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The Perversion of the Marriage Contract
Paul A Rahe has a post on the Main Feed, The Haunting Fear That Someone is Having a Good Time, where he talks about the absurdity of the modern view on sexual consent and how it removes passion from the relationship. The last several years have seen a rise in accusations of sexual assault on college campuses with the rise of Kangaroo courts treating accusations as truth without any investigation, frequently resulting in the expulsion of the accused without any opportunity to defend himself in a court of law.
Whether it is Mattress Girl or The Duke University Lacrosse team, real damage has been done to young men based on false allegations that were acted upon without any legitimate investigation or trial. This has resulted sexual consent contracts. I am not kidding. There is even an app! I’m sure most of you already know this.
For me, the real absurdity is how this happened. In the ’70s, no-fault divorce was passed in the US. This led to a rapid increase of divorces that lasted to the ’80s while there was also a steep decline in marriage rates (Census Data for the time period).
I grew up in the 90s and knew many kids whose parents were divorced. Many claimed they would never marry. And true to their word, the late 90’s and early 2000’s were marked by a rise in cohabitation. I get it. Why do you need a paper that says you love one another? It is just a paper and means nothing and its none of anyone else’s business. Right?
Not only this, but marital rape was enshrined in law across the US by 1993. Some may think, “Well that’s a good thing, right?” Violent assault was always against the law in the US, but marital rape was considered a misnomer because the marriage contract provided consent.
Wait. Hold on a second. Let’s follow this trail, shall we?
- 1960’s – Sex is acceptable outside of the marital framework
- 1970’s – No fault divorce weakens institution of marriage, leads to rise in divorce and lower marriage rates
- 1993 – The marriage contract is no longer considered a contract of sexual consent
- 1990’s – Rise in cohabitation, the questioning of why we need a piece of meaningless paper to say we’re in love
- Now: Sexual consent contracts
So, are you telling me we are issuing short-term marriage contracts???
What happened is we deconstructed marriage and what it meant to be married, divorcing it from sex and long-term commitment and making it solely about the individual. Marriage was no longer necessary for sex and if sex no longer needed marriage, why do we really need marriage? Once sex didn’t need marriage, it was completely removed from marriage. If Marriage didn’t confer any individual benefits, then why go through the process of marriage in the first place? Why not just live with the person you love?
Except it would appear that humans actually needed more than just anchor-less sex. Women have actually been harmed, but not by the men they falsely accuse. They would engage in activities with men they weren’t quite certain about, typically while inebriated, resulting in regret and sometimes depression. Usually, he blows her off – it was just a one night stand, right? If she were to get pregnant, abortion wasn’t hard to get, but this just led to more depression. The world around her said that free-sex and abortions were ok, so clearly the depression and regret has nothing to do with those, so it must mean there was something wrong with the actual sexual encounter… could it have been rape? So then a false accusation is levied against an innocent man. So rather than stop our paltry culture of the sexual merry go round and re-legitimizing the benefits of marriage, little contracts were drawn up to provide for these misled and misinformed youth to continue in their destructive behavior rather than change. There is a word for this and it is perversion.
Published in Marriage
Indeed.
Main feed. Let’s upvote this
So how does the culture change?
In an interesting term of phrasing now it seems that rape and sex are sort of the same thing. A friend of my wife’s and her were talking on the phone. The friend mentioned that she was raped last night. That got my wife’s attention and my concern in that if she needed anything to help with the event. My wife’s friend said no it was not rape rape, it was just rape. It seemed that she went to the bar like she does every weekend, got drunk like she does every weekend. Brought some poor schmuck home like she does every weekend. Had sex with him and when she woke up decided he did not meet her high inebriated standards. The aforementioned mentioned schmuck offered to take her to breakfast but she just wanted him gone. I am not even sure she got his name. She normally does not.
So this is what the world has come too. Sex with a stranger is rape but not rape, rape. I am left wondering what would constitute rape, rape, rape or maybe even rape, rape, rape, rape.
Thanks for an excellent essay.
The same way they changed it. Whether its one step at a time or what Trump did in this election by pushing a very radical position and then settling on something more “moderate”…
Stake that claim until it becomes the new “norm” and do it again.
That is why the position of reasonable compromise is just another way of saying slow surrender.
What a great observation, “short-term marriage contracts”. Perhaps the college or municipality can levy a fee with each transaction? Then perhaps a few years later we can have a SCOTUS ruling on who or how many people can enter into such a contract?
“They” being who? seems like the culture has changed from the bottom up… people voted with their actions and deeds to reject the concept that sex should be reserved for marriage… institutions are adapting to that reality.
