I read this article on “5 Reasons ‘Traditional Marriage’ Would Shock Your Ancestors” by one Kathy Benjamin on Cracked, considered responding and decided against it, because ‘what’s the point?’ Then somebody asked me on Ask.FM to respond, so here it goes.
The article’s main flaw (other than it being obvious left-wing evangelization with a complete dearth of humour on a supposed humour site) was that it cherry-picked every small edge case in Western history to draw a pattern for the gullible while ignoring larger realities.
Now onto something more thorough.
#5. People Didn’t Marry Young
First, yes they did, even if we accept the author’s own misrepresented data. In the US the average age of first marriage is 27 for women and 29 for men. This is actually younger than Western Europe where age of first marriage is almost invariably over 30 for both men and women. The highest age Kathy cites are: 23-24 years old and grooms 26-27 (in England, where the average age is now 32.1 & 30), a difference of 2-4 years. Her other link points to a 1890 high of 22 for women and 26 for men, a difference of 3-5 years. 2-5 years is a rather significant difference.
Other than this Kathy simply distorts what the links say:
In general, the marriage age in Western Europe has stayed constant. English records from the 1600s show that brides were usually 23-24 years old and grooms 26-27.
Click the link:
The mode (ie. ‘usually’) for women is given as 22, the median as 22.75. The mean was 23.5. So, 22 was the usual age and half of women married at 22 or earlier; there were just some outliers who married later pulling the average above. Bu even if we use the mean, women in Britain in the 1600s still married 4 years earlier than the US today (and 6.5 years earlier than the UK today).
For men the relative situation is much the same Mode: 24, Median: 25.5, Mean: 26.5.
We can see Kathy doesn’t really understand statistics.
When colonists in early America started getting married slightly younger, it was considered odd enough that Benjamin Franklin commented on it.
Here she gives the impression that Franklin was like ‘wow man, those Yankees are like so far out there.’ If you follow the link, you see that Benjamin Franklin simply looked at the subject and found that yes, Americans had earlier marriages and that settled European cities were not naturally replacing themselves due to low wages preventing family formation. If anything, he’s commenting on the self-destruction caused by the (conditions causing) later marriages of the settled European cities. (Side note for NRx: Franklin noticed that cities are demographic shredders back in 1814).
But the marriage age in America soon settled back into the normal pattern, and by 1890, most couples were getting married in their mid-to-late-20s again.
Again read the link. Marriage age rose from 20 to 22. After which it shrunk again.
If you read the earlier .pdf (Table 2, p. 28), female marriage age peaked in 1880-1900 at 23 (after a civil war which pretty much destroyed an entire generation of young men) after which it declined steadily reaching a low of 20 in 1960. It wasn’t until 1980 that the marriage age again reached what it was in the post-bellum period. So, by “the normal pattern” she means an anomalously high few decades around the turn of the century following a civil war which destroyed the supply of single young men.
Also, notice that this high was the age of 23, which is still almost a half-decade lower than the average age is now.
Also, notice that the earliest time here is the 1600’s. So, she’s ignoring millennia of Western Civilization prior to this; not to mention she ignores anything outside of England. You can read about the uniqueness of Germanic marriage patterns here.
As can be seen, Kathy is simply incorrect across the board.
#4. Marriages Were Short
Ancient Greece and Rome both allowed divorce, and the most famous divorcee of all time is certainly Henry VIII, whose first one occurred in 1534.
Yes, the Pagans did divorce, but in Rome, it was not at-will, it was at-fault and solely the right of the husband, at least for the first few centuries (ie. before Rome declined). Once Rome began declining, calls to end easy divorce were implemented. In Greece, while divorce was allowed, monogamy was still the rule.
Are these really the models Kathy wants to hold up as an example?
King Henry was one person. Anecdotes /=data, especially when said anecdote is a historically significant king because of his divorces.
John Milton, the poet most famous for Paradise Lost, also wrote four books on how awesome divorce was in the 1640s… Inevitably, religious figures freaked out and tried to ban them.
