From Human Stupidity, an MRA blog rather obsessed with underage girls and the alleged evil of age of consent laws:
[I]f a 15 year old … can decide to have sex with a 16 year old … [h]ow come she cannot have sex with a 35 year old? Age discrimination by law?
Are you worried about manipulation of the tender 15 year old? I have a solution:
what about legalizing sex with underage adolescents, if they first undergo an hour of mandatory counselling and a 2 day cool off period? That should take care of this issue. This would guarantee safety for the 15 year old against being conned or manipulated. More safety that is offered to 21 year old tipsy Friday night party girls who may feel sorry for what they did yesterday
I think he might actually be serious here. Though it’s pretty clear he’d be happy with any excuse to make it legal for 35 year-old men to have sex with 15 year-old girls.
Brandon: It really isn’t about your wife…but society domesticating you.
No. Just no.
By what mechanism of “marriage” is society able to make men domestic?
Actually, now that we are on that, what makes “Marriage” the magical man-breaking, sex-killing, etc., that merely living with someone doesn’t?
@Pecunium: I never said anyone here said I should get married.
Then why did you bring that into the debate?
Ya, my subjective stance on marriage is wrong…I don’t think so. Some people are pro marriage others aren’t. They both aren’t right or wrong…they just see the institution of marriage differently.
No one here has said jack shit about your subjective views on marriage; we are disputing the fact claims you assert about it. That’s objective.
Are you making the claim that I would look a soldier in the eye and say something like that? There are a bunch of reasons for people joining the Army…I know I enlisted.
I know you enlisted, it’s why I used that analogy.
I don’t think you would say that to a soldier, but you are doing just that to people who get married.
But you don’t see it that way. Why? Because you don’t want to get married and you did want to enlist. That solipsism is a huge part of your problem.
If it’s not about Brandon, it’s not an issue. People who talk about things you think apply to you are being insulting. You talking about things which actually apply to people, not insulting.
I disagree with the whole notion and societal pressure put on men to get married, have kids, tend to the home, be a breadwinner, etc.. As if this is the only route to manhood or being a “Real Man”.
So do I. So do most of the people here (save NWO, Meller, etc.). Which is what you expected. The problem isn’t what you believe, it’s all the shit you say about it. Again, you are looking people who like marriage and saying they are being stupid, even self-destructive. But you think it’s different from telling soldiers they are stupid for joining the Army.
That’s the real problem, and it’s no small part of why people are saying things like, “narccissistic” and “stupid upper class twit”, because you are being one, and acting like the other.
Brandon, it’s not that you and your gf having sex is gross…it’s the fact that you described it as “Ashley takes care of my sexual needs.” For one, like so much of what you’ve said, it sounds a bit one sided and transactional. For two … it sounds one-sided and transactional. You might not mean it that way, but it sure as heck sounds that way.
Personally, I’m against marriage as an institution, but the reasons you’ve advanced for avoiding marriage actually apply more broadly to ANY long-term, committed relationship with kids, a home, etc. Now, you’re certainly free to decide that those aren’t things you ever want in your life. But you’re not against MARRIAGE. You’re against having to think about other people, compromise, and build a life with someone else. Fine and dandy. But just admit that you’d prefer never to be tied down be commitment and responsibility rather than pretending it’s specifically the legal contract of marriage to which you object.
If it’s solely MEN who need to be “tamed” and “domesticated” via the institution of marriage, why in the hell was/is it always WOMEN who were/are subject to purdah, foot-binding, extreme genital mutilation, laws of couverture, etc.? I guess all those things that women were/are subjected to was actually covert methods of breaking and taming men.
@Pecunium: So are you saying that societal pressures can’t actually pressure someone to conform?
Marriage is a paradigm shift from being single or co-habitation. People often have different expectations as to “what marriage actually is”. People can adopt a mindset that since they are now married…they don’t have to work at the relationship anymore. It makes some people lazy and they feel trapped in a relationship that they hate over time.
While I have seen a few happily married couples, most couples just seem to tolerate each other. Also, most of the marriages in my family have dissolved. Out of the nine kids my grandparents had…3 are still married. Out of 9 marriages total. And out of those 3, 1 is on shaky ground.
This reinforces the idea that marriage can breed laziness, contentment, contempt and simply not caring about your partner. It also reinforces the idea that humans may potentially not be geared towards monogamy since men and women roughly cheat at the same rate. So maybe relying on one person for all your emotional, physical and sexual needs is not realistic.
You keep bringing up the “insulting bit” when I have clearly told you that while I might think the idea of marriage is overall a bad decision, people that do get married are not stupid. It is just they have different values, beliefs, priorities and goals.
