SSM: BOYZ II MEN. Another long piece, about how making marriage unisex will change the male quest for masculinity:

A good friend tells this story from his college days: He and several guy friends were drinking pitchers of beer in a local bar. They had one too many, and the leader of their intrepid band devised a challenge. Hoisting his glass, he declared, “Whosoever is a man will bang his head on this table three times!”

You can guess what happened next: All the heads around the table went bang, bang, bang. The leader upped the ante: “Whosoever is a man will hold his hand over this candle for one minute!” And several masculine hands began to burn.

I know what you’re thinking. If you’re a woman, you’re thinking, What possessed these people? And if you’re a guy, you’re acknowledging, ruefully, that you’ve either done this kind of jackassery or known many men who would. These are the lengths men will go to prove their masculinity.

Men go farther than that, actually. While girls have several biologically-determined markers of womanhood, from menarche to first childbirth, boys must rely more on culturally-defined rituals to ease them into the responsibilities and habits of manhood. This makes manhood an even more fraught category than womanhood. How can a male prove that he’s a man? He can do all kinds of things, some deeply destructive, some fruitful and loving. He can join a gang (fatherlessness is a major recruiting tool for gangs). He can join the Army. He can express his hatred of men he deems insufficiently masculine, harassing or even attacking “queers” in order to prove he’s not like them. He can impregnate many women to prove his potency, becoming a “player.” Or he can marry.

Humans seek out gender. We want to be, not just “people,” but men and women. Every culture develops its own ways of distinguishing the sexes, so that they have their own clothes, habits, in-jokes, customary gathering places, heroic figures, and, most importantly, rituals of adulthood. All those gendered activities are meant to prepare us for the most gendered roles of all: mommy and daddy.

Marriage has served to “genderize” men for centuries. The wedding ring is the sign that the careless kid has finally grown up, become a man with a man’s responsibilities. Males who become husbands also become, in their own eyes and society’s, men.

And this is where same-sex marriage comes in. Same-sex marriage is unisex. Marrying a woman is significantly less proof of one’s manhood when a woman can do it!

When cultural signifiers become unisex, men move away from them fast. Because men’s uncertainty about gender is greater than women’s, they work harder to establish their gender. Thus women can be named Mackenzie or Ryan, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find any newborn boys named Leslie, Evelyn, or even Madison. Once a masculine name becomes a “girl’s name,” parents of boys drop it fast.

In a country like ours, where one third of all births in 2000 were to unwed mothers, men don’t need any additional reasons to forgo marriage. Making marriage unisex will make it less attractive to men and, therefore, less effective in forming families. Men won’t consciously think about their decisions in terms of gender. But the desire for gender drives many of our decisions, somewhere just below the surface of thought.

We’ve already managed to make marriage less attractive to men by pretending that men are expendable, that fatherless families are just “alternative family forms.” Same-sex marriage will enshrine that gender-neutral understanding of marriage in law. This is certainly not the only reason to oppose same-sex marriage; but in a time when masculinity is (even) more contested than usual, and men’s ties to their children and to the women they sleep with are (even) shakier than usual, “de-gendering” marriage is a terrible idea.

It will take a while for the consequences of unisex marriage to sink in, but eventually, men can be expected to realize that this avenue to manhood has now been closed. As that realization hits home, males who want to become men will seek out the other classic roads to masculinity–none of which are as universal and beneficial as marriage.

SSM: MY BASIC POSITION. This is long but I think it’s pretty plain-spoken:

Americans still think the debate over same-sex marriage is about gay people. We still think it’s about your best friend who’s just said she’s a lesbian, or your son who’s just come out. We still think it’s about whether homosexual acts are sinful.

It’s not.

The same-sex marriage debate is about marriage, above all else. It’s about a view of marriage that was first promoted by and for heterosexual couples.

I used to dream about same-sex marriage. In high school I was in love with a girl who was the marryin’ type. I used to think about the future, when we’d be married. We joked about how my parents would be her in-laws.

So I think I have some grasp on why gay-rights activists are pushing for marriage. Homosexual couples love one another dearly, and they want recognition of this love. They want to feel like society honors their emotional commitments. They envision marriage as a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

But there are all kinds of intense relationships that society does not honor the way it honors marriage. There are best friends (which many women will recognize as the closest relationship they’ve ever had); mentors; grandmothers; beloved teachers.

Why do we give marriage more societal honor than we give these other, often deeply important, relationships? Because we recognize that marriage has evolved to do more than these other relationships do for society. These relationships do less (not nothing, just less) to nurture children; to bind the young to the old; to corral the often destructive forces of desire into productive and loving channels; to bring people from youth to adulthood; and to align the interests of parents and children, rather than forcing tragic choices between the two. Marriage gets “props” from society because it does all these things more than any other institution does, or could.