First, she undermines her own point here; she says that Milton was the exception at the time not the rule. But beyond that, read the link:
To Milton, canon law was just another weapon used by the “Great Whore” against men, and since the English church continued to enforce such laws governing marriage and divorce, she was the whore’s accomplice. Milton wants to restore manly dignity to the practice of marriage, first by restoring the power of divorce exclusively to husbands, and second by insisting that marriage is principally a kind of friendship much like the manly friendships described by Socrates in the Symposium and Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics–a kind of enlightened heteroerotic pederasty. Milton’s zeal against canon law is the same as his zeal against bishops–the goal is to restore manliness to English Christianity. This is why he has no patience with the widespread European Protestant notion that divorce should be allowed to wives as a protection from abusive husbands. Milton wants to liberalize divorce, but for men, not for women.
Milton was closer to an extreme MRA than anything. I wonder why Kathy would hold him up as a model?
In America, the 1870 census revealed such a high number of divorces that the government ordered a report on the subject.
She’s being very disingenuous here. Read the link, flip to p. 138. This crisis of divorce was caused by a increase (157% increase over 20 years) in divorce that was still a low rate of divorce. New Hampshire had the highest average divorce rate, at 1 divorce per 10 marriages, meanwhile Maryland had 1 divorce per 62 marriages.
The divorce crisis was caused by divorce rates ranging from < 1% to 10%. A far cry from today’s 40-50%.
By the 1920s, divorce was so common that society was convinced marriage would soon be a thing of the past.
By “so common“, she means a peak rate of 16% (1/6) during 1929, which you might remember as the year of Black Friday and the start of the Great Depression. So even when the economy was being annihilated, the high divorce rate was still only 16%, as compared to 40-50% today.
And yet here we are almost 100 years later, and people are still fighting for the chance to get hitched.
Actually, marriage rates have been in free-fall since the 1970’s or so. Marriage is dying.
#3. Single-Parent And Blended Families Were Always Normal
Here she makes the argument that because people in the past experienced the tragedy of the deaths of spouses we should be fine with destroyed families. I don’t think I need to comment too much on that.
Her concluding argument is this:
And in the 1950s, those halcyon days of supposedly perfect families? Between divorce, death, and sex outside of marriage, 22 percent of kids were still being raised by a single parent. If being raised by one gender ruins children, our ancestors were screwed.
Yes, because the boomers are the models of health. That’s why the 60’s were such a peaceful time, and that’s why they have such healthy families, never use drugs, never commit suicide, and are never depressed.
#2. Procreation Wasn’t Everything
People much smarter than me have pointed out how ridiculous this is. What about couples where one partner is infertile? Or couples where the woman has gone through menopause? Are those marriages also totally invalid?
Her argument is literally that because we don’t police edge cases we should therefore overthrow our our entire understanding of and tradition of marriage.
In the Middle Ages, some couples took this to the extreme. Catholic men and women could enter “Josephite marriages” where they lived together as husband and wife, but never got it on.
Some people make deep, extraordinary spiritual commitments to dedicate their lives to God while denying themselves sex therefore sex and marriage have nothing to do with procreation.
Her next argument is literally a lot of people have murdered their children, therefore marriage has nothing to do with procreation.
Then it is that people use contraception therefore marriage has nothing to do with procreation.
These arguments aren’t even worth refuting. They aren’t even really arguments, just random, barely unconnected statements designed to elicit emotional impressions in the gullible.
#1. Gay Marriage Has Always Existed
Gay marriage was not uncommon in Ancient Rome; even the Emperor Nero publicly married at least two men.
Neither were raping slave boys and pederasty. Also, is Nero really the role model you want to look up to here?
But even among the people fine with raping young boys, gay marriage a joke and not officially recognized:
Same-sex weddings are reported by sources that mock them; the feelings of the participants are not recorded. Both Martial and Juvenal refer to marriage between men as something that occurs not infrequently, although they disapprove of it. Roman law did not recognize marriage between men, but one of the grounds for disapproval expressed in Juvenal’s satire is that celebrating the rites would lead to expectations for such marriages to be registered officially.