In no other contract, can one party blow up the contract, and take most of the property, the production (i.e. kids) and get a permanent lien on the income of the other party for no reason.
If someone walks and their is “no fault” then they should get nothing that is not already theirs.
Further, in Marriage, if you don’t have sex with your spouse, you are not up holding your end of the contract, and that is grounds to divorce, with cause.
As long as the system is set up for women to blow up marriages for cash and prizes, why should a man get married? I am going to put as much pressure on my son when he grows up, as I can, to have him sign a pre-nup. Now, that might not be honored, but it is better than nothing.
I’m wondering if men hold all the cards in changing this. It is said women hold the power of sex, but men hold the power of commitment. Can men be raised to take the power of sex away? They arguably have the most to lose in carefree sex at the moment. If they hold back (out of self preservation), could things be more ripe for a push back?
What do you think?
“They” being whoever pushed the change – feminists, liberals, libertines.
The church seriously capitulated and needs to return to the full teaching of sexual morality. Expect their congregants to abide by the proscriptions set forth in scripture.
Parents need to raise their expectations for their kids. Stop making it easy for them to have sex and stop treating it like its “just sex”.
Careful, there, that is so Red Pill it is “alt-right”!
I think it is what we have to do. Right now though, most men are taking the Blue Pill, and enable women.
What a great insight. And yeah, the whole sexual liberation has been a cultural disaster which only seems to get worse. It’s just a continuing spiral down.
One of the sticking points of this particular institution is that it is so counter to natural instincts, and for good reason. Individuals choose it because of social pressure (at least they did in the past), and society chose it out of necessity — it really was the best way to harness the natural forces of our loins in a productive manner and prevent the destructive potential of simply letting us go feral.
I think most of us just don’t want to be seen as douche canoes and are still holding out hope of getting some. It’s crude, but honest.
Don’t some sect of Muslims have this short term marriage contract thing?
Although I agree with returning to a scriptural foundation for morality we are in a minority on the authority of scripture. We have to approach it from a different angle if we’re to expect anything other than an immediate brush off. We are talking about the highest of human rights here: sexual gratification (at least the left seems to view it that way…)
Shhhh – Don’t give them ideas!
What do you have in mind (in a brainstorming capacity)?
Right… and religious moral authority regarding sexual matters has been destroyed by religious authority, everything from the Catholic pedophile coverup to most recently the religious right lining up behind Donald Trump. Can Jerry Falwell jr ever preach about abstinence again?
Many of the teachings of the church, however, are based on natural law, not necessarily scripture. I may be out of the mainstream about this, but I think natural law is actually a more approachable path to appeal to people these days. Unfortunately, natural law seems to be losing out – instead, the contemporary culture wants to interpret freedom to mean deliberate consent about everything.
In my mind the first step is to somehow get an acknowledgement that men and women simply view sex differently. Yes, we all enjoy it, but our motivations and expected outcomes are not identical. There’s probably several steps before this since sexual equivalency seems to be a pillar of the leftist faith. We will need to get psychology, physiology, neurology, etc. on our side. When we can get “because, Science!” on our side in this we might make a little headway.
It’s this thought that helped inspire the post. In modern culture consent is the only basis for ethics or morality, especially concerning sex.
But it wasn’t just religious pressure. Yes, religion was enormous in it, but there’s other things there like the social cost of bastardry and uncivilized packs of youth roaming the streets. Am I describing the past or the inner city?
Liberty University announced Monday that its new athletics director is Ian McCaw, who resigned as Baylor University’s athletics director in May after being sanctioned and placed on probation by the Texas school when its athletics program became embroiled in a sexual assault scandal.
So he’s the only one who should talk about it?
And the religious right didn’t line up behind trump because he’s a pillar of moral goodness. Rather, out of the two (3 if you count Johnson) that was least likely to dictate our beliefs to us or our exercise of those beliefs.
When I say return to the proscriptions, it means adulterers wouldn’t have a pulpit. One of my priests (when i was a child) was removed because of sexual indiscretions. This is proper ettiquette and a scriptural way of dealing with these things. That would also be part of this.
But this isn’t just about religion. You seem to see it needs to change and faith is one means in which to approach it. If that is anathema to you, what do you have in mind? Or do you think its possible to fix this without censoring libertine sex?
Yeah, ok, what social costs to bastardry do you think would be appropriate today?
I agree with you. There are natural law arguments in here. Just for the conservative minded, part of limiting government involvement in this is to empower the church to return to its proper teaching as one aspect of change.
I’m saying nothing has the authority in todays world to censor it.