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

[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.