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.
i made fun of you because you said something dumb but if you need to create some narrative that reinforces your frothing rage w/e its not like im gonna convince you not to be a tedious sophist
MsN: Sure. Or a straight woman could marry a gay man to get the same benefits, without having to deal with any negative feedback for apparent lesbianism. So unless your sole argument is that, “Legal marriages can be abused by people seeking benefits, so therefore [What? Even given the first bit, you don’t seem to have an actual point, there],” there’s really not much point in bringing up the fact that some small segment of the population might theoretically find a way to take advantage of the system.
I think we need to go back to the part where raising a kid is way more work and pain in the ass than the child support is worth.
I mean, if you think caring for kids is trivial, open a home daycare. You’ll make piles more money than any child support payment could possibly offer (the median is only $280 a month, Census Bureau data), and they’ll go home at night! And you won’t even have to get fake-gay-married for unclear reasons!
There are a lot of reasons for someone to raise a child as a single parent, from unconditional love to “found out too late for an abortion, figured I might as well,” but pure profit motive is not one of them.
Monsieur Sans Nom:
Okay… I’d love to see some evidence of that but whatever, I’m still not seeing why it would be way more terrible if women did it with other women.
This is really not hard: if you want to use birth control, use birth control. If your would-be partner refuses to have sex with you if you use birth control, don’t have sex with them. Ta-da!
By the way, getting pregnant, even if it actually would work, seems like the worst get-rich-really-damn-slowly scheme ever.
Damn, effed up the capitalization on your name, my bad. Your points are still idiotic.
Doesn’t having a kid and raising it to adulthood cost, like, $250k these days? Not clear on how the Eeeevil feminist bitch ladies make a profit on that under this batshit insane conspiracy theory.
As for the cock carousel, well, we sell a lot of tickets under this scenario, so color me intrigued.
Straight women vs bisexual man: a good number of them won’t date me at all because they have a problem with me having had sex with men. Most don’t care.
Straight man vs bisexual woman: most will pretend they like it, because they only think of the potential male-centered FFM threesome. Once they actually get in a relationship with such, spend most of their time policing their partner’s orientation and being paranoid about cuckolding.
At least the biphobic women I’ve known own their feelings and don’t go with the passive-aggressive “ya, sure, no prob” gesture.
Nameless Dude its not a strawman
Sure it is. You tried to make fun of me because you’re obviously incapable of coming up with a cogent rebuttal and you don’t like what I have to say.
Making fun of you ain’t work.
Just look at the gem above. If one is attempting to show intellectual superiority by mocking another’s failures of rhetoric, it behooves the person assuming the mantle of ability to at least make some vague effort to correctly use the terms being used as bludgeons. Elstwise it’s sort of like hitting someone with a buche de Noël instead of an actual stick.
Fixed.
Making fun of you ain’t workin.
Quoted for truth, I ain’t workin’ when I mock you, I’m amusing myself. If it pleases others to the good.
To be honest, you aren’t the audience, as I’m not trying to amuse you. But hey, if you think of any retorts with actual wit, feel free to share; we could use a change of pace.
It’s science time!
I am sleepy as fuck right now so forgive me if I garble anything. Sir Nameless is a doofus but unfortunately he’s right as far as I can tell about heterosexual women discriminating against bisexual men. Or at least having a bias against bisexuals in general. It is the case though that bi men seem to get more crap from hetero men than they do from hetero women, since men tend to be more homophobic in general. I don’t want to cover up the real and complicated issues bi people face just in the name of proving him wrong. (For what it’s worth, I am totally ok… more than ok, actually 😉 , with bi men, but that is mostly because I am bi myself.)
Here’s some data on attitudes of heterosexuals towards bisexual people:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00224490209552150
It’s “Heterosexuals’ Attitudes toward Bisexual Men and Women in the United States” by Gregory M. Herek in the Journal of Sex Research (2002). (If anybody wants the .pdf ’cause they don’t have academic access, PM me in the forums or whatever)
— Herek cites a 1999 phone survey (Herek & Capitanio, “AIDS stigma and sexual prejudice”, in American Behavioral Scientist) in the literature review that found that hetero women responded more negatively to a man with AIDS if he was described as bisexual than if he was described as gay. Hetero men showed the opposite pattern.
–The actual study at hand: Herek asked the subjects (all heteros, 1283 of them) to rate their feelings of warmth/coldness towards various groups on a scale from 0-100 (where 100 was the most warmth). Bisexual women were pegged at a mean of about 46 and bi men at around 43. These scores were lower than scores for (in order): white people, Catholics, black people, Protestants, Mexican-Americans, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Hatians, people who are pro-life, people with AIDS, people who are pro-choice, lesbians, and gay men. (Lesbians and gay men were only several points above the bisexual groups). But hey! Bisexuals beat out injection drug users, who were rated at a mean of 21.
–Herek found on this temperature measure that hetero women tended to rate LGB groups significantly higher than hetero men did, lesbians and bi women were ranked significantly higher than gay men and bi men, and the difference between homosexual and bisexual rankings was significant (the gays barely, but significantly, edging out the bis).