It’s like the bungee jumping example earlier. I can do my own personal cost/benefit analysis on bungee jumping and come to the conclusion that it is far to dangerous for me to do. Others might come to the conclusion that the “rush” is worth potentially dying. That doesn’t mean I think the person bungee jumping is stupid or a bad person. It means he is willing to take on more risk.
@Comrade Svilova: How can sex be one-sided? It takes two people to participate. Transactional? Isn’t that a good thing. Each person gets what they want.
@Pam: Marriage is the last forty years is a completely different beast compared to the old marriage laws of the past. Women today have property rights, conduct business without male approval, vote, etc… Those concepts didn’t exist in all cultures of the past so it’s like comparing apples to oranges.
Also, you also helped prove my point that marriage is a bad deal. Who the hell would want to subject themselves to foot binding, covering women head to toe or otherwise put stupid rules on women?
But today in most of the world, those problems don’t exist. Women today can look at the negative parts of marriage and decide that it might not be the best thing for them as well.
Also I can’t really speak about the domesticating women part because I am not a woman. That’s like trying to tell black’s I know more about racism than they do. Which I don’t
Brandon: @Pecunium: So are you saying that societal pressures can’t actually pressure someone to conform?
No, though you keep arguing that you are immune to them.
What, I am asking, is the societal pressure which makes an individual relationship, a private individual relationship, something which is wasn’t.
What is it that society does, when one gets married, which is so different than the relationship which existed before the marriage?
I keep mentioning the insults, because you are still insulting people.
Lets try a different example.
“Brandon, I see you aren’t married. Did you know that only idiots don’t get married.”
That’s insulting. No, I didn’t say, “Brandon, you personally are an idiot for not being married,”, what I did was include you in a class which I called idiots.
That means I said, indirectly, you are such an idiot.
Also I can’t really speak about the domesticating women part because I am not a woman. That’s like trying to tell black’s I know more about racism than they do. Which I don’t
The Irony… it burns.
You admit you know nothing of actually being married, but you are willing to lecture everyone else about what being married is, means, and does.
The Australian government over the last few years has changed all the laws that treated married couples different to de facto couples, so now they are treated the same. People still get married.
Brandon, you claim marriage = monogamy, for example, but that is demonstrably false. Non-married couples are often monogamous, and honest poly folk get married. Again, your problem isn’t with signing the form at the court house, but with commitment to a specific life style that doesn’t work for you. But that lifestyle isn’t ‘marriage’ because plenty of married people have a totally different lifestyle, and plenty of non-married folk are living the lifestyle of committed couplehood you so deplore…
I know some people with an open marriage. In today’s uber connected world whatever you are into you can find someone into the same.
Brandon, do you really want freedom and polyamory or just a male centered harem wherein you see other people but the women see only you? Please see my comment directed at you here
http://manboobz.com/2011/09/10/yeah-well-youre-a-big-meanie/comment-page-1/#comment-58996
@Pecunium: No one is immune to societal pressures. However, observant people will start to see when society is trying to pressure them. You can better see those pressures if you are aware of them.
Ya, I am not debating you with the “insulting bits” since we keep going around in circles. I don’t know how many friggin times I have to say there is a distinction between the person and the institution. Obviously, you see that criticizing the institution of marriage is somehow a personal attack on you…which it isn’t.
Irony? Possibly. However, there is enough objective information about marriage for one to come to a conclusion about if they do or don’t wan’t get married. I don’t actually have to get shot with a rifle to know that it would 1) hurt and 2) possibly kill me.
One does not need a direct experience with something to make a judgement on it.
@Magpie: I am not sure if I follow you. Are you saying the Australian government is treating non-married couples or people co-habituating as if they were married or they are treating married couples as if they were co-habituating?
@comrade svilova: At least in the US, the default thinking is marriage = monogamy. Sure, if I look around enough, I can find poly’s, swingers and open marriages. But those types are the minority. Most people when they think of marriage, they see committing to one person and one person only.
Also, my problem is very much the court documents. For one marriage contracts are barely contracts, they are enforced poorly and I have a problem with the state actually being in the marriage “business” to begin with.
@Societal: Yes, there are tons of different lifestyles.
I also answered your comment here:
http://manboobz.com/2011/09/10/yeah-well-youre-a-big-meanie/comment-page-1/#comment-59118
Funny how I criticized the institution of marriage without attacking people. It isn’t your conclusion that is the problem, Brandon, but rather your foolass sexist stereotypes, innaccurate generalizations, and make believe alternate history you use as support for your position.
@darksidecat: Ya…ok…you win.
Brandon: Ya, I am not debating you with the “insulting bits”
1: That’s because you aren’t debating, merely asserting.
Obviously, you see that criticizing the institution of marriage is somehow a personal attack on you…which it isn’t.
