Could "gay marriage" send the sexual revolution into reverse?

[fpb]

One possible result of “gay marriage” that has not been considered seems to me worth considering, though it may sound paradoxical. It may need not to a less but to a more inhibited and prurient attitude to sex.

My reasoning is as follows. Start from the obvious: the demand for “gay marriage” only makes sense if marriage is conceived as a legal permission to have sex. Marriage, of course, is not and has never been that. But if you take sex within marriage to be legal and permitted, validated and right, in itself (that is, independently of the attitude or potential for procreation), then you correspondingly devalue sex outside “marriage”. I am not saying that we may see a decrease in “hooking up” and casual sex, but if sex outside “marriage” loses the sense of validation, permission and correctness in favour of sex in “marriage”, then that will make the commonplace view of sex outside marriage not just cheap but much nastier than it has been. We may be seeing some advance warning of that even now, for instance in the universal rage of contempt visited on Paula Broadwell (even granting she deserved it). But the worst result would be on the homosexual community itself. Everyone knows that most practising homosexuals do not restrict themselves to one partner. Everyone knows that the whole “gay community” rotates around constant exchange of partners. Everyone knows that when we speak of gay bars or clubs, we don’t speak of chaste establishments; but if homosexual relationships become formally divided between the inevitably small group of permanent, formalized “married” couples and the inevitably much larger pool of players, that will make the “community” of players and swappers even more dirty, even more dodgy, and even more dangerous than it already is.

I think, however, that this effect may not even be restricted to gay sex alone. The loose morals of the present are very unlikely to be changed merely by a change of mood; but we may be heading towards a direction where sex outside marriage becomes joyless and destructive. This is not an unfamiliar trajectory. There was a brief period in the late sixties when free sex and "mind-opening" drugs seemed to be the twin tracks of an ongoing revolution. Then drugs, while continuing to be widely used, fell off into a joyless, despised, lonely twilight world, haunted by freaks and stalked by mental illness and early death. Something like that might well be going to happen to what is left of the once sexual revolution.

Comments

[cheyinka]

I've always heard it not really as permission, but as... a ratification that the couple's affection is really real, I guess? I mean, the impression I get is that many, though certainly not all, people who intend to marry a same-sex partner don't intend their marriage to exclude other sex partners; what they want is affirmation that their primary relationship has meaning to society.

I suppose it's entirely possible that sex between people, neither of whom are married to anyone, might descend that way, but I think it might also be possible that marriage will just be further made irrelevant :(

[fpb.livejournal.com]

No. Marriage is about the children. It is about descent, which is why the ceremony always involves the extended families of both partners. Love may or may not be a part of it, but family relationships always are. Even when you are dealing with people who, for reasons of age or health, cannot have children, a marriage is still an alliance between families. It means that you acquire - the English term is profoundly significant - relatives-in-law, who, from thenceforth, are never again really alien to you.

Looked at it from a certain viewpoint, marriage removes two persons from the sexual arena. This is actually the place my thoughts started from. Marriage cannot be a licence to fuck, because no man or woman ever needed that licence. And I am not speaking only of fact, but of law too. In most history, in most cultures, the law did not limit sex to married couples: to the contrary, it established a few groups with which it was illegal to have sex - minors, relatives, members of the same sex and married persons. (In actual fact, it was the woman who was more strictly forbidden and more frequently blamed, but I think you will find that it was also possible for women to charge their husbands for the same reason.) Concubinage, casual relationships, and courtesanship, were all practised without any great difficulty, In other words, when it came to adults without existing bonds, most sort of things were tolerated. Our age did not invent the "consenting adults" formula; to the contrary, the fact that we have to formulate and repeat it suggests that it is not as natural to us as it was to our ancestors.

What "gay marriage" does in this respect is to reverse all the presumptions. Because there is no question of children - I am tempted to say,no issue about issue - the whole business of families coming together becomes unreal. Do you imagine for a minute that Elton John considers David Whatsisname's mother as his mother-in-law? The point then becomes to consecrate and eternize a sexual relationship. Sex becomes the thing that "marriage", so described, values and celebrates.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

"Start from the obvious: the demand for “gay marriage” only makes sense if marriage is conceived as a legal permission to have sex"

This is obviously wrong. It makes sense as a symbolic commitment to spend one's lives together (however true or not that may turn out to be) and it makes sense as a package of legal rights regarding property, taxes, inheritance, (USA) health insurance, immigration, medical decisions, and child custody[1], and it makes sense as a social signal of that package of rights which people like random nurses in a hospital can be trusted to recognize, unlike civil unions.

[1] While technology is not yet able to let gay couples have children with each other, the individuals are certainly capable of producing or adopting children, or bringing them from a straight relationship, to be raised together.