— Interestingly this breaks out by gender: hetero men rated bi/gay men significantly lower than bi/gay women but hetero women rated bi/gay men similarly to bi/gay women. BUT hetero women rated bisexuals significantly lower than they did gay men/women whereas hetero men did not make this distinction. So hetero men tended to have poorer attitudes towards men who were homosexual/bisexual whereas hetero women tended to have poorer attitudes towards the bisexuals.
Here’s another paper called “Biphobia in Undergraduate Students” by MJ Eliason, from Archives of Sexual Behavior (1997). (I can also ping this to people if they want it):
http://www.springerlink.com/content/q71867t268570310/fulltext.pdf
This one found a lot of anti-bisexual prejudice (mostly from hetero men) and bi males came out at the bottom again. It also seems to have confirmed the “hetero women don’t want to sleep with bi men” thing but unfortunately the paper doesn’t break down the stats enough for me to know exactly what’s going on.
This had 229 heterosexuals, 170 who were women and 59 men, who filled out a “Beliefs about Sexual Minorities Scale” & answered questions about stereotypes regarding bisexuals.
— Bi men were rated as the least acceptable group (61% “unacceptable), then bi women (50%), then gay men (43%), and then lesbians (38%)
— Hetero men gave significantly worse ratings to bi men, gay men, and gay women than hetero women did on the BSM scale. They didn’t differ significantly in their evaluation of bi women.
— Hetero men were significantly more likely to report that they would have a sexual relationship with a bi woman than hetero women were about bi men
— But, 77% of subjects stated that it was unlikely that they would have a sexual relationship with a bi person they were very attracted to and only 9% said “very likely”
— Hetero men were more likely to endorse a number of negative stereotypes about bisexuals than hetero women were (promiscuity stereotypes, bisexuals are just closeted gays, bisexuals spread AIDS)
-shakes fist- BLOCKQUOOOOOOOOTES!
@kladle: Quite in keeping with my experience, though again I can tell you that I’ve seen lots of hetero men who self-report as favorable to bi women end up flip flopping as soon as it comes up that they’re *dating* one.
Also, we need some other identity besides bisexual or pansexual that doesn’t mean “I’m willing to date or sleep with people of both genders / any gender preseentation or lack thereof” (respectively) but means “I’m only willing to date or sleep those who aren’t monosexuals, regardless of gender presentation or lack thereof”. Because that’s me. I’m pretty much done with monosexuals as partners. Not worth the aggravation.
One of the problems with explicit bias studies is that they ignore implicit bias, which is a huge deal. Explicit bias studies tell you less what people feel and more what people think their opinions on the matter should be.
@blackbloc, yeah, my experience is that most cis hetero men do not respond well to bi and lesbian women. They only accept insofar as they pretend queer women’s sexualities don’t exist. They like queer women…no, women fucking women, if an only if they see it as a spectacle for their own (cis hetero male) benefit rather than as women’s actual personal desires. Bi women who are out and who are vocal about their desires often have to be damn careful about dating cis hetero men when it comes to homophobia, up to and including violence.
I once dated a straight woman who was married to her gay male roommate. The arrangement was: he got a green card and a wife to show off to his relatives back home (to cover for his being gay), and she got…a rent controlled apartment in San Francisco.
I’ll leave it you to decide who got the best of the deal.
That said, please Google “slash fic” before you make any more overgeneralizations about what women think of gay or bi men.
That’s a little like looking up lesbian porn made by men to see what men think about lesbians…
Pterygotus: When the allegation is bi/gay men are reviled by women the presentation of a significant body of work celebrating bi/gay men is a strong indica the revulsion is far from universal.
No, I’m with pterygotus on this one, fetishizing gay and bi men (or, more acurately, men fucking men) does not necessarily indicate acceptance of them.
I wanted to clarify that I don’t think fantasizing about or enjoying watching men having sex with men is automatically bad or fetishisitic, however, there is more than a litte fetishization of gay and bi men in slash fic circles, and it is most certainly a problem to start projecting those fantasies onto others’ identites. Ditto for men who fantasize about or like watching women have sex with women, that is not an issue per se, the issue is the projections they make on actual queer women from it and the fetishization of queer women.
As someone who has been active in slash fandom since 2003, I can attest that there are currents of extreme homophobia even among slash writers (weirdly hard to believe, it exists), and fetishization applied to men (up to asking male fans in costume at cons to ‘make out’ for the slashers, or incredibly creeply and inappropriate behaviors by female fans–including petitions to actors to kiss). It’s not all slashers, of course, but it does exist — and just as queer doesn’t automatically mean progressive, so too being a slasher doesn’t automatically mean progressive…
Speaking of the whole topic of faux male porn “lesbians,” the picture on this post is exactly from that genre–I’m not saying that there are no lesbians who might not choose to dress this way, or who don’t look like that, but it’s not the most common imagery associated with lesbians!
Hey MRAL, guess what? You know how most people, including and perhaps even especially feminists, would describe the behavior that ithiliana is talking about?
Creepy. Even though most of the people doing it are women. See? It’s not a gendered term, it’s a term used to describe a specific sort of behavior.