2: I am not feeling personally attacked. As I keep saying (and you keep ignoring), I am trying to teach you why you are getting the reactions you get. You are not attacking marriage.
Lots of feminists (myself among them) see some serious problems with marriage. It’s got structural flaws.
You are not addressing those structural flaws. You are making claims about marriage which are either untrue (e.g. it can be replicate by private agreements and contracts; and that this is less work than getting married, or “it’s expensive to enter into; or,”as a man I have a 97 percent change of paying alimony if I get divorced), or are assertions of obvious harms that only morons will undertake.
But you don’t see the parallels between saying, “people who get married are stupid”, and “people who join the army are stupid.”
It’s the latter which offend people (again, for all you think my disagreement is based on feeling offended, it’s not. You don’t know me well enough to offend me, in general, and the things you are saying are so wrong as to be laughable, save that they are insulting to other people, and counterproductive to your understanding of the actual issues)
I’ve seen lots of people sayig stupid shit about the Army (e.g. soldiers give up their rights). Those aren’t attacks on people. Those are accusations of structural flaws in the institution.
That’s not what you are doing. You may think it’s what your doing, but the evidence (all the people who keep telling you that’s not what you’ve done) is against you.
I can speculate as to why you shrug this off, but that would be a very different conversation, and you wouldn’t agree with it either.
@Pecunium:
“You are not addressing those structural flaws. You are making claims about marriage which are either untrue (e.g. it can be replicate by private agreements and contracts; and that this is less work than getting married, or “it’s expensive to enter into; or,”as a man I have a 97 percent change of paying alimony if I get divorced), or are assertions of obvious harms that only morons will undertake.”
Let’s go through them shall we…again:
Replicate benefits through contracts and other legal agreements: This depends on the very subjective nature of what marriage benefits you actually value or that actually apply to you (since some benefits only affect veterans). The point is if you think most benefits of marriage are actually useful then marriage is your best option. However, if there are only a few benefits you value then it would be much easier to replace marriage with a few contracts. If I just want to gift something to someone, I don’t marry them…I just put them in my will.
Expensiveness: I never said that getting married (the actual license) is expensive. I did however say that JUST getting the marriage license is far rarer then getting married, paying for the church, reception party, etc…
I am not talking about the exceptions “you don’t have to have a wedding” but the average “most people that get married also get a wedding”
Alimony Are you trying to say men aren’t the majority of payers when it comes to alimony payments?
While getting better, if alimony is part of the divorce…more than likely the man is paying it. What I find interesting is that men ARE getting awarded alimony more often and the attitudes these women take.
Women collecting alimony from man = I was the housewife and didn’t earn money so I am entitled to alimony payments.
Men collecting alimony from women = he is throwing a tantrum and I am getting taken advantage of. He isn’t a real man because I have to support him.
http://www.forbes.com/2007/03/13/women-paying-alimony-lead_cx_pink_0313alimony.html
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/role-reversal-wives-angry-paying-alimony/story?id=8662940
I find it hysterical that when women are treated like men in court, it is somehow unfair and abuse…but it’s the status quo when the genders are reversed.
I guess that is really my litmus test. I take the sentence and reverse the genders and see if it invokes the same response or is factual.
Oy…
Replicate benefits through contracts and other legal agreements: This depends on the very subjective nature of what marriage benefits you actually value or that actually apply to you (since some benefits only affect veterans). The point is if you think most benefits of marriage are actually useful then marriage is your best option. However, if there are only a few benefits you value then it would be much easier to replace marriage with a few contracts. If I just want to gift something to someone, I don’t marry them…I just put them in my will.
And… as we keep saying, not all those benefits are things which can be replicated. Some can, in theory, but aren’t always enforceable. Others, such as leaving things in your will are either subject to penalties, or require devising a will which isn’t subject to challenge. In any case they are time, and money intensive.
Expensiveness: I never said that getting married (the actual license) is expensive. I did however say that JUST getting the marriage license is far rarer then getting married, paying for the church, reception party, etc…
I am not talking about the exceptions “you don’t have to have a wedding” but the average “most people that get married also get a wedding”
Bullshit. You kept saying, “Yes but”. The answer was simply “yes”. You want to talk about, “choice” in one place (see above re marriage) but deny that people choose in another (how they ccelebrate something which makes them happy). There are any number of things which people choose to do to celebrate things which don’t need to have money spent on them (Birthdays, graduations, funerals). Those are independent of the required costs.
You keep conflating them, and ignoring the reasons behind the choice, rather saying, “society coerces them to waste money.”
Alimony Are you trying to say men aren’t the majority of payers when it comes to alimony payments?
No. I was quting your mistatement of fact, the one where you said that, as a man, you had a 97 percent chance of paying alimony in a divorce (which wasn’t qualified with, “If alimony is paid). This is patently untrue.
