On Marriage, continued

Something just struck me. I wrote in an earlier post about my objections to women taking their husbands' names upon marriage. Well, in one way this connects with my problems with societal homophobia. I believe that people are capable of remembering two or even more family names in connection with a single family unit, but many of them just aren't familiar with the concept and therefore bridle at it, or would rather be mentally lazy and slap the same label on both spouses and their kids. And many, whether consciously or subconsciously, subscribe to the idea that a woman should "be subsumed into" her husband upon marriage, as is the will of patriarchy.

Now, gay and lesbian couples are (blessedly, in my opinion -- they're a breath of fresh air within the New York Times Sunday Styles wedding announcements, see earlier post) very likely to include two or more names in their family unit. So maybe gay and lesbian couples are in somewhat of the same boat with heterosexual couples who retain two names instead of shoehorning both partners in under one name. Many folks claim they "can't handle it" when the truth often is, they don't want to handle it. They're using nomenclature as a means of social compulsion, to make straight women who want to maintain their independence, and gays and lesbians, disappear.

Of course it's not as simple as that. Homophobia is still far more socially acceptable than misogyny. Though misogyny remains too socially acceptable on its own account, if a straight woman, and her male partner, are willing to take on the extra work needful to make the world at large recognize the fact that they each have their own surname even though they're married, they can usually get pretty much everyone to go along with it. Some people may be obnoxious about it, and even attack you personally if they feel threatened enough, but if you don't cede ground, all but a handful will back down. Unfortunately, the same is not true for gays and lesbians seeking the plain old right to marry, much less recognition as a married couple. A straight woman who insists on her own name may get guff, but she won't get beaten up or killed. Gays and lesbians who refuse to pretend to be who they're not may actually get beaten up or killed, or lose their jobs, or be denied housing, or lose custody of their children... and a lot of other unpleasant, wrong and dangerous things. Not to mention that they run a very good chance of being abandoned, rejected and/or abused by their very own family members.

This is a strange time. We've managed to go a little ways toward getting past sexism and racism in our political choices, but at the same time, there's this "renaissance" (I would say recidivist slide) of women ostentatiously "taking their husband's names," and, far worse, a spate of benighted anti-gay legislation which has gone so far as to re-write state constitutions to deny the right of marriage to a specific group (on the basis of sexual orientation or preference), and also to deny the option of domestic partnership to heterosexuals who don't want to legally marry. The effect on my state, Florida, is catastrophic. First there's the despicable homophobia and anti-American tenor of the constitutional amendment passed here. And then there are the disastrous consequences for our senior-citizen-heavy population. Many single seniors live together without marriage because marrying means losing a significant part of their already pathetic Social Security benefits. Now they face not being able to register as domestic partners, which means they have no rights if a partner gets sick, no access to a partner's health benefits, etc. etc. Sickening.

Let me be clear on one point. If a woman desperately wants to change her name upon marriage, it's a free country. But the overwhelming trend of women "taking their husbands' names" is an ongoing expression of a pretty clearly discernible, long-standing patriarchal sentiment, which is that women are here to support and enable men (and children), and not to lead lives of their own or have goals of their own. This system has not redounded to the psychological or economic benefit of homemakers, whose vital work I think should be explicitly part of the Gross Domestic Product. Full-time homemakers of either gender should be awarded Social Security in their own right, not as derivatives of their spouses, and ideally, they should be officially allotted a given share of the annual family income, so they never have to beg, cajole or manipulate in order to get their hands on spending money. And don't get me going on so-called "no-fault" divorce, which seems to assume that someone who hasn't held a paid job for years can somehow jump right back into paid work! What very few people realize is that only about 15% of women who divorce are awarded ANY alimony at all, and as for child support, the frequency with which men skip out on paying it is disgusting.

But I digress. Which I do tend to do. To get back to the resistance of the larger society to both "two-name" heterosexual marriage and, far more aggravatedly, gay/lesbian marriage: of course, what both these options do is to undermine the paradigm of patriarchal marriage. They offer models of marriage that go against gender-role assumptions and assume equal partnerships instead of complementarity. A large percentage of our fellow citizens don't want to see, and don't want their children to see, that there are quite a few different ways to do coupledom, including ones which don't necessarily involve hierarchy, dominance/submission, procreation, or the "disappearing" of one partner into another. They want to force everyone into "one-size-fits-all" (it never does) gender roles and marriage molds, ones they find familiar and comforting, ones that don't require individual thought and don't necessitate the taking of individual responsibility or individual stands.

This is intimately connected to our culture's love of dualism, the idea that there are only two answers to any given question, one labeled "right" and one labeled "wrong." Every situation is reduced to an "either-or" choice, with no option labeled "both-and." More on this next time.