Marriage
and the Two Religions
12/19/06
I
had afternoon classes this semester, so I was still
at home late enough in the morning to watch those
shows — you know the kind I mean.
They
come on after the morning news, but before the soap operas and
sassy-judge programs
and, while they are not news
exactly,
they still concern themselves with commentary about what’s
going on in society to an extent that
occasionally warrants a response.
And
two of
the “stories” I saw on them this past week
didn’t sit right with me. One
was about “the changing
face of
menopause” or
something, and the other was a
series of riffs on some new
statistic revealing that single women now outnumber married women in America. The
fact that both
“stories” were about women
isn’t the problem — logically, half of all stories
that are about someone
should be about women,
and besides, statistically,
more women than men are watching TV at that hour, and you have to know
who your
audience is. It was
the way
that they were “about
women” — the fact
that they both led up to the inevitable “so
take that, men!” — that intrigued me.
So,
as
instructed, I
“took”
it — took it, and 1585ed it.
Does
every
“story” — or, for that matter, movie or
commercial — about women have to end with a
“so
take that, men”
in order to
“count” as being about
women? I've certainly
never told any women that they had to be ashamed of
discussing
menopause, or that they were under some kind of imperative to get
married — so
why does the fact that society is coming around on these matters need
to be
constructed as some kind of rebuke to me? After all, the idea
that gender is a zero-sum game — that anything that's good for women
has to be bad for men, and vice-versa — is a big part of the problem.
On
the
other hand, though, someone
must have been
telling
women these things. It
is
the case that, until very
recently,
women did
feel as if they had to be
ashamed of discussing woman-specific medical issues, and as if they
were
worthless if they couldn’t land a husband by “a
certain age.” So
if men weren’t necessarily telling them this, who
was?
Let’s
think
here… it was… oh, yeah: Religion.
So
here we
go again. I swear
to you that I genuinely wanted
to post an essay this week that had absolutely nothing
to do with the fucked-up relationship between religion and feminism —
we really did. But
then I woke
up this morning and the fucked-up relationship between religion and
feminism
was still here. When
something is
finally something else’s fault, I promise I’ll
say so.
Now,
you two play nice...
At
this
point, many Academic-Feminist readers are probably ready to accuse me
of
clouding the issue. You say that these
things were actually the
fault
of religion and not
men, they
might object, but
what’s
the difference?
Religions
were invented
by men and enforced
by men
to make all the
stuff happen that men wanted to happen, so it’s immaterial
which one of them we
blame something on.
That’s
a good
point, and it provides a good starting place, but it’s not
the end of the
discussion by a long shot.
For
one
thing, regardless of whether religions got started
by men,
it’s still in
recent times
been just as much the fault of women
that religion continued
to
exist — especially with regard to stupid societal-propriety
shit like in these
two stories.
It’s
not your religious uncle
who slaps
your face when you bring
up some sex thing — it’s your religious aunt.
It’s
not your father
who won’t stop bugging you about when you’re going
to get
married — it’s your mother.
The
feminist response to the above examples would be to say that the women
in them
have been brainwashed. Well, yes,
exactly. That’s my position too. But
they've been brainwashed by religion,
not men — this
is my position
because,
clearly, the brainwashing was conducted by religious
women at least
as much as
it was
conducted by religious
men, and way more
than it was conducted by non-religious
men. Sometimes, it
seems as
if feminism is really
just a struggle
against religion
that
cannot bear to acknowledge
itself
as
a struggle against religion and, as a result of this, has had to turn
itself into
a religion — in
the sense that its
repeated assertions that all the problems caused by religion
are actually just caused by men
can
only possibly be defended by faith.
Ask
yourself the following question: since, in
real life,
women want
to get married and men don’t,
how come less
marriage is being
celebrated as a victory
for women? Your
response might be that it is false
to say
that
women want to get married and men don’t.
Okay,
fine. But false
how? It’s also
false
to say that all
men are taller than all
women, but the statement
“men
are taller than women”
is still generally a true
statement, because
if you have a
hundred men and a hundred women in a room, the average height of the
men will
always be taller than the average height of the women.
Whatever the reason, the vast
majority of women
want
to get married way
more than do the vast majority
of men, so
bringing up
examples of your friend so-and-so who doesn’t
want to get married even though she’s a woman and your friend
so-and-so who wants to get
married even though
he’s a man is pointless. It
only serves
to draw attention away
from the
issue, when the issue is clearly still there.
Just
as in
religion, the first response is always to deny the very existence of
the issue. This is
possible because there’s a
compartmentalization of the brain at work, same as in
religion — just as many
religious people genuinely believe in Creation when they’re
in church, but
realize it’s a load of crap when they’re not in
church, many women genuinely
believe that they don’t want to get married when
they’re in Gender-Studies class,
and then, once they leave the classroom, their lives go right back to
revolving
around wanting to get married.
Okay,
fine, that last statement
was unfair. But to the extent that it is
fair, here's how women can change it: Stop indulging your
friends
when they act like it's the biggest deal in the world that they're
getting married. Seriously. When your friend tells
you
she's getting married, just say “Hey, wow, that's great,
congratulations,” but don't
scream and cry and jump around. If she asks
you to scream and cry and jump around, punch her in the arm or give her
a wedgie or something.
If she expects you to spend all your time over the next
several months doing shit for her so that everything will be perfect,
punch her in the arm or give her a wedgie or something. If
she tries to make you wear some
ugly
dress in order to ensure that none of her friends looks better than she
does on her special day, punch her in the arm or give her a wedgie or
something.
Honestly.
