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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
I would say the civilization of males is also a primary purpose.
Yes, I meant both fornication and adultery. And I was including emotional and spiritual self-harm. I don’t deny that collateral damage is another factor, of course.
social unit providing for the combining of financial resources and emotional support as the unit grows old and feeble?
No. I mean making us behave like human beings rather than animals. Sex is one of the few motivators powerful enough for this. When it was kept locked behind the ring we did what was required to obtain it. Now less is required of us, and it shows.
When the primal rage has ceased and I’m feeling “quite sleepy”, I often think “Man, I bet that would have been funny to watch!”
Those are both benefits, but to point out the obvious fruits of heterosexuality, namely children (if both units are healthy), marriage was primarily designed to protect the progeny of sexual unions. Marriage (especially when paternity tests didn’t exist) provides some assurance that the issue of a woman’s womb belongs to her husband.
I’m not thoroughly sold on it, but I haven’t heard much by way of society expressing it this way. Maybe one or two parental units taught some of my friends this, but not as a widely accepted view.
We seem to prefer our extremes. As a Christian, I’m going to argue abstinence til marriage is the absolute best possible course. However, as a society we seem to either go for full stop abstinence or all out sexual freedom.
Do you know of any wide-spread movement to teach pubescent teens to wait til they are emotionally, mentally, and financially capable of dealing with children before engaging in the sexual act? Or to make sure who you are doing it with is someone you don’t mind possibly having kids with?
Good post.
My $0.02 — it’s not that we expect too much from marriage (otherwise known as “holy matrimony”) — it’s that we expect too little. The standards have been lowered to non-existent with the advent of same-sex “marriage.” I wouldn’t describe it as “perversion” so much as “profanation” in order to get to the “heart” of the matter (not intending to insult our gay friends, but trying to use language accurately from a religious perspective).
There is a program for teaching teens about sexual moral excellence. It’s called Theology of the Body for Teens based on St. Pope John Paul II’s magnificent writing on the subject. The effort to regain the significance and meaning of conjugal love starts at home with the conversion of hearts to the message of self-giving love in Christianity.
Oh, ha ha–civilization of males, where it existed, was just a by-product. The whole point was protection/possession of the seeded womb.
The life of the male who married often didn’t change much. He was still away from home, fighting, patrolling his lands, whatever, which meant he had sexual freedom, too. No, the point was to secure the female. And as I said, it no longer is necessary.
But that doesn’t justify, or make comprehensible, any government, or court, changing the definition of “wedding” , which has always been a ceremonial, public declaration of a mate in the biological sense. That’s like if we passed a law that from now on , prospective adoptive parents must legally be referred to as “pregnant”. Sorry, but “pregnant” already has a meaning, rooted in biology.
Where are the women on this thread?????
In my lifetime, we as a culture first divorced sex from reproduction. As The Pill became readily available, it wasn’t much of a step to separate sex from marriage. The ease of casual flings, allowed men to eschew relationships, in favor of variety. Now the commonality of the “friends with benefits” mindset has reduced sex to something about as meaningful as Words with Friends. Maybe the introduction of consent contracts will be the final blow to what once was a glorious illicit delight. As men become wary of women, maybe men will replace us [women] with porn-bots, and the lonely damaged women of the world will wed their cats.
The perversion (maybe i didn’t make this clear enough) is that sexual consent contracts are being used in place of marriage.
I am a woman. I believe Hypatia is as well.
Beautiful. Thank you for the book reference!
You ably outlined the path to where we are. But, this whole “contractual” mindset would seem to be the problem. Instead of complete self-giving — laying down one’s life — one man, one woman, one flesh so completely united that new persons are born from the union, the contract mentality is about protecting one’s self-interests. It doesn’t even meet an ideal understanding, let alone a sacramental one.
We are called to something higher. Instead, we keep lowering expectations. It’s no wonder we’re meeting them.
As am I.
To this fine post, I would only add that once children are taken out of the equation. marriage is on a slippery slope leading to fornication.
It is also worth noting that the first state to adopt no-fault divorce was Oklahoma, which did so in the early 1950s at the suggestion of the Baptist Church. The presumption was that this would ease divorce and remarriage and thereby reduce fornication.
When I left Oklahoma almost ten years ago, it had the highest divorce rate in the nation — not because Okies were more inclined to fornicate but because they were more inclined to get hitched.
Yes I am a woman!!
As of right now I identify as female, but who know what tomorrow will bring.
I am both, does that count as twice or half?
I think we’re saying the same thing from the two different points of view. Yes, marriage protects the child, but it does so by making the man responsible and accountable. Without it we’d be like dandelions spreading our seed to the wind; with it we stay and tend the garden planted with our seed.
This is unrealistic. We should just go back to what WASPs have always done. Do what comes naturally but sweep it under the carpet and don’t talk about it. It works great.
How about we notice that the happiest people seem to be people in stable and loving relationships.
No, I disagree; it is inherently a problem. It’s all symbiotic. Extramarital sex leads to weakened family structure which leads to social programs to support the dysfunctional which leads to weakened family structure. The unintended consequences are unnoticable, or better put, not identified as part of the causation. The divorce culture, then sense that you have an alternative to the current marriage, is at the root of this.
How many shot gun weddings were there? The divorce rate went through the roof in the 70s. There couldn’t have been that many shot gun weddings. I would like to see the data that supports 1950s shot gun weddings with 1970s divorce rates. That claim seems to me to be soley based on Hollywood mythologizing.
I don’t disagree in the slightest that this can be the case, but I strongly dissent that the causation is this strong. I personally know far too many counter-examples.
I don’t have the figures in front of me, but I recall that it’s quite a bit. It’s discussed in the first few chapters of Red Families v. Blue Families.
UPDATE: Doing a quick search of the book, in chapter two: “By 1960, the number of pregnant brides rose to almost a third, a level not seen since 1800. The average age at marriage fell to the lowest levels in the 20th century.”
There are footnotes for both of those; I’m not familiar with the underlying data.
I wouldn’t say that sex and marriage have become separated; clearly, sex is still very much a part of marriage. It’s that marriage is (far less) a prerequisite for sex.
Well, it’s likely that the causation goes both ways: That marriage improves people’s lives and that well-adjusted, competent people disproportionally recognize the benefits marriage provides and succeed in it.
I didn’t make the complete case. Unfortunately it’s hard to do. Even if someone responsible has an extra marital affair, and he talks about it to the guys and they get ideas themselves and then go out and do irresponsible things. The point I’m making is, nothing is in isolation. There is a metastizing effect that spreads out. And sex is just one cultural element. Compound that with drugs, crime, poor work ethic, and so on and you get a spiraling down of our culture. In my opinion, the only thing that’s holding up western civilization today is an increasing standard of living, and even that has dropped somewhat the last few years.
A full one third of marriages had pregnant brides? I find that hard to believe. Or are you saying that the number of pregnant brides increased by a third? If so, a third more of a smidgeon is still a smidgeon.