MRAs, and manosphere dudes in general, tend to have some strange notions about marriage, many of them believing it to be little more than an elaborate scam, perpetrated by women, to rob men of their money and freedom and even their precious bodily fluids.
Given that they generally see marriage as a tool that women use to pry money from men, MRAs tend to be simply baffled by the very idea of gay marriage, and lesbian marriage in particular – why would any woman want to marry another woman instead of a man whom she could exploit?
Now the right-wing Center for Marriage Policy has put forth a case against gay marriage that’s even more bizarrely conspiracy minded than any MRA screed on the evils of straight marriage.
In a recent post on the Center for Marriage Policy website, the group’s president, David R. Usher, argues that proponents of gay marriage like the National Organization for Women are using the issue as a Trojan horse to promote a new kind of evil he calls “feminist marriage.”
Forget the adjectives “same sex” and “gay” as prepends to marriage. These are victim-based marketing ploys invented by NOW to send us off into a heated debate about homosexuality and equal rights – distracting us from seeing their real goal of establishing “feminist marriage.”
Feminists … intend to convert marriage into a feminist-controlled government enterprise and subordinate the rest of America to fund it.
So what exactly is the strange beast he calls “feminist marriage’?
Feminist marriage is a three-way contract between two women and government. Most women will have children, and few women can afford or will go to the extreme of using artificial insemination to achieve pregnancy. Government is the automatic third party collecting “child support” entitlements for children born in these marriages.
Even non-lesbian ladies will want to get on this gravy train:
Feminist marriage will be far more attractive to women than heterosexual marriage. Sexual orientation does not matter when two women marry and become “married room-mates.” They can still have as many boyfriends as they want and capture the richest ones for baby-daddies by “forgetting” to use their invisible forms of birth control. On average, a feminist marriage will have at least four income sources, two of them tax-free, plus backup welfare entitlements.
Meanwhile, those in traditional man-lady marriages will pay through the nose:
Those in traditional marriages will pay taxes that will be used to support feminist marriages where child support or welfare cannot be recouped, as occurs in our existing welfare state. Traditional marriages have only two income sources, neither of them entitled or tax-free. Over time, many women will prefer “feminist marriage” because of the very substantial economic and sexual liberation advantages. Heterosexual marriage will be heavily burdened by costly marriage penalties, and be comparatively unattractive to women.
But what about dudes who marry each other? Tough luck, fellas!
Marriages between two men are destined to be the “marital underclass.” In most cases, these men will become unconsenting “fathers.” Women in feminist marriages will not mention they are not using birth control. Men in male-male marriages will be forced to pay child support to women in feminist marriages and become economically enslaved to these women.
Apparently, most of the dudes who marry other dudes will not actually be gay.
Most men in these marriages will still have regular sexual encounters with women. Some men in these “marriages” will want to have children. These men will have even more illegitimate children with women in (or contemplating) feminist marriages, most often without informed reproductive consent. Over time, reproductive fraud will become the norm in the United States.
In addition to being so very very evil, feminist marriage is apparently very very complicated.
Women will no doubt enjoy the financial benefits of these new arrangements. But all of us – even the ladies married to other ladies — will pay in the long run when “feminist marriage” ushers in a sort of economic fempocalypse:
Feminist marriage will demolish men’s drive to be successful, motivated workers. It will also further weaken the American job market and harm women’s employment opportunities. Our “Competitiveness Gap” with marriage-based Asian economies will expand as men’s productivity and educational attainment continues to decline, while increasing social problems, violence, and higher taxes stimulate businesses to remove jobs overseas.
Oh, hypothetical women using hypothetical girl-on-girl marriage to extort hypothetical money from hypothetical men, why must you be so hypothetically evil?
Even though the Center for Marriage Policy is little more than a cheerleader for traditional hetero marriage, I wouldn’t be surprised to see marriage-hating MRAs taking up this argument as their own. Politics makes strange bedfellows. As does “feminist marriage,” at least in the fevered imagination of David Usher.
ithiliana: I’ve been reading slash since… since… holy shit, ’97? No, ’96. Damn.
That last comment had a point, but I’m too tired to remember what else I wanted to type.
DSC and Ithiliana: I’m not arguing with the idea that slash fandom is often fetishizing, objectifying, homophobic or EXTREMELY creepy. I mean, I’ve hung out in slash fandom circles too. However, when someone is suggesting that straight women find bi men inherently disgusting, “many of them wank about MSM” is a decent counterargument. However, the fetishization of queer men is problematic and often oppressive; it’s just a different kind of oppression than the one the Pretentiously Nameless One was going on about.
Porn faux-lesbians is a slightly different issue because many of the men who wank to it, in my experience, believe lesbian sex is not real sex and that lesbians can be “cured” with a good dicking, both of which are homophobic beliefs.