I find it hysterical that when women are treated like men in court, it is somehow unfair and abuse…but it’s the status quo when the genders are reversed.
Do you recall what I said about it?
Can you cite anyone here who said the stay at home partner ought not get spousal support if they were male?
That dog don’t hunt.
I guess that is really my litmus test. I take the sentence and reverse the genders and see if it invokes the same response or is factual.
Care to put this into English?
Most, if not all of us used gender neutral terms in referring to who should get alimony if alimony should be given, you idiot. That you read into this the roles you expected to see surprises nobody.
Brandon, cohabiting (straight and gay) is treated the same as married. We still can’t marry someone of the same sex, yet.
Cohabitating is not treated the same legally as marriage. And only heteros get some of the social benefits of marriage through cohabitation. In fact, cohabitating heteros have more legal rights than cohabitating queer couples in many cases. What happens, for example, if your partner of 17 years and father of your four child is brutally and cruelly murdered in a racist attack and you want to sue for wrongful death or get benefits? If you are a gay couple, you get nothing: http://www.back2stonewall.com/2011/09/sue-sdoma-mississippi-denies-gay-man-sue-spouses-racist-murderer.html A hetero couple would have had some rights to recovery.
@Pecunium: I never said that every single “benefit” of marriage can be duplicated with contracts and other legal agreements. Spousal protection in court cases and hospital visitation rights are two that I can think of off the top of my head.
Let’s just say for arguments sake that this list is roughly all the benefits and responsibilities of marriage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_and_responsibilities_of_marriages_in_the_United_States
Clearly someone can go through the list and mark the “benefits” that don’t apply to them (say veterans benefits when you are not a veteran). Then you can go through the list and decide which ones are fairly useless since you already have them (various insurance benefits). Now with the rest of the list, you can go through them and see if those benefits are useful to you. If you come up with a high number, then marriage might be a better option. However if the number is low and the benefits you did pick can be duplicated through other means…then marriage might not be a good decision.
Basically you are drilling down to get to the benefits you actually want. There is no point in getting married for benefits that you already have.
Fine…getting a marriage license is absurdly cheap.
However it would be naive of anyone to not take the idea of a wedding or its costs into consideration since the majority of marriages are followed by a wedding.
Fine…IF alimony is awarded the man is most likely going to be the one paying it. It’s my bad if I didn’t add that first “if” in there. My main objection was that if you don’t get married you have a 0% chance of paying alimony (at least in my state…other states may differ). However, if you do get married even if I have a 20% chance of paying alimony that still increases my odds exponentially.
I didn’t say you said anything about women paying alimony. I just remember reading how the women felt about paying it. It wasn’t “Well I was the breadwinner and he stayed at home to take care of the kids”. It was “I am never getting married again and I feel taken advantage of because he is crying/whining/throwing a tantrum that I won’t support him”. I think women paying a higher percentage of alimony is a good thing for alimony reform. I guess time will tell.
In response to my “litmus test”: If someone says “men should really do X”. I flip it around to “women should really do X”. While that person said the former example…would they still say the latter. Helps me see double standards.
@Magpie: I wouldn’t want to be in that situation. That is holding people to a contract they didn’t even agree to or sign. Co-habituating couples should not be held to the same standards of married couples.
Brandon, just have an open relationship for godsake. There are plenty of women out here who are more than happy to carry on relationships with multiple men simultaneously.
Darksidecat, I was referring to Australian law, to clarify a comment for Brandon.
Brandon, I haven’t seen any disadvantages to it. It makes a lot of legal disputes easier to sort out, especially for same-sex couples (who didn’t count as partners at all, before).
@Magpie: Ya, but you are holding people to a contract they didn’t sign…hence it is possibly illegal. By signing a marriage contract you are entitled to all the benefits and responsibilities. By broadening that out to co-habituating couples, you are subjecting them to a contract they didn’t sign.
Just because it makes legal disputes “easier”, that isn’t a reason to justify that behavior. You can make the legal system a lot easier by stripping everyone of their rights. In fact the “easier” a legal system is…the more totalitarian it tends to be.
See: show trials and kangaroo courts
Which type of rights/responsibilities do you mean? The examples where it’s better (that I have seen) have mostly to do with what happens when one partner dies: wills, having your partner as beneficiary on your super, staying in the family home, that sort of thing.
@Magpie: And if your partner wanted to do that he would either 1) put you in their wills or 2) actually marry you.
The state is allowing one person to take something from someone else (home, inheritance, etc…) without that persons approval. Which is wrong and immoral.
The problem previously, was that you could put your cohabiting partner in the will, but other relatives could challenge it, throw you out of the house, and you could only have a spouse as beneficiary of super.