She goes on:
During the Ming Dynasty in China, it was not uncommon for older men to marry young men and bring them into their families as official sons-in-law.
Not Western civilization.
Both the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic church allowed “brother-making” in which two totally straight single guys had an official ceremony telling everyone what good friends they were and how they were going to live together and pray together but totally not do any guy-on-guy stuff.
Mark Yuray was right. Kathy has been so indoctrinated in homosexuality that she can’t even conceive that men may have close friendships, even formalized ones. Here’s more on why this is nonsense.
Single women living together has always been more acceptable than men cohabiting (because women don’t have sex drives, right?), but that doesn’t mean that all female “roommates” tried to hide their bean-flicking activities from their neighbors. Many of them were open about their relationships, and both the women involved and their friends considered the couples married, whether they had gone through a ceremony or not. In the late 1800s, these relationships were called Boston Marriages. In at least one case, Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant were considered a “common household” under the law for tax purposes. In Spain in 1901, Elisa Sanchez Loriga pretended to be a man in order to marry Marcela Gracia Ibeas. Despite needing to use deception, after they were found out, the marriage was still allowed to stand.
Her argument is really: ‘because women could live with friends, everybody loved lesbianism’. She then finds 2 cases were may have been accepted. Two. Do I really even need to comment on the extreme cherry-picking being done here?
If you want to admit you don’t like the idea of same-sex marriage because it makes you think of sex that makes you feel icky, feel free to say it. I’m sure everyone would feel better knowing how much you fixate on their bedroom antic?
I am highlighting this merely to show how ignorant this woman is. Oh yes, not wanting to destroy 2 millennia of tradition and engage in a massive court-forced social engineering experiment is because ‘yuck!’. Not wanting the persecutions of Christians and Christian churches who refuse to recognize this farce (and even homosexuals know it is a farce given that half of their “marriages” are open) is because ‘icky’. Not wanting to condone the behaviour that leads to deadly plagues is all about “eww’. And that’s not even touching religious reasons as I know those won’t mean anything to leftist nihilists.
I know modern leftists don’t have deep reasons for their beliefs and mostly just base it on whatever emotions the most recent Gawker article stirred in their shallow hearts, but they should at least have the common decency not to project their emotion-driven shallowness on everybody else.
Do the right thing. Make America as progressive in civil rights as South Africa.
Yes, let us emulate this self-destructing land of rape and murder.
****
To put to death this topic, gay marriage would be, at best, shocking to anybody in Western Civilization from the fall of Rome up until a couple decades ago.
For an example, let’s just take the cause de jeur: gay “marriage”, which is now, in 2015, supported by “moderate” “conservatives” and is currently illegal to oppose in any real way in some states. In 2008, just 7 years ago, “moderate” liberal Obama opposed it. In 1996, less than 20 years ago, “moderate” liberal Clinton signed a law banning gay “marriage”. In the 1980’s, only gay radicals were pressing for “marriage”, in the 1970’s not even most gay activists were for gay “marriage”. Before that, it was hardly ever even mentioned. In 1962, just 50 years ago, sodomy was itself illegal in every state. In 1953, less than seven decades ago, just mentioning gay marriage or writing about homosexuality was considered obscene. Just over two centuries ago sodomy merited a death penalty (although these laws were rarely enforced and went beyond just homosexuality). In the 1500’s, the debate was between whether the church or the king would execute homosexuals. Talking of homosexual “marriage” at this time would have been seen as insanity.
Leftists can make up whatever bullshit emotionally-driven arguments they want when they force their social engineering experiments on normal people, but the least they could do is stop lying about our ancestors. There has been no place for homosexual “marriage” in Western Civilization since the church shut down the Roman’s anal rape of slave boys.
This following theme about the age at marriage is my data specialty. I have researched it.