"Everyone knows that the whole “gay community” rotates around constant exchange of partners"

Just like "everyone knows" that the Catholic Church taught the world was flat until Columbus proved them wrong. "Everyone" can "know" things that are totally wrong.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

How much time in your life have you spent in close proximity with male and female homosexuals? Me, it's been about ten years. That celibate gay community you seem to have heard of never seemed to be in any of their experience - but then, I only lived in a bucolic, provincial little hole called London. I well remember the annoyance of my 100% gay friend Adrian when he found a pub he knew had gone gay - he had not gone there to be checked out by everyone and he wanted to use the toilets for their original use. The fact is that a community that defines itself by its taste for a particular sex act cannot help but be concerned with sex and with members as prospective sex partners or objects. Of course your ideology won't admit this, but reality does.

All the privileges you mention are not even secondary, not even tertiary, they have nothing whatsoever to do with marriage as an institution. If you want to marry because you want tax privileges, you are not even a whore, you are an idiot. They are petty little legal enactments that can be demolished - and mostly have been - at the state's caprice, and where inheritance is concerned, are largely the individual's choice. And please, no more sob stories about nurses forbidding affectionate partners from staying at their beloved's bedside. I have an allergic reaction to sentimental manipulation.

Frankenstein technology may breed human beings out of pigs for all I know - I am not interested and I hope sanity prevails, although between sanity and sentimentality manipulated by money power the battle is far from certain. Meanwhile, what gay men do is purchase them. A man who purchases the sexual services of a woman is called a john, right? Well, in that case a man who purchases a baby must be called an Elton, since a man who purchases the sexual services of a woman in order to buy a baby is called an Elton John. Money, of course, can do anything.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I've known several homosexuals, yes. They mostly don't fit the promiscuous stereotype. Especially the female ones -- which the stereotype doesn't even claim to apply to, so you were being overly sweeping in your post even by that standard.

I'm not denying the culture exists; certainly many gay men act the way many straight men would like to act if they could find willing partners. But it's not the whole of even gay men, let alone the whole gay community. All the lesbians I know are or would like to be in a committed relationship. Mind you, that's true for most of the gay men I know, too.

"a community that defines itself by its taste for a particular sex act"

Which sex act would that be, that includes both gay man and gay women? Gays are defined by their *attraction* to people of the same sex, not particular acts; anal sex isn't even universal among gay men. That's reality, not ideology.

"have nothing whatsoever to do with marriage as an institution"

There is no universal 'marriage as an institution', apart from being two people being tied together somehow in a relationship including to but not limited to sex. The rights I listed *are* much of the institution of marriage in the modern world.

As for "not whores but idiots", these aren't people wanting to get married just for tax benefits. These are people who love each other and want to live together, just as straights do, and want the same benefits straight couples do.

"emotional manipulation" -- It's called empathy. You'd apparently prefer not to have any regarding the people suffering under your preferred policies.

"I hope sanity prevails" -- why 'sanity'? IVF and surrogate babies have turned out just fine.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You live in a parallel universe. IVF and "surrogate babies" haven't turned out just fine - I have seen the unhappiness to do with a sense of rootlessness, the desperate need to have a real parent and the certainty that the real parent would be inadequate or worse. As for there being no such thing as universal marriage, i won't even bother answering that one: if you wanted to give a clear instance of your desire to deny reality in the name of ideology, you could not have chosen a better if you had thought of it for two weeks with your chin on your arms. And I am tired of trying to prove to you that the moon is not actually made of green cheese. You would probably tell me a tale of someone eating moon rock samples just to prove your point. All right, the moon is made of green cheese, men and women are not made to procreate, procreation is a silly notion, and science exists to deform and dominate human beings. Happy now?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

All right, my previous answer was not my most glorious moment. I will say to explain it that I have been under exceptional physical strain lately, and that as a result my writing has been diminished to nonexistent. Let's see if I can do better this time.

There is no universal 'marriage as an institution', apart from being two people being tied together somehow in a relationship including to but not limited to sex.

Your expression is peculiarly sneaky. It assumes the matter in argument before the argument is started. No, sir, there is no "two people" involved, there is "two sexes". In numerous cultures, marriage involves one man and a certain amount of women; in a smaller number, one woman and a certain amount of men, as in some mountain castes of northern India. (Kipling, who knew his native land well, mentioned this custom in the figure of Lisbeth, a.k.a. the Woman of Shamlegh.) One man, one woman, is the most widespread; one man, many women, is common among ruler classes in many cultures and sufficiently explained by the position of power of the leading males. (Current research suggests that the setting of Muhammad's life was largely Christian and Jewish rather than pagan; in which case, the prophet's ruling that each of his followers could have four wives plus as many slavegirls as he could possess would be a perfect instance of imposing upper-class male privilege within marriage, where the prevalent Christian society had banned polygamy, in a context of open and ongoing warfare that privileged brute force.) The more unusual deviations, that is polyandry and incestuous marriage, may, I think, be shown in every case that can be verified to come from the influence of a previously established religious idea. Polyandry spread in North India from the legend of the Mahabharata, with its five husbands and one wife Draupadi; incestuous marriage derived in Zoroastrian Iran from the idea that God (Ahura Mazda) had married his "daughter" or creature, the female archangel Spenta Armaiti.