Marriage developed over centuries to meet several specific, fundamental needs: children’s need for a father. A couple’s need for a promise of fidelity (and consequences for breaking that promise). Young people’s need for a transition to manhood or womanhood. And men’s (and women’s, but mostly men’s) need for a fruitful rather than destructive channel for sexual desire–a way of uniting eros and responsibility. In other words, marriage developed to meet the needs of opposite-sex couples. Why would same-sex couples expect that this institution would meet their very different needs?

At best, marriage only addresses one need of homosexual couples: sexual fidelity. Even there, it should be obvious that same-sex couples will be less likely to insist on physical fidelity than heterosexual couples. If your man might make babies with someone else, you’re more likely to see the point of restrictions on male sexuality. If you can get pregnant, you’re more likely to see the problems that might result if the father isn’t legally tied to you. So the connection between sexual fidelity and the institution of marriage is a basic consequence of the fact that when men and women–but not same-sex couples–have sex, babies often result. When the institution is no longer responding to opposite-sex couples’ needs, we can expect the emphasis on sexual fidelity to weaken.

Canada has already legalized same-sex marriage. A case now trudging through the Massachusetts courts could ultimately do the same for this country. It may seem like we’re stepping into an unknown world.

But it’s not so new. Same-sex marriage is the next step in the long process of thinning and weakening marriage. Marriage is narrowed from a complex institution serving a variety of needs–focused on the needs of children–to a contractual arrangement between two adults to validate their romantic desires. In this “thin” notion of marriage, children are not the greatest fruit of marriage, the preeminent sign of a couple’s union; they are at best optional extras.

For several decades now, we’ve been watching the unfolding consequences of the “thin,” individualist concept of marriage. Those consequences include broken families and fatherless children. Heterosexual couples have begun to reject this model of marriage–the divorce tide is ebbing, and most Americans now realize that children do best when they’re raised by their married parents.

Same-sex marriage would revive the mistaken view of marriage that spurred the rise of divorce and family fragmentation–and more than merely reviving this mistaken idea, would enshrine it in law. While the heterosexual world is waking up to the problems caused by the adults-first, individualist version of marriage, same-sex couples are pushing for that vision to become the law of the land.

Same-sex marriage is about marriage.

SSM: THREE TYPES OF ARGUMENT. Throughout these posts, and previous posts on this site, I’ve been making three different kinds of claim:

1) Marriage was not designed to respond to the desires of and pressures on same-sex couples, and we shouldn’t expect it to do so. This is at once the strongest and the weakest claim. Strongest, because it strikes me as glaringly obvious! As Maggie Gallagher has pointed out, even societies that accepted or valorized (male) homosexual conduct did not institute same-sex marriage. But it’s also the weakest claim, because of the obvious objection: If same-sex couples want to put on the yoke of a relationship model never meant for them, well, is that really my concern?

2) Marriage is an honor certain kinds of relationship earn from society because of what they do for society. Same-sex marriage would do far less for society than regular-old-marriage does. Marriage is, inherently, a “special right”–something a relationship earns because of what it gives society.

3) Same-sex marriage is likely to actively harm heterosexual marriage and family-making. Thus it will knock the wind out from the current renewal of marriage, undoing a lot of the gains we’ve made in areas like unwed childbearing and fatherless households. This is obviously the claim with the sharpest edge.

Let me prevent one misapprehension at the start: I am not claiming that the day California passes a same-sex marriage law, Mr. and Mrs. Skylar Moonbeam will decide to abandon their kids to go take poppers in a bathhouse and join a lesbian vegan commune (respectively). I’m not sure why I have to make this point, but I’ve actually seen people say things like, “Canada instituted same-sex marriage months ago–and hey, Canada’s still there! Where’s the breakdown of the Canadian family? What, do you really think people are gonna leave their spouses just because Bob and Tim get hitched?”

We’ve heard that line of argument before, of course. What, do you really think making divorce easier will make happy marriages fall apart? No–but it made good-enough marriages harder to sustain and harder to form. (For more, read The Abolition of Marriage.) As with the rise of unilateral no-fault divorce, the effects of same-sex marriage will be generational, gradual–and very hard to reverse.

Here’s a list of my previous posts on SSM. I’ll point out the places where I make arguments of types 1, 2, and 3.

“Abolish marriage”? At the end of this post I gesture toward argument type #1.

Civil unions? arg. #1.