The particular period where she notes the drop in the age of marriage from an average of 26 and change for men and 22 and change for women down to 22.5 for men and 20.8 for women occurred during a time of rapid increasing birthrates that occurred from 1932 until the advent of the pill in 1962. Note that the entire period 1960-1980 (actually 1983) the age of marriage remained at that low rate.
In a period of increasing and sustained high birth rates AFTER a period of low birth rate coupled with high male mortality (Like the biggest war ever) created a situation where there many, many more younger women for a given set of older men. Especially for those men that reached maturity in the early 60s, but really for the whole period 1940-1980.
It has been noted that during a time when there is female biased sex ratio and extreme economic hardship (and even The Great Recession didn’t meet that criteria of extreme) that women will have children much earlier, “teen” earlier. Assume a ratio of 1.2 women to 1 man. Or assume that some high percentage of men are unable financially to form a family. The females will lock in paternity far earlier. The best example of this was Colombia during the period 1990 to 2005. Teen pregnancy went through the roof. Massive education campaigns attempted to solve the problem. It was “solved”, though not by education. It drop in the violence and an improvement in economics that accompanied it changed the sex ratio. Also the advent of the internet, foreign men coming to Colombia to find wives, get girlfriends were attendant to the decrease.
So likewise, when faced with massive. and I mean massive, sexual competition (and there is no way a man that is less than 40 years old can even conceive of the difference between now and say, Pre-1985. At the beginning of the baby boom the US population was 150 million, at the end it was 225 million. One in three people alive in 1965 was born during that time, that means that in 1965, 1 in 3 people were less than 13 years of age, probably 1 in 2.5 was less than 21.
And let me give you some numbers. In 1945 there were 2,858,000 births. In 1950 there were 3,632,000. Look at that difference. Assume around 1.4 million males born in 1945 and then 1.8 million females born in 1950. So then in 1970, there 400,000 more 20 year old girls than there were 25 year old guys. In 1955 4,104,000 births so then the same thing. And every year from 1932 until 1963 more kids born the subsequent year. Imagine even the local effect this had even in high school where there were more junior girls than senior boys, and even more sophomore girls.
The marriage rates during that time can exactly be explained by this sex ratio. Women had no sexual bargaining power, and in fact, the “sexual revolution” occurred as a function of this lack of power. Women gave it up or men found someone that did. It wasn’t hard. Evolutionarily women only have access to sex to control men. They loose that control at two points. The first is when there is an excess of women relative to men. And the second is what is occurring today, when there is no hope from men in getting sex from women. Then the men stop pandering to women and get outright rebellious and defiant.
But the tendency of men is to marry in order to guarantee sexual access. Neurologists have shown that in men, the sex act bonds men to their sexual partner. And this bonding has a darker side. Removal of the bonded pair female from the male triggers stress agents that lead to depression. He is compelled to return to her. He literally must see her and smell her in order for these stress agents not to fire. It is as if he has a loaded gun pointed at him once bonding has occurred. Women do not have the same biochemical neurological outcome of bonding.
So in western culture when the sex ratio favors men, most will marry.
It is regularly noted that the post war era was a historical blip, a bubble, and often since that really began what could be called “modernity” in the US, that time is assumed as some standard.
And the reality was the female biased sex roles in favor of men created an abnormal sexual environment.
But this is key to me, and I say it over and over, WHEN THE MEN HAD THE ADVANTAGE AND THE SEXUAL POWER, THEY MARRIED, THEY FORMED FAMILIES, IT WAS A LOW OF TIME OF INFIDELITY, AND HIGH SOCIAL VALUE.
NOW THAT THE SEX RATIO HAS FAVORED WOMEN EASILY FOR 25 YEARS, THE OPPOSITE HAS OCCURRED. Women have the negotiating position and use it to their advantage. And marriage is not in her advantage until she looses sexual capital with age and bucks up against biological reality.
Now to address the claim that 22% of children lived historical in single parent homes due to death, divorce, and bastardy.
Marriage is a social institution that solves the social problems of heterosexual sex. It was and is proven that the health and well being of children is maximized under the protection of a father. It is a statistical fact. But the primary function of marriage, its teleological and consequential function is to assign responsibility under the law for children that are the product of heterosexual sex and near as I can determine, that means all children.
