When it Comes to Marriage, Here’s How and Why they Suffer
(c) 2019, Davd
Fern and Miriam1 are victims of Feminism, though they may be reluctant to say so. They want to marry and have babies; and if they were living in the social (especially civil-marriage) environment of their grandmothers’ generation, they would very likely be married by now, and Fern would very likely have two or three children.
Marriage is one way, not the only way, that modern women are the victims of Feminist-lobbied social changes which benefited some of the Feminists of two previous generations.
Fern recently reached age 30, a warning-signal for women that if they are going to have children, the first one should be born within a very few years. She would like to marry, but Bjorn, the young man she has kept-company-with for several years, is not willing to make a commitment to early-21st Century civil marriage—and “I can’t blame him”: The rules of early-21st Century civil marriage2 put him at a serious disadvantage if Fern were later to decide she wanted a divorce. (cf. Brown, 2013, Nathanson and Young, 2006.)
Bjorn has seen too many other men, from his father and men of his father’s generation to a few men close to his age who married early, “get beat-up by the divorce courts,” for him to go thinking “this can’t happen to me.” While his grandfathers had marriage-friendly laws to rely on, as well as the women they married—and while those old-fashioned marriage laws encouraged the women of his grandfathers’ generation to be faithful—things have changed, and Bjorn knows it.
His friends, his father, and some of his father’s friends thought they could trust the women they married, and found they couldn’t. Women like to be mysterious, he thought when Fern tried to push the issue of marriage, and I will accept they are mysterious enough that I can’t be 100% sure Fern won’t change and put me through the divorce wringer.
It’s not Bjorn’s doing that marriage changed from his grandfather’s day to his; and it’s definitely not his responsibility to fix the laws of marriage. The changes were lobbied into existence by Feminists, and many Feminists today still regard them as good for women (cf. Nathanson and Young, 2006, Brown, 2013). When the question is whether a man will or won’t commit himself for marriage under the 21st Century rules, though—the new rules have quite logically persuaded millions of men to simply say “No”.
“Man-up?” commented Bjorn in response to what has become a common shaming tactic; “I’m manning up by staying single! I’m valuing my civil rights, many of which “marriage-2” could take down. If I’m going to be a father—which appeals to me in general terms—then I want to be assured that I can father those children from diaper age to age of majority.
“Two things and only two, Fern can do and I can’t: Pregnancy and breastfeeding. I can take on chores like cooking for her and older children, more of the gardening, running the wash machine—you know—to balance those. When the Law assures me that the children are just as much mine as hers, then I might trust the Law enough to marry like my grandfathers did.”
Miriam is a few years younger; she has a promising, executive job running a regional section of a government social-animation project—which job requires her to be “on the move” most days of the week. Though much better in status and future potential than “selling on the road”3, it is likewise incompatible with mothering small children.
As executives often do, Miriam is looking toward the future; and she doesn’t know if marriage is part of her future or not. Even more than Fern was before her thirtieth birthday, Miriam is aware that a good man willing to risk marriage, is hard to find.
Fern and Miriam are both capable, decent-looking women, where i mean “decent looking” in two senses: Both young women are appealing in appearance but not so extremely attractive as to be distracting to strangers if they dress somewhat modestly; and both comport themselves so as to give an appearance of decency in the way one would expect them to deal with others.
Under old-fashioned marriage law, as it might be called in North America, or more generally, under the terms of marriage normal to healthy civilizations, both Fern and Miriam would easily find good husbands to sire and father their children. Bjorn has said that he and Fern would probably be married by now if marriage were trustworthy and man-friendly.
Both are unmarried today, not because of how they treated others recently, but because of how Feminism and Feminist-lobbied laws have treated men for the past 1-2 generations (25-50 years) of time. Men are getting wary of marriage, and rightly so; but it isn’t these women’s fault.
In 1959 and 1969, a woman who entered legal marriage, thereby promised fidelity to her bridegroom precisely because marriage-law at that time supported fidelity. Today, entering “marriage 2” fails to assure the husband of fidelity, precisely because marriage-law at this time does not. Men value fidelity and we have seen what other men have suffered when it fails.
Since the Law does not support marital fidelity any longer; the burden of proof of fidelity falls on young women like Fern and Miriam, and it is an onerous burden to bear when so many millions of wives before them, were unfaithful to their promises, often sexually and all too often by divorcing for no grievous fault.
One of the “civil rights” business corporations are explicitly given, is “the right to be sued” for damages and to enforce contracts they make. Of course, no one, individual or corporate, wants to be sued; but wise corporations—and women, and men—value the “right to be sued” as proof that they can be trusted to keep promises, and proof built into the Law, independent of their own character, that should they fail to keep a promise, they can be held to account.
The right to be held to a lifetime, covenant form of marriage would probably have assured Fern, might yet assure Miriam, of marriage and a husband’s support when their babies are young. Without it, their prospects of marriage are much weaker, and not because of something either of them did wrong.
(The author of “The Misandry Bubble”, a classic blog within three years after it appeared, wrote that these terms of marriage have been almost the same in such a great diversity of civilizations — civilizations so diverse economically, geographically, racially, in religion and technology—that it would seem this form of marriage is a requirement for civilization.)
Glubb [1976: 13-15] observed that morals tend to disintegrate and hedonism flourish as empires disintegrate:
The heroes of declining nations are always the same—the athlete, the singer or the actor. The word ‘celebrity’ today is used to designate a comedian or a football player, not a statesman, a general, or a literary genius. [16])
If the election of “rock star like” Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister, can be viewed as indicating decadence, the failure of his Government, and other recent Canadian governments, to provide wives with a covenant form of marriage and its support for fidelity, passively effects decadence.
Feminist lobbying and its influence on legislation and the judiciary, degraded marriage from covenant to mere, and somewhat weak, contract (Nathanson and Young, 2006, cf. Brown, 2013). Women who took advantage of the change to discard husbands who might have become boring, but who had done them no great wrong, often exploiting those men financially and denying them the company of their children, may have felt they benefited from the change.
Fern and Miriam—and perhaps also Bjorn—are suffering for their pleasure.
Cited:
Brown, Grant A., 2013. Ideology And Dysfunction In Family Law“”: How Courts Disenfranchise Fathers. Calgary and Winnipeg: Canadian Constitution Foundation and Frontier Centre For Public Policy
“The Futurist”, 2010. The Misandry Bubble . January 1.
Glubb, John Bagot, 1978. The Fate of Empires. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd. ISBN 0 85158 127 7
Graham, Billy [William Franklin], 1997. Just as I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham. San Francisco: Harper Collins.
Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry“”: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Reviewed here.
Notes:
1. All the names in this account are pseudonyms. The characters began as people known to the writer, and were “edited” based on the statements and experiences of other people known to me.
2. I write from Canada for a Canadian website. I read statements from the USA indicating that civil-marriage there is also misandric. Possibly European civil marriage is not so “Feminist”. I would guess that Latin-American civil-marriage is more “fidelity for life” in character; but speculatively. Asian civil-marriage? Probably a great range from Muslim to Marxist.
3. It might be worth mentioning that Billy Graham, a very successful man by most criteria, recounts in his autobiography (1997: 34-38) that he sold Fuller brushes and associated products the summer before he entered college. So in context, Miriam has a much higher-status job with comparable demands for daily mobility… and Billy Graham’s future potential was not represented by his job that summer.
