IS UNISEX MARRIAGE GOOD FOR MARRIAGE? Eve v. Jonathan

How could Bob and Jim's marriage possibly affect Bill and Suzy?

The first and quickest argument that same-sex marriage will have no negative effect on heterosexual couples is simply that homosexual couples are such a tiny minority, and only a minority of that minority would choose to marry. How can a tiny minority affect a majority?

Maggie has already pointed out that the same claim was made about divorce: "How will making it easier to end an unhappy marriage affect anyone's happy marriage?" And yet, a generation or so later, it's obvious that there have been consequences: more children of divorce, who often have a harder time trusting, finding good partners, and forming good relationship habits; greater reluctance on spouses' parts to make major financial or career commitments to a marriage that could dissolve; more children who, due to seeing friends' parents' marriages break up, fear that every parental fight signals divorce; lessened willingness to stick it out through rough patches; etc. etc.

But the symmetry between the divorce/same-sex marriage arguments is just a suggestive parallel. I give a more direct reply to the "tiny minority" claim here, in several (short!) segments. Here's the first, let's call it, "Roles, ideals, and the search for a self"

Humans live by roles. We need them. We seek them out. Roles help us figure out what we should do, who we should be; and, once we've agreed to take on these roles, knowing that we're living up to our roles often provides a degree of solace when the role proves difficult. Providing roles to play is one major way a society compensates for the necessary suffering I talked about earlier.

Some of the deepest and most important roles we seek are a) sexual roles (or persona), and b) roles that help us to be heroic--that help us do the right thing when it's hardest. I believe that same-sex marriage will make both these kinds of roles, as they pertain to marriage, harder to find--especially for men. As a result, more children will be left with, at best, a severely attenuated link to their fathers; and more women will be left raising children without the help of a husband. (I should note here that gay men, specifically, need strong relationships with their fathers. I've known many homosexual and bisexual men who had such relationships, and many who lacked them. And it's kind of obvious that lacking a strong relationship with one's father makes it harder to love and trust men, and to develop a healthy sense of oneself as a man.)

So, let's take these two claims one at a time. First, how will same-sex marriage affect sexual roles--specifically, masculinity? How can a male prove that he's a man? He can do all kinds of things, some deeply destructive, some fruitful and loving. He can join a gang (fatherlessness is a major recruiting tool for gangs). He can join the Army. He can express his hatred of men he deems insufficiently masculine, harassing or even attacking "queers" in order to prove he's not like them. He can impregnate many women to prove his potency, becoming a "player." Or he can marry.

Same-sex marriage is unisex. Marrying a woman would become significantly less proof of one's manhood--after all, a woman could do it! And when cultural signifiers become unisex, men move away from them fast. Because men's uncertainty about gender is greater than women's, they work harder to establish their gender. Thus women can be named Mackenzie or Ryan, but you'll be hard-pressed to find any newborn boys named Leslie, Evelyn, or even Madison. Once a masculine name becomes a "girl's name," parents of boys drop it fast.

In 2000, one third of all births in the U.S. were to unwed mothers. Men don't need any additional reasons to forgo marriage. Making marriage unisex will make it less attractive to men and, therefore, less effective in forming families. Men won't consciously think about their decisions in terms of gender. But the desire for gender drives many of our decisions, somewhere just below the surface of thought.

We've already managed to make marriage less attractive to men by pretending that men are expendable, that fatherless families are just "alternative family forms." Jennifer Hamer's What It Means to Be Daddy: Fatherhood for Black Men Living Away from Their Children found that many low-income black women bought into this idea, pushing away men who wanted to be more involved in their children's lives and setting up all-female households--where "same-sex parenting" means a baby, a mother, and her mother. So men have sex with multiple women, form multiple unmarried families, and simply don't have the resources to support any of them very well. (Oddly, Hamer herself treats her work as support for the "alternative family form" theory--even though, to anyone who grew up with a married, regular-old father, the families she describes sound frighteningly chaotic and half-formed.)

In a time when masculinity is (even) more contested than usual, and men's ties to their children and to the women they sleep with are (even) shakier than usual, "de-gendering" marriage is a terrible idea.

posted by maggie at 12:33 PM VOTE

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