I am not familiar with the data that she uses to comes up with that 22% and my suspicion is that was a high threshold at some point and it was generally lower. All data that I find for bastard children says less than 5% in 1950, less than 10% in 1970. And it was probably far lower among white women. So then assume the rest of her 22% and since she wants to act like “for forever” then I will use the less than 5% number meaning that over 70% of the children from single “gender” headed households (and probably 90% of white children) came from married people, thus extending, one way or another, the protection of the institution of marriage and rights accorded to children born of legitimate unions. It might have taken the form of child support/alimony in the case of divorce or inheritance/insurance in the case of the father’s death.
To claim horseshit about childless marriages, whether voluntary or involuntary is just noise. A toaster has the teleological function of making toast. You can use it to light cigarettes but that doesn’t make it a cigarette lighter. The fact that childless couples enjoyed the same benefits of marriage as those with children and non-mothers received many of the same considerations as mothers upon divorce was a bug not a feature. The reality (until now) was that the major of marriages produced children. And marriage was the social solution to those children.
The basic assumption you can derive from all of this, the data I gave, the arguments but forward by this female writer (and wholeheartedly endorsed by women in general) is that women are basically immoral and are enemies of marriage and social cohesion (when it suits them to be). They are the equivalent of used car salesmen ready to bargain for sexual access at the best economic and social price possible. They are so ego invested in maximizing their position that they internalize any ally, no matter how destructive or morally reprehensible, that allows them the leverage they demand. And men and children can go to hell. It’s all about her.
Mark, great comment. I’m curious about your source for that male bonding stuff. You have any links you can share?
One more thing real quick:
I remember seeing data which indicated that that the black out-of-wedlock birthrate during the 40’s and early 50’s was better (lower) than the white rate. And by an amount that was more than statistically significant, too. Using a variety of sources, I hypothesize that this had to do with the fact that black women at the time were heavily motivated to marry. The extreme restrictions on their financial and social mobility meant that they largely felt they needed a man. And more specifically, needed to marry him, as a measure of security.
Regarding out-of-wedlock birthrate around the time of World War Two. I wonder if the relatively lower number of blacks in the military (by percentage) had anything to do with that? If your men were still around, much easier to avoid bastardy.
“During the war years, the segregation practices of civilian life spilled over into the military. The draft was segregated and more often than not African Americans were passed over by the all-white draft boards. Pressure from the NAACP led President Roosevelt to pledge that
African Americans would be enlisted according to their percentage in the population. Although this percentage, 10.6%, was never actually attained in the services during the war, African American numbers grew dramatically in the Army, Navy, Army Air Force, Marine Corps, and the Coast Guard.”
http://www.nationalww2museum.org/assets/pdfs/african-americans-in-world.pdf
Boom. And the mic is dropped. I can definitely empathize with your initial sentiment of “why bother?” Leftist she-bitches like this have found a cause, and they will lie and obfuscate for that cause no matter what. It’s what leftists do.
By the way, the example she gives of Ming China is BOGUS. It is based on, as I remember it, a single source from a single region that has no corroborating source. ‘Gay marriage’ has NEVER existed in ANY civilization in history, PERIOD. It might have existed among Native Americans at one time, but they were not a civilization.
“Her argument is literally that because we don’t police edge cases we should therefore overthrow our our entire understanding of and tradition of marriage.”
Not even that. On the issue of ‘sterile’ or ‘post-menopause’ couples getting married, this moron doesn’t understand the difference between being infertile and being INTRINSICALLY INFERTILE. Sodomites are not unable to produce children because of some cruel twist or fate or time, they cannot produce children for the same reason an electric heater and a vacuum cleaner can’t produce children. The best they can hope for is creating synthetic children in test tubes like certain sick sodomite celebrities, and these are often rape fodder.