Review of AFF same-sex marriage debate. Toward the end of this, I call for more discussion of what makes best-friendship different from marriage, and why marriage is a sexual relationship and not just an emotional commitment. (Relates to argument type #2.)

These three posts give a quick overview of argument #2, and the discussion of friendship in the last post gets into arg. #1 as well.

How can a minority affect a majority? (prerequisite for making arg. #3)

This post at Gideon’s Blog goes into several areas of argument #3. My response to him is here (scroll down).

This piece by Maggie Gallagher hits arg. #2 hard, and makes arg. #3 as well. Similarly but faster here: “Marriage is the place where we think it is a good idea to have children. This is no longer written anywhere in the law, when we got rid of provisions restricting the sexual license to marriage and also giving special privileges to children born within marriage.

“But regardless of whether or not the law is articulate about this purpose, it is still one of the things that marriage is (marriage not being the sum of its legal incidents).

“Therefore, in giving marriage to unisex couples, we are saying that we think it is a great idea of unisex couples to acquire children. We are saying children do not need mothers and fathers.

“None of that is true with any male-female union.”

SSM: THE SETUP. This is the start of a series of posts in which I’ll lay out my reasons for opposing same-sex marriage, and answer other people’s objections. I’m not sure how long it will take, so feel free to jump in whenever you want.

Today’s posts will probably be among the longest in the series–I hope to keep most of these bite-sized, but today I’m laying out my own position and that takes more time than a FAQ-like reply to objections.

There will also be times when I reuse phrasings that I’ve said before, either on this blog or at MarriageDebate.com, though that shouldn’t happen super often. It’ll happen because a) I’d like to place my previous comments in a clearer context, and/or b) I think a particular formulation is much clearer than anything I could come up with from scratch. So basically, any repetition is in the service of clarity.

Sorry about the whole Blogger thing where the series starts at the bottom and you have to scroll up! But since I don’t know how long this will be or how many posts I’ll do each day, I can’t get around this difficulty.

Okay, on with the show.

SEASICK, YET STILL DOCKED: In a ragged mood. Not up for ramblin’. Lots of fun stuff for you, though, some of it written or mostly-written already. Coming distractions: horror imagery in Magritte; the happy ending of “What You Can Do for Your Country” (well, somebody’s happy, anyway…); comics and The Spanish Tragedy; and a week-long series of brief posts on same-sex marriage that should give you a much more cogent picture of my position than I have heretofore presented, and will also reply to various objections I’ve read elsewhere, thus it should end up as a combination mission statement and FAQ. And did I mention, short. Anyway, all that and more will be yours tomorrow. No, really, I mean it.

Um, anyway, sorry for the limited blogging of late, but like I said, tomorrow is bonanza day here at EveTushnet.com. It’ll be real. Check in starting… ohhhhh… let’s say 5 or 6 PM, if it’s sunny I want to spend the day writing in Dupont Circle and I don’t have a laptop. See you then!

Oh–and to those who suggested haunted-ship movies, thanks! I’ve already watched “The Below” and “Ghost Ship,” and have learned such fun facts as: When old-timey music starts playing on a device that definitely should not be playing it (e.g. a record player you’ve turned off, or a walkie-talkie), very very very not-good things are about to happen….

Anyway, feel free to keep recommending haunted-ship flix. Remember, they don’t have to be good. They just have to be typical.

TOMORROW: I’ve got quite a bit to say, but no time to say it in. Tomorrow after four I should have time to post; expect a review of Founding Brothers, mad same-sex marriage stuff, and the end of “What You Can Do for Your Country.”

Blogwatch on the streets of London,

Blogwatch on the streets of Humberside…

Riverbend Blog: Anybody got more info on this?: “This media free-for-all [in Iraq] lasted for about two months. Then, some newspapers were ‘warned’ that some of their political content was unacceptable- especially when discussing occupation forces. One or two papers were actually shut down, while others were made to retract some of what they had written. The news channels followed suit. The CPA came out with a list of things that weren’t to be discussed- including the number of casualties, the number of attacks on the Coalition and other specifics. And we all began giving each other knowing looks- it’s only ‘freedom of the press’ when you have good things to say… Iraqis know all about *that*.”

Unqualified Offerings: Command-and-control in Iraq. Only it’s not clear so much about the “control” part. Also, this is my promise and/or threat that I will in fact organize my previous posts on same-sex marriage and reply to UO’s/other people’s various posts on ditto, this week, but not until at least Thursday. You have been warned.

The Volokh Conspiracy: “Doonesbury” and campaign finance reform. And the power of the press. A very good, basic post on one of the problems w/CFR.

…Burn down the blogwatch

Hang the blessed DJ

Because the music he constantly plays

It says nothing to me about my life….