GENDER AND MARRIAGE: Sam Schulman replies to Eve

To your first point--I am not saying something new when I point out that marriage enables a woman’s sexuality--but I think it has tended to be forgotten, because women are hugely more sexually able outside of marriage than ever before. The larger point I was trying to make is that marriage is more consequential and essential to a woman's identity in a sexual relationship than it is to a man's.

To your second – how does gay marriage "break my leg or pick my pocket"? – it is precisely because I think that that question is a good one, and that the brilliant and impassioned arguments made against gay marriage by Maggie and her allies attempt to answer that question specifically--and do not quite succeed--that I wrote my piece. Gay marriage doesn’t--provably--cause harm in those measurable ways--but it does have more profound effects.

To your third point--I was not trying adequately to describe the comparative dynamics of same-sex relationships--a subject on which my opinion is worthless--so much as I was saying that in a gay "marriage"--not a true, loving relationship but a "marriage"--one partner must play the "bride," the other the "groom"--because marriage is something that is formed between men and women. And this is possibly distasteful and--I'd venture to say, agreeing with you--not relevant to what you propose as differently-structured relationships that occur between lovers of the same sex.
posted by Eve at 11:01 AM VOTE

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