That's what guys
do when our
friends step over the line, and trust me, it makes things run a lot
more smoothly.
An
academic “-ism” is supposed to
be a methodology of examining the world that continually redefines
itself in
the face of new evidence, like a legitimate science.
There
is no existentialist
party line, and no utilitarian
party line. But
if you were in a Gender-Studies class and asked “If a decline
in marriages is
really a victory for Feminism, then how come virtually all women in
real life
want to get married?”, and persisted past the first-response
denial-of-the-issue, you would get the second response of
“they’ve
been brainwashed.”
But — once
again — brainwashed by whom? Men? But
men don’t
want to get married! Why
the hell would we
brainwash women
into forcing us
to do something that we
don’t want to do?
And
if you
asked that
question in a
Gender-Studies class, you’d probably just get thrown out, the
same way you’d
get thrown out of a church if you stood up and asked “When
you guys say you don’t
believe in
evolution, does that mean you
don’t even believe dogs evolved from wolves, because, you
know, we made that
happen ourselves, during recorded history?”
I'm
not
anti-feminist — I just believe that smart women and smart men need to
join
together against the common enemy of religion, but that Academic
Feminism is
keeping this from happening by taking the focus off of the real enemy. Most
college Feminists
spend more time being
pissed at science
than they do
being
pissed at religion — apparently,
just because it makes for more fun. Since
there are usually no religious fundamentalists to be found at a decent
college,
acknowledging the problem for what it is would leave them no-one to
yell
at. But there are
guys around who like science,
so the college feminists yell at them,
because it’s better than not being able to yell at anyone. But feminism needs
to realize that the enemy of its enemy is its friend.
Religion
is its enemy, and science is the
enemy of religion, which makes science the friend of feminism. Even
if science believes
that, on average,
girls will probably be a little bit worse than boys at Tetris,
this is negligible compared to what religion has to say
about you.
The
brave
and well-intentioned Academic Feminists of an earlier generation who
got the
ball rolling have now lost control of the ball and don’t even
realize it. In the
minds of today’s teenage women, feminist-inspired liberal
arguments have melded with religion-inspired
conservative ones into a contradictory nexus that would have seemed
inconceivable to the college feminists of the early ’90s. The
statement “models
are too thin and cause eating disorders, and that’s
why
premarital sex is wrong”
would be senseless
to a college woman in 1992, but it is par for the course in 2007. If
you don’t
believe me, ask a woman who’s currently
attending a politically
middle-of-the-road college. The
conversation may surprise you.
On
that
note, let’s back up into some more logic, aimed at the
original statistic,
which said that single women now outnumber married women. Since
that means that
fewer women are
choosing to get married, or are getting married later,
or not staying married as long, doesn’t that also
mean
that fewer men
are getting married,
or are getting
married later, or not staying married as long, and that single men
will soon also
outnumber married men,
if they don’t already? If
one thing is true, then
the other thing
has to be true, right?
So
why was this
presented as if something is only
changing relative to women? Isn’t
society’s repeal of compulsory marriage
a victory for all independent-minded people? Of
course, if you
presented it as such, then
you’d have to do the other
half of
the story. Can you
imagine? “And
now, Part Two of our story, wherein we examine men’s
reactions to the news that
men are getting married less…”
Cut
to some footage of single guys pouring champagne on a stripper,
screaming “Yeah! Woo-hoo!
No
marriage!” Doesn’t
exactly make for highly-rated daytime
TV, does it?
Only presenting half the story means
you don't have to offend potential viewers by exposing what the
statistic really means: if all you say is that women are getting
married less, you can frame it as a rebuke to sexism, and 100% of the
daytime viewing audience is pleased. If you go the whole nine
yards and explain that people
are getting married less, then it's no longer a “you go girl” story,
but instead a “decline of religion” story — and since women who don't
work and are home in the daytime to watch these shows are more likely
to be religious, far less than 100% of the audience is pleased.
Remember
what I said earlier about compartmentalization of the brain? The
fact that the story
was presented as if
what was obviously only half
the
story were in fact the whole
story — even though this can’t logically be
true — allows for the mind of the
viewer to do what it wants to do without
having to do what it doesn’t
want to
do. The viewer can
imagine strong single
women focusing on their careers or whatever without
having to picture wasted single guys partying.
If
both halves of the story are presented, the
compartmentalization is
destroyed, the doublethink exposed as doublethink, and the viewer would
have to
confront the fact that she wants
to
get married and doesn’t
want to get
married at the
same time.
Am I saying
women have to get
married? No. I’m
not saying
that anyone
has to get
married — women or
men. Focusing on
your career instead of
getting married is okay, and
so is
going to strip clubs instead of getting married.
Any
other position constitutes a religion
and is bullshit.
Let’s
go through that one more
time. Imagine that
you yourself are
watching the “story” over your morning coffee, and
trying to figure out how you
should react.
The
conservative reaction is “Boo! Everyone
has to get married!”
The
liberal reaction is “Yay! Women
don’t have to get married!”
The
1585
reaction is “Well,
we’re
all for people not getting
married, but why the fuck are they presenting this as if it’s
just about women?
Oh,
right — because presenting it as just “marriage vs.
not” would make it clear that
this is actually a religion
vs. humanism thing,
which would mean the
audience would have to think deeply about important issues instead of
giggle
childishly at light infotainment, and this audience would almost certainly change the
channel
rather than do that, so clearly the only solution is to spin it as yet
more
“battle of the sexes” crap, even though in the long
run this just makes
everything worse because it confuses people about what the real
struggle
is. Fuck the world.” Clear?
Good.
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