GENDER AND MARRIAGE: Eve replies to Sam Schulman

I agree with Sam that marriage is a necessarily gendered institution--an institution that unites men and women, not "persons." That said, there are several things about his Commentary piece that I don't get. I'll ask my questions in this post, then briefly sketch my own sense of how gender and marriage relate in a separate post.

1) Picking up on Maggie's and Lynn's comments: It seems like Sam is arguing that in societies structured to give women sexual and parental control only within marriage, women attain a degree of sexual and parental control by marrying. I'm not sure how this is a) news or b) relevant to a society like our own, which extends some degree of sexual and parental control to unmarried women.

2) Maybe "same-sex marriage" is a contradiction in terms. But how does it pick my pocket or break my leg? (This is why I tend to talk in terms of "why society honors marriage," rather than "what marriage is"--the former gets much more directly at how Smith's redefinition of marriage would affect Jones.)

3) This might be a tangent, or it might not: What does Sam mean when he says, "In a gay marriage, one of two men must play the woman, or one of two women must play the man"?

This sounds like a claim that same-sex unions will replicate opposite-sex roles. I would argue that same-sex relationships are generally structured differently from opposite-sex relationships precisely because of gender differences. (There are some obvious implications here for discussions of different standards of fidelity in same-sex couples and discussions of same-sex parenting.)
posted by Eve at 11:01 AM VOTE

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