Feminist Fred

A man chases women until he finds one who allows him to fuck her, impregnate her, and thereby own her life. This is the essential meaning of marriage, if you strip away all the details about God and legalities and shades of moral do’s and don’ts. The chasing of women, the relentless pursuit, is what reveals marriage as the brutish and domineering thing it really is.

The fear of gay marriage must be closely related to the fear of dominant gays. Men, or dominant sex partners, no matter what sex, will be allowed to chase women, or whichever sex they target, that they see as submissive or open to being seduced. The idea of sex itself is drenched in coercion and male supremacy, and marriage is the codification of the essential underlying meaning of sex being about pursuing and winning. Putting this power into the hands of gays means allowing them the same privilege to openly pursue those who haven’t chosen to be gay but who can be had by the same mixture of cunning and force that men use on women.

It has taken me a really long time to even come this close to understanding the fear and outrage straight people feel about gay marriage, since I have a nature that has never really been comfortable with my given role as a predator. Once you see that the echos of rape resound throughout the entire construction of arousal and sexuality in a patriarchy, you stop being befuddled by the moral window dressing that they all use to disguise their unexplored fears and desires.

So the sum of my understanding of the fear of gay sex and marriage is this: If we let those gays openly marry each other, they can openly pursue anyone they want, and that means that gay people will start raping, owning and marrying straight people. The idea that anyone can rape and enslave someone is a subtle threat to male privilege.

I can’t help but feel awe about the unbelievably fine and delicate sensitivity of male privilege to the slightest threat from any side. For something that most people would swear does not exist, it certainly has a robust self-preservation instinct, even in the face of total emotional chaos, which is how I used to characterize the fear of gay marriage.

Twisty has asked us to pass around this report from Pakistan:

ISLAMABAD, Aug 29: Balochistan Senator Sardar Israrullah Zehri stunned the upper house on Friday when he defended the recent incident of burying alive three teenage girls and two women in his province, saying it was part of “our tribal custom.”

Senator Bibi Yasmin Shah of the PML-Q raised the issue citing a newspaper report that the girls, three of them aged between 16 and 18 years, had been buried alive a month ago for wishing to marry of their own will.

I realize that male supremacy, from the standpoint of an American male, fearful of losing his precious privileges or even being mistaken for someone less than masculine at all times, is a somewhat abstract thing, because the less time spent thinking about it the better. But actually it’s all part of a global, age-old set of customs that are no different in essence from this atrocity.

When you think of liberating women from this kind of custom, or any custom that degrades, patronizes or even exaggerates the distinctions between the sexes in the name of masculine or feminine behavior, you are also thinking of liberating yourself from the cultural mandate to be an unthinking monster who oppresses half the people on earth by your very existence.