What has never existed before the last twenty years - not in any culture, not in any historical period - is "gay marriage". There is no institution involving sex and the perpetual union of two or more people of the same sex. James Boswell's attempt to place one such institution in early Christianity of all places has drawn the scorn of every scholar who knew anything of the matter, including gay advocates. Ancient Rome is, in this, particularly instructive. My own research suggests that Rome had a homosexual underground, and a homosexual "culture" in the anthropological sense of the word, for centuries before Virgil and Juvenal; and that this culture, in spite of using the cultural prestige of Greek ephebophilia to validate itself, was in fact notably different from Greece's. To make matters short, Greek pederasty was about the few years of passion between a free-born adult and a free-born adolescent; Roman homosexuality, of rather longer connections between an adult master and an adult slave or socially inferior freeman. Such was the connection between Virgil and his slave Alexander, such that between the emperor Hadrian and his slave Antinous. This sort of connection, taking place down the centuries in the sexually rather loose atmosphere of Rome, might well make a "queer theorist" conceive that the next step would be a recognized ceremony of union. But in actual fact, the Romans, even more than the Greeks, treated male-to-male marriage as the ultimate in absurdity, the height in their rather hard-driving idea of humour. Just read Juvenal.

As a matter of fact, Boswell himself may be easily understood in terms of what I have been saying. The more extreme deviations, I said, are justified by previously existing religious ideas. Is it not strange that, when certain sections of society were preparing the onslaught of "gay marriage", someone tried to "prove" that it had existed all along, and, at that, in the dominant religion of our culture? Boswell was a lousy scholar, but makes a nice scholarly exhibit.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

But it's not the whole of even gay men, let alone the whole gay community. All the lesbians I know are or would like to be in a committed relationship. Mind you, that's true for most of the gay men I know, too.

You have to look at things as they happen and not just at things as people would like them to happen. And the truth is that lesbian relationships have little more endurance than male homosexual ones. Have you ever been near a lesbian couple that was breaking up? I have. I also have read plenty of lesbian literature, through my years as a comic book reviewer with a particular interest in the underground. Peculiar thing - it is pretty nearly all about break-ups, jealousy, rows, and infidelities. One could almost say that the peculiar quality of the lesbian experience is disappointment and jealousy. And what this shows is that the mechanics of the homosexual life, both male and female, inevitably make for infidelity. Even now, when the difficulties in the way of fidelity have multiplied (including the rarely noticed fact that most people now live to their seventies, whereas in the ages without divorce the average European white would be dead by 45 if not earlier), more than half of all marriages last until death. An infinitesimal amount of unmarried OR homosexual relationships may be said to last as long. The male or female homosexual will nearly always end up being either betrayed or betrayer; the difference is in style, not in substance.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As for "not whores but idiots", these aren't people wanting to get married just for tax benefits. These are people who love each other and want to live together, just as straights do, and want the same benefits straight couples do. "emotional manipulation" -- It's called empathy. You'd apparently prefer not to have any regarding the people suffering under your preferred policies.

I broke down your division between two paragraphs because you are playing with ideas and notions in a way I find illegitimate, and I want to bring your ideas together. These are people who love each other and want to live together, just as straights do - OK, but even given what I said before about the objective near-impossibility of such an outcome, let us suppose it happens. For what reason would it entitle them to want the same benefits straight couples do? Either, as I said, they want the benefits and that is the point, or the benefits are not important to them. But if you use their mutual affection - which I do not deny, and indeed could not deny in the light of the obvious jealousy and heartbreak involved in every break-up - to screw money and privileges from the State, then money and privileges are what you want, and the use of tearful scenes of mutual love is nothing more than whorish emotional manipulation.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

IVF and surrogate babies have turned out just fine.

I sincerely hope you never find yourself in the way of verifying the utter, smug falsehood of that statement. It comes from the kind of "academic studies" intended to flatter commonplace prejudice. Until you have seen it, you have no idea what it means to have no known father or mother, no identity of your own, no place to stand. It was in the face of that utter misery that I decided to make peace with my own father, who is not an admirable parent; because however difficult our relation might be, it still gives me something that at least one person I know will never have, and will suffer all her life for. As for the physical facts, I believe I have read that IVF babies are at greater risk from an enormous amount of conditions as compared with the properly made article. But that, to me, is much less important than the fact that dozens of embryos are butchered to make one IVF baby, which achieves the impossible: something morally worse than abortion.