Cracked used to be a pretty good site for some irreverent humor, but a writer changeover seems to have rendered it a toxic left wing cesspool. You can see it in multiple other articles as well, where they will package lies in decreasingly humorous anecdotes, and just hope none of their readers actually do any research.
I’m going to put together a few links on Sunday because a lot of good stuff has been put out this week. I’ll add to it your dispatching of another lefty fembot to the scrapheap.
What’s so boring is when leftists post this stuff like it’s new when it has been standard fare from every proglodite troll for over a decade. It’s like they’re bots getting messages from the central server that they rehash in their own words, which are hardly much different other than tone. Yet they pretend to be free and original thinkers. At this point, even the people who originate the arguments are hardly original since they basically have preset formulas developed by the few witty leftists many moons ago.
Off topic.
I have been following and interacting with several Evangelical leaders online looking for red-pilled ministers. The two best candidates I’ve found so far have been Doug Wilson and Voddie Baucham. The risk, of course, is being called racist and Evangelicals love witch hunting for racists. Wilson is considered a fringe figure because of this but Baucham is black so is somewhat immune. He posted this today of facebook. A small piece of encouraging news. This is pretty dry in parts but I would encourage people to use this and other resources to educate your clergy about the errors of Social Justice.
http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/forcing-change/010/10-social-justice.htm
It’s the same fight that racial intermarriage saw several decades ago. Don’t turn back and watch burning Sodom and Gomorrah lest being changed into a pillar of salt is your fate…
I liked the stat’s on the Baby Boomers.
A.J.P.
Just today I was at a small NRx meetup, and we were talking about how common an argument it is among leftists that if even a single outlier, exception, or edge case can be found, it somehow disproves a general rule that is true the overwhelmingly vast majority of the time. If there is some policy or general rule that is good and wise the vast majority of the time, and if they can find just one edge case – even a hypothetical one – in which someone might, however regretfully, not follow it, then the entire thing is discredited in all cases. For example, when one says that divorce and single motherhood are bad ideas, they reply: “Well, what about if the husband is violently abusive?”, as if citing one relatively rare edge case which would *obviously* be an exception means that they’ve successfully managed to completely discredit the idea that intact traditional families are the best way to raise children. Similarly, they seem to think that if they can pull just one example of something having happened in the past out of the thousands of years of human history, that means it was common and accepted everywhere by everybody in all time periods. It’s an obviously stupid and dishonest argument, but they use it because they know that most people are too lazy to check up on it to see whether it’s really true and aren’t intelligent enough to comprehend critical subtleties in logical or historical arguments.
For example, Nero. Nero was insane, and the erratic and bizarre things he did were hardly accepted in Rome. That’s how he ended up setting off a rebellion that concluded with him committing suicide rather than being dragged in front of the Senate for a trial. Also, I wonder why Cracked doesn’t mention that the man that Nero “married” bore a strong resemblance to his dead wife, and that Nero had him castrated and called him by his wife’s name? Probably because it would show that Nero was, in fact, merely a delusional maniac who got away with doing clearly insane things until even the people who were terrified of his cruelty finally could bear no more of him.
That’s the truth, but “Nero married a man so gay marriage has always been accepted! LOL checkmate you ignorant Rethuglicans!” is the narrative, and we all know what will win when a leftist hits a conflict between truth and their narrative.
Excellently put, Antidem. As you point out, even the outlying examples they can give are plagued with problems. Alas, Liberals do not deal in facts. They never have and they never will. For the cause of ‘progress’, they will martial any data they can and if the data is insignificant or lousy, it doesn’t matter. Who is going to argue against them? Conservatism is essentially dead as an ideological opposition.
It is now time for us to fill the vacuum.
Wonder who had the last laugh…?
“Wonder who had the last laugh…?”
*reads lengthy, detailed piece indisputably proving exactly why sodomarriage is culturally, socially, and morally toxic*
*watches 5 unelected judges torture logic and language to overturn democratic laws and referendums banning gay marriage*
*Nation slides deeper into decadent, nihilistic decline*
“heh heh, guess that PROVES you bigots were WRONG!”