative about sexual intercourse—and there is something dangerous about being a woman in a sexual relationship with a man to whom she is not yet married. Among the now-aging feminists of my generation, no less than among their mothers, such a woman is commonly thought to be a victim.

Marriage is a sign that the ever-so-slight violation that is involved in a heterosexual relationship has been sanctioned by some recognized authority.

Call me a radical here but I’m… pretty sure marriage is not MacKinnon’s preferred solution to the problem of heterosexuality-as-rape (to the limited extent even she sees it that way.) I’m even more sure her solution does not include further extending “fiercely protecting” women’s virginity and “hardly permit[ting] them to ‘date.’”

In fact, call me a real radical here but I’m… pretty certain that no matter how conservative, and no matter how genuinely leery of sex she might be, and even no matter how superficially similar the outlines of her strategies might be to Schulman’s and those of his ilk, MacKinnon’s solution is precisely antithetical to his: the way to give women agency, sexual and otherwise, is to give them agency, not to immure them in deep and often outright murderous traditions that are merely less worse than enslavement… not to construct them into traps that are at best “ever-so-slight violations” of their autonomy, their integrity, and their right to be independent human beings who’s decisions are to be respected.

And finally, what exactly do Schulman and his kind think of men that they imagine this enslavement of women to be better, safer, more dignified, more sacred at the hands of tradition than at the “mercy” of the monsters they imagine men to be? Sweet Mother of Pearl! And these are the folks who imagine that feminists hate men!

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The remaining points against Schulman have been better expressed by others but they bear repeating

• The most dangerous place for a woman is in her home.
• Women are most likely to be assaulted, battered, or murdered in their homes.

• Women are most likely to be assaulted, battered, or murdered by a husband, domestic partner, or male family member.

and finally

• If the goal of traditional marriage really was the protection of women from men rather than the protection of their property value* as exchanged between men then, as AAG so nicely puts it, women would be far better off marrying 80-pound Rotweiler/pit-bull-mix attack dogs. Or as one of her commenters put it, they could marry their cans of pepper spray. Or as Holly Pervocracy would probably say, a handgun. (Although as Holly also points out, one rarely has one’s handgun, well, handy when you tend to need them most: when around male friends, dates, and partners. Just sayin’)

But of course the traditional institutions of marriage were never meant for the protection of women. And the extent it ever was necessary, the advent of classical-liberal conservative institutions as manifested in the notions of, say, rule of law founded on principles of individual rights held self-evident in our and other constitutions has made it less so.

Sheesh! Where do they get these guys? Who’d want to marry one of them?

Oh, right. And at the end of the day, of course, Schulman says (after claiming, naturally, that some of his best friends are gay) marriage must remain forbidden to same-sex couples because if you let just anybody get married then the special role marriage carves out for women might be lost.

He says it as if that were a bad thing.

* As in “thou shall not covet thy neighbors wife, nor his house, nor his cattle, nor his man servant nor maid servant, nor anything else that is thy neighbor’s.”

Someone named Jay, guest blogging at Feministe talks about little boys…

Saw a new patient yesterday who apologized for bringing her three-year-old son to the appointment with her. He did pretty well; she brought a bunch of toys and a coloring book and a box of snacks, and she told him in advance that he could have the snacks when I came in the room, so he settled down with his crackers while we talked.  It’s never a surprise to me when kids start to wiggle or wander around during Mom’s exam. It’s hard to sit still when you’re three.  But it does still surprise me when mothers – whether they’re patients or friends – say the kind of thing this woman said to me:

I’m really sorry about him {child is doing nothing unusual, just climbing on and off the chair} My older one, she’s six, and she’s an angel. But he’s all boy.

Meaning what, exactly? That boys are devils? That being active is somehow evil behavior? I know, I know, she probably didn’t mean that he was evil, but he was sitting right there, listening to this. I have enough trouble with the idea that kids are “good” or “bad” – we don’t use that language with our daughter. Kids are concrete, and they’ll take what they hear very seriously. [Emphasis in bold is mine —fl] But beyond that is this idea of being “such a boy”.

She said it here.

Yeah, and people say it’s “Teh Feminists” that go in for male bashing. Fshyeeah right.

When the ultrasound for our first child came back boy-positive we were a little stunned, since, for some reason, my partner and I both had had vague mental images of having girls. Reaction to the news in our mostly-conservative neighborhood, and even among our more progressive and mostly-childless friends was even more one-sided: “oh poor you.”

That the situation was to be exacerbated by him being a Scorpio boy highlights the deep experiential degree of empirical rationality behind either the boy-problem or the birthday one.)

In fact he came out just fine. Fine enough, in fact, that when we got the ultrasound back on our second child and discovered the next one was going to be a girl we were… once again a bit stunned! And in fact she came out just fine as well. Far more brash and boisterous, and severely less cautious or bookish than her older brother but a natural gymnast, awesomely strong for a child her age, and a natural, scary-smart aptitude for math. In other words, all in all both our children are well within the parameters for normal, healthy, happy, active human children. Stereotyped expectations to the contrary not withstanding.

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Jay also happens to nicely answer the allegedly imponderable question: is it possible for individual or social sexism to oppress men or boys.

My patient thinks she’s struggling with her son because “he’s all boy”. I think she’s struggling because she’s hundreds of miles away from her family and friends with essentially no support, and every message she hears is that her kids have to start NOW, at age 3 and 6, to prepare for competition in the big bad capitalistic world where they will have to make their way alone, just like she and her husband are making their way alone. They need health insurance and housing and money to put the kids through college, and no job is secure, so he works all the time, and because he works all the time, she has to manage all the kid stuff and house stuff herself. So a kid who sits and plays alone is a lot easier than a kid who really wants to get up to the top of the china cabinet and see if he can fly.

I wish she had a real community, a society that supported her family and bridged the isolation. I wish we as a country valued something other than material achievement. Maybe then she could expand her vision of what kids are and enjoy her smart, active, questioning son, and come to see him as an individual who is all himself, and not just all boy. [Emphasis in bold is again mine. —fl]

In other words, yes. And who exactly is oppressing boys and men with these narratives of defectiveness, hyper-activity, indiscipline, immaturity, and so on? Would that be feminists like Jay or her feminist colleagues at Feministe?

Trick question: No.

Instead it’s the same anti-feminists who claim feminists hate men.

Note: Jay, a primary-care physician, usually blogs at Two Women Blogging.