Why Jesse’s Gender Matters in the Marriage Debate
By Haley Swenson - Jul 25th, 2008 at 11:55 amI’ve been following the blogosphere dialogue surrounding Courtney Martin’s recent Prospect article pretty closely, because I think the way we view marriage is at a major, fascinating turning point. And as a feminist who loves male contribution to feminist dialogue, even when it’s dissenting, I wanted to respond to Jesse’s most recent post in which he asks whether he can disagree with a feminist without being labeled sexist.
Of course, the answer is a resounding yes: Men can disagree with feminists and still be feminists and feminist allies, just as women do with each other every day. While I’ll start by saying I completely disagree with Marcotte’s conclusion that Jesse was trying to bully Martin into marriage or taking an inappropriate level of interest in her marital decisions (I’m pretty sure he was just calling her arguments against marriage weak), I do think his gender is relevant in critiquing his argument.
Jesse’s gender is relevant to this discussion not because of his penis, as he suggests, but because of his life experience as a dude.
The heart of Jesse’s criticism of Martin’s argument seems to be that he can’t imagine why the simple legal status of being a man’s wife would threaten a woman’s sense of equal standing in any progressive relationship.
Well, whether he can imagine it or not, there are a lot of entirely rational women who seem to fear whether they are capable of this very resistance to the historical sexism of an institution. The truth is, most men will never experience the same social or even self-inflicted pressures to be a certain person once they have that ring on their finger. It’s incredibly difficult for women to single-handedly redefine what being a wife is or what being married means, even in their own minds, because the traditional, sexist definitions are so deeply ingrained not only in society but in our very psyches.
For Martin, Marcotte and many strong, smart, rational women I know, avoiding marriage altogether is the best way they know to ensure their relationships don’t fall into traditional roles that would be damaging to their personhood. This is a point Marcotte makes quite clearly and quite well herself.
It’s not as if we aren’t putting thought into this and we’re making knee-jerk reactions to a historical institution. Please give us more credit than that. Marriage does make us nervous, and it’s because we aren’t all super-hero feminists who are completely above the influence of our sexist cultures and histories. We realize that, and sometimes we have to make decisions that make it easiest to define ourselves and our relationships in the way we want to define them. I think it takes a concerted effort for anyone but feminist women to understand how difficult it is to actually live and hold themselves to their feminist ideals while living as women.
I don’t think Jesse’s disagreement with Martin makes him sexist, but it does indicate he and other progressive men could be doing us all a favor by questioning how their experiences of privilege might affect their perceptions of the strengths or weaknesses of women’s arguments before declaring them irrational.
Since Jesse is from Mass. and gay marriage is legal in that state, we are going to get married but not tell anyone when it happens. Who know…maybe it already has…
July 25th, 2008 at 12:32 pmBravo, Haley. Great post.
July 25th, 2008 at 12:45 pmagreed. our greatest biases are those which we are unaware of.
July 25th, 2008 at 12:55 pmThis is something that I think a lot of progressive men don’t always get when they try to argue with feminists about feminist issues. It’s not that we don’t value the argument they’re presenting, but we definitely can see the privilege they experience. Identity politics is tricky stuff, and thanks, Haley for expressing that.
July 25th, 2008 at 2:55 pmVery well said, Haley.
July 25th, 2008 at 4:19 pmAs a woman happily unmarried to the same man for 18 years marriage is something that I would never consider. My first objection is the participation in a ceremony that is filled with sexist and demeaning practices…from the white dress to the giving away of the bride the whole ceremony is problematic. The idea of needing the state or a religion to validate a relationship is counter to the idea of agency in womens decision making process. Finally anything know historically as an institution has been oppressive to women. My personhood is to precious to me to submit myself to something like that.
July 27th, 2008 at 2:42 pmHe also neglects to recognize that marriage is not merely a social status, but a legal one as well. Marriage as a legal civic status cannot be simply “rewritten” in individual situations.
And I very much agree with Kay:
July 27th, 2008 at 6:27 pm“This is something that I think a lot of progressive men don’t always get when they try to argue with feminists about feminist issues. It’s not that we don’t value the argument they’re presenting, but we definitely can see the privilege they experience.”
Gender and personal identity are never relevant for critiquing an argument. Ever. That’s one of the primary rules of argument. Considering them relevent is an ad hominem fallacy.
July 28th, 2008 at 12:24 pm[...] recent marriage debate (see Martin, Singal, Matthews, and Marcotte, phew) last week with a post on how much gender plays a role in a person’s acceptance of critiques of marriage as weak or [...]
July 29th, 2008 